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Comment by josephcsible | Hacker News Reader

tl;dr: if you ever lose access to the Microsoft account you use to sign in to Windows 11 24H2, you have no way to recover any of your locally-stored data.

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Should be: If you ever loose your decryption key to your encryptet data, regardless of OS, you have no way to recover any of your encryptet data.

When installing windows and configure bitlocker you do get presented with the option to create an offline backup of said key eg to a USB drive. The same dialog also give you an option to back it up to OneDrive in addition to an offline backup.

This is a non-story

Except this is being forced everybody, including non-techies.

The first version of Windows that started to encrypt the drive by default using Bitlocker was Windows RT 8 for ARM (Release 2012). The first x86/x64 version that did same was windows 8.1 (Release 2013)

This is a story because Microsoft is automatically enabling encryption for everyone without making sure they're aware of that first.

My desktop has been on Windows for a long time due to games. I think this is going to be the last straw, as Microsoft continues to harass users into sharing all their secrets into the cloud in a way that also causes painful lock-in.

I literally bought another SSD a couple weeks ago to start the "never boot to Windows unless I really need to" process.

Backing up the Bitlocker encryption key to OneDrive* has been the default since bitlocker was introduced in Windows Vista in 2007.

The dialog has for this has always offered the option to back it up to a USB drive and the dialogs function is largely unchanged the past 18 years providing access to backup up the decryption key to a local target or online.

*Back then OneDrive was called Windows Live Folders

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