Find your lost BitLocker recovery key in your Microsoft account.
Hi, everyone.
Leo Notenboom here for askleo.com.
In recent months, I've run into several situations where
individuals discovered that BitLocker had been turned on on a hard drive that they
didn't realize BitLocker had been turned on.
Normally, BitLocker is something you
enable and we will actually look at that in a moment.
But what's interesting is these people
know that they did not explicitly turn on BitLocker, and yet there it is.
What I've discovered is that some manufacturers are actually shipping
machines with Windows Preinstalled and BitLocker pre enabled.
Now, on the surface, that's actually not a bad thing.
It gives you the extra security of having an encrypted hard drive.
There's not really a downside these days, with one exception.
And that, of course,
is what happens if you can't get in or you move the hard drive or whatever you need
the recovery key in order to be able to access the drive.
But since people didn't set up the BitLocker themselves,
they would not have had an opportunity to actually grab the recovery key.
I want to show you exactly what you can do to get the recovery key after the fact.
Let's take a quick look over on my machine.
So this is a Windows 10 Pro machine.
It has a BitLocker not currently enabled.
So if I go to my local disk and I right
click on the C drive, I have the option to turn on BitLocker.
This is what most people experience.
This is what it means for most people to have BitLocker turned on.
They'll have done this.
I'm not going to do it to this machine right now, but as part of that process,
you will be after the BitLocker has been turned on,
after the encryption keys have been generated.
If you want to save those keys and that is your opportunity that you get
to save the keys, it's something that is in your face.
It's a step that you are reminded to take when you enable BitLocker yourself.
If you haven't enabled BitLocker yourself, well then things get a little weird.
So without BitLocker being enabled, one of the really interesting ways
to get your recovery key is if you've been using a Microsoft
account as your sign in account for your Windows machine, you can actually go.
And I'm just going to go right here to the link that I have in the article.
Account Microsoft Com Devices Recovery key.
I haven't been able to find a stepbystep,
click here, then click here, then click here.
Way to get to this URL, but the URL itself is unlikely to change if I click on it.
I'm brought to my Microsoft account and
a specific page that lists the recovery keys for my machines that I have Leo have.
Now here you can see I've got a recovery key for a device called Ask Leo example WI
To be honest, I'm not even sure which machine that is.
It's not this one.
We know that because this machine doesn't have BitLocker turned on.
But what's neat about this is that this will list for all of your machines
all of the BitLocker recovery keys that you may have created over the years
on my personal account, my live account, I actually went to this page and sure
enough, it shows me four or five different recovery keys, all for the different
machines that I happen to have BitLocker enabled on.
So this is an impart.
It's a great reason to use your Microsoft account to log into your Windows machine
because you get this kind of safety as a side effect.
Your recovery keys are automatically saved here.
So if you find that you have BitLocker
turned on and you know that you didn't do it, the first thing I would have you do is
to go to this URL is account Microsoft Com Devices recovery key
and see if your computer is listed there and the recovery key is available there.
If it is fantastic.
If not, what I want you to do is to go
back to the File Explorer, rightclick on the drive that has BitLocker enabled.
And if BitLocker is enabled,
that will say manage BitLocker instead of turn on BitLocker.
Part of what you can then do with manage BitLocker is back up the recovery key.
And in fact, I'll go ahead and show this on screen.
This is a screenshot of the process
of actually creating a BitLocker encrypted drive, but you're given several different
options of where to place that backup copy of your key.
And sure enough, the first one listed is to save it in your Microsoft account.
This is where in your Microsoft account it would appear if you're not using
a Microsoft account, if you want to do other things things,
or if you want to save it in addition to saving it in your Microsoft account,
you have these options to save it in a USB flash drive, to save it to a file or
to print it on a piece of paper that you can then save somewhere securely.
But that's the bottom line here.
That is something that I really want you to make sure to do and have.
If you find you have BitLocker enabled, back up your recovery key, go fetch it,
however, works for you, but then make sure to back up that recovery key.
If you ever lose your machine,
sign up if you ever need to transfer that hard disk to a different machine.
If you ever need to examine the contents
of a backup image using some other machine that may have been taken using BitLocker
actually preserving the BitLocker encryption.
It's the recovery key that will let you
regain access to the contents of that drive without it, you're out of luck.
The encryption will serve its purpose.
It will prevent unauthorized access of the information on your hard drive.
Having that recovery key is one of the ways you regain access
to that drive for the article on which this video was based.
For more details.
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as askleo.com/36189 I'm Leo Notenboom.
This is Ask Leo com.