Fix that title gore please
~~Windows 11 users reportedly losing data due to Microsoft's forced~~Windows 11 users reportedly losing data due to Microsoft's forced BitLocker encryption
this post was submitted on 02 May 2025
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Surprise, surprise.
Forcing security measures onto someone who doesn't understand them or know how to recover their data if something goes wrong is a bad idea.
I read the article but am not smarter than before. I heard some time ago that windows does encrypt the drive but you need an active online account and the key will be saved online. So do people forget their online passwords and methods to recover that said account? I dont like m$ and am using linux, but people loosing their passwords, being uninformed about their systems and dont so backups is not the direct fault of the operating system.
I helped my sister deal with this. Bitlocker activated itself, the keys were in her account which she had access to. She had done everything properly but nothing worked to resolve it.
There’s countless forum posts on it since about 2021 if you go looking for it. None of the recovery processes worked so I reformatted and enabled bitlocker at the start. Next time I visit, she’s getting Linux Mint.
Fuck Microsoft. End users shouldn’t be expected to troubleshoot like that.
Bitlocker can be turned on without having an account on device iirc.
Correct, can be turned on and it will provide you the key to be saved as a file if I recall
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It tech here. Yup sure does. For enterprise customers it gets saved in active directory anyway. But for home users, no way. For new devices I always create a local account and turn off bitlocker if it happens to be enabled. Most people don't remember their email password, some don't even remember their email address. So many times I've had to remove the drive of a dead PC or laptop and copy all their files off of it, because people just don't make backups. But already happenend a few times now that a private customer got suckered into making a Microsoft account by one of those full screen pop ups. Probably set it up with an E-Mail some relative of theirs created just so they can download stuff of their Phones App store. And all their stuff just gets automatically encrypted. Bye Bye all the photos you had taken for the last 10 years. Thanks Microsoft.
I just got bit in the ass by bitlocker when my laptop motherboard died. I had to do the unsafe bootloader hack to get back into the drive.
Why isn't this a thing for me? Because I skipped MS account creation? So many Win11 issues I read about on here and I get almost none with my vanilla ISO install.
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Windows is ransomware now
Nailed it, that is how ransomware works.
in Italian gangster voice "Hey Buddy, give me your information, fair price for security, eh?, What? Do you not trust me? Buddy, you may lose your information, we wouldn't want that, right?, just make an account I'll handle the rest"
When are stockholders going to realize that the current Microsoft CEO is ruining Windows?
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I've decided to switch to Linux come october. I have some reasons I wanna wait as long as I can, but come october I'm leaving Windows behind.
I've decided to switch my gaming PC to Linux...a few weeks ago.
No ragrets. My games run faster, I no longer need extra shit to make Windows work the way I want it to work, and I can remote into it however I want without running into artificial roadblocks.
Get started early so you have time to acclimate and address issues. You are going to hate it if you urgently need your computer for something and something unexpected happens.
If you're new to Linux, I suggest at the very least starting to learn now. If you have a spare device you can install it on, an old laptop or something, dual boot on your existing machine or use Virtualbox...Start learning now, while you still consider Windows an option.
My own journey to the Linux platform included several instances of the following scenario:
I need to get something done. It's simple, in Windows 7 I know how to do it in seconds. It's so simple that I don't know the words for it, just the thing to click to do it. But it doesn't work that way in Linux, even the vocabulary is different, and you need this done right now because you're working on something and you don't have time to stop and learn this right now.
Boot into Windows, get your job done and turned in. Then look up how to do it in Linux later. Eventually you stop hitting that wall.
You've decided you have seven months. I'd get to it.
Yeah it can happen, when you force people without their consent encrypting their data.
Isn't that what Iphone and Android already do?
One major difference is that it is so much easier to lock yourself out of the desktop TPM chip compared to mobile device security chips because they're not tightly coupled.
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Huh .. I never noticed. Probably because my phone OS never failed to boot, requiring me to pull data off the HDD directly.
Samsung is notorious for this.
The only phone manufacture that does that is Google with pixel. Any other phone is for my knowledge either "weakly" encrypted or not at all.
Still your Mobile OS isnt just upgrading and encrypting your SD card and main drive. Thats the point.
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Something broke.
I blame bitlocker.
I'm in favor of a heavy handed push towards encryption, I think most people don't realize how important this is (now more than ever), but windows should be guiding and educating on this not requiring, and it should have absolutely nothing to do with an email address or online account.
On a home PC, what for? The only data that really matters to be encrypted is my keepass database file. Giving the option is fine but I don't think it should done without asking the user to choose.
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I saw this problem coming a mile away
Must have been a massive monitor.
All of the data I actually care about is stored on a NAS and backed up in triplicate. The only data actually on my PC are program files.
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ShitLocker