it should be in your MS online account as someone wrote, but in case of, I always save it on a USB key, hidden somewhere. You can also print it, or take a picture of it with your phone. Because there is no way to get it back.

Because they force you to use online accounts now, you can get it from the registered account via the Microsoft account page.

In your Microsoft account: Open a web browser on another device. Go to https://account.microsoft.com/devices/recoverykey to find your recovery key.

The automatic encryption and subsequent backup both took place because you were using a Microsoft Account

Been there, done that. I don't remember where I retrieved that code, but somehow I managed to do that. Maybe it was on Microsoft site loggin in with his credentials.

Hi, repair shop owner here.

Automatic Bitlocker encryption has been a thing since TPM 2.0 devices hit the market in 2018.

If a device is UEFI, Secure Boot is enabled, TPM 2.0 is present, and the user signs in with a Microsoft Account , then the disk is encrypted and the recovery key is saved to that Microsoft Account.

If those conditions aren’t met, automatic encryption doesn’t happen.

As long as they know their Microsoft Account Identifier, users can easily get to that key through the first search engine result for “bitlocker recovery key”: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/finding-your-bitlocker-recovery-key-in-windows-6b71ad27-0b89-ea08-f143-056f5ab347d6

We don’t really have a hard time with it - if a user provides their login PIN, a short terminal command will let us grab a copy of their key before BIOS updates or battery disconnects.

I have had very few cases where folks suffered data loss because of Bitlocker. Most of them were HP Laptops that used Intel Optane accelerated SSDs - encrypting what is effectively a software RAID0 is a recipe for disaster.

The other few had an unhealthy paranoia where they were reluctant to share anything about themselves with Microsoft, yet still decided to use a Microsoft operating system. While setting up the computer, they created a new Outlook.com email (instead of using their primary email), made up a random birthday, and did not fill in any recovery options like a phone number or secondary email. With the password (and sometimes even email) forgotten, they created a situation where they could not prove the online account was theirs and therefore could not get to the recovery key that had been backed up.

I do think that Microsoft should have this as an opt-in feature during the out of box experience, which is how Apple has it set up for Filevault and how most Linux distributions are set up. Ultimately, most users will still mash “next’ through the process and later blame the computer.

I have had quite a few clients have their laptops stolen after car breakins. Their biggest stressor was the possibility of thieves having access to the data on those machines, and the fact that we knew their systems were encrypted with Bitlocker brought them a lot of relief.

You didn’t store the key anywhere but on that disk.

Windows does not let you store the recovery key on an encrypted drive.

The rest only means, we need to deal better with our data. All the above basically also applies when you HDD or SSD dies, which can happen any time.

Backups is what you need, not an unencrypted drive.

This is 100% to try to force more OneDrive subs..

I wouldn't fault a casual user for not backing up their encryption key because they wouldn't be swapping hard drives in the first place. And the tech savvy people already know to backup keys.

Knowing Microsoft's behavior for many years, it might. If I had a dual-boot, I'd make sure I have a backup of all the important data on a separate device

Bitlocker leaves partitions it can't understand and system partitions (like the EFI ones) alone in my experience.

Dual boot users may have trouble accessing their Windows files if they don't configure Bitlocker to allow direct password unlock (I believe Windows 11 uses the TPM, possibly with a TPM PIN for interactive unlocking, which Linux can't use to access the drive). This isn't too difficult to work around, but it's an extra step.

Bitlocker is a feature that relies on NTFS

Unless you've somehow been working with cthulhu and installed Linux on an NTFS partition, you're probably golden

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/windows-software-bitlocker-slows-performance

That number was only for random write performance. And if you have an SSD that supports TCG Opal and eDrive standard (IEEE-1667) for hardware based bitlocker encrytion then there is no negative speed impact.

Yeah it would only be that slow if you don't have a CPU with AES-NI instructions (which were introduced nearly a decade and a half ago)

That's random writes, tested on a particularly fast SSD. Most consumer SSDs won't get to the 550MB/s random writes, hitting closer to 85MB/s.

If you configure it to backup your keys to your account, yes.

This (at least used to be) an opt in configuration option