My suggestion is that you back up to both your Microsoft account (so as to be listed online, as I showed earlier) and in some other form. (Screenshot: )Ĭlick on Back up your recovery key, and you’ll be given the options shown earlier to do exactly that. Manage BitLocker, Backup your recovery key option. If, however, it says “Manage BitLocker”, click on that.
#WHERE TO FIND BITLOCKER RECOVERY KEY WINDOWS#
(If the menu has no Bitlocker option at all then you probably have the Home version of Windows without BitLocker support.) If the menu includes “Turn on BitLocker”, then BitLocker is not enabled for this drive. Right-click on the drive in Windows File Explorer. The accurate way: backup your recovery key My question, though, is how do I know if these are up to date? This is great, particularly if you suddenly need a recovery key for a drive you didn’t realize had BitLocker enabled. Take a screenshot of the page and save the image in a safe place, for example. If they are, then further back up this information somewhere else, just for safety. If you use BitLocker, see if any keys are listed here. This implies that the key was saved before I changed the name of the machine from it’s auto-generated default to my own NOTEN-based naming scheme. It’s likely it’s a machine on which I turned BitLocker off.
It turns out that several computer manufacturers are delivering machines with BitLocker turned on by default. But what if you didn’t take this path? BitLocker on by default? It’s important to keep somewhere safe to avoid possibly losing access to everything on that drive, should something go wrong. The recovery key is your way back in should you lose the ability to sign in to Windows normally, or should you ever need to move the drive to a different machine. It’s important that you take at least one of these options, if not more than one. Prompt to back up your BitLocker recovery key. If you explicitly turn on BitLocker full-disk encryption, at some point in the process you’ll be encouraged to save the recovery key. Either way, if you’re using BitLocker, make sure to back up your recovery key. You can examine all the BitLocker recovery keys associated with your Microsoft Account by visiting, or you can examine the state of each drive, and back up its recovery key manually, by right-clicking on the drive in Windows File Explorer and clicking Manage BitLocker. BitLocker may be enabled by default without your knowledge.