A Windows RT tip for the paranoid - Bitlocker for Micro SD

[MikeF74]

For the paranoid among us who do not want their personal data exposed should your device get lost, stolen or seized, Windows RT supports BitLocker drive encryption but not the creation of BitLocker-protected disks. The C: partition is protected by default, by that protection is not automatically extended to the MicroSD cards you insert into your tablet.

Here comes the sad part for some of you, you must have a professional version of Windows 7 or Windows 8 in order to enable BitLocker protecion on a volume.

This morning I have enabled BitLocker on a 64GB MicroSD and inserted it into the 2520. After providing my password via Windows Explorer on the desktop, and telling it to automatically unlock the disk on startup, my MicroSD is now protected from prying eyes. From now on, I will be the only one to see the boring pictures I've taken and listen to the podcasts and music I've downloaded. Take that NSA (who probably already have my decryption key on file).

 

[Laura Knotek]

This is useful to know and should be helpful to a lot of forum members. I'm glad you shared this information.

 

[MikeF74]

If you do this, be sure to reformat the volume as NTFS first (by default, it is exFAT). I had to reformat my card when I wanted to move the location of my SkyDrive folder to the SD card since SkyDrive requires that the files are placed onto an NTFS volume.

 

[GizmoEV]

Thanks for the info. Now the only problem I'm having is that I can't convince the tablet to save files to the SD card by default. Prior to the formatting as NTFS and applying Bitlocker it worked just fine. It just ignores the setting. Any ideas?

 

[GizmoEV]

How did you move your SkyDrive folder to the SD card? I went into the modern UI settings and told it to save all pictures and things to the SD card. This seemed to work but the default camera doesn't use the new place, only the Nokia camera app does. I went to the desktop and used explorer, right clicked on the folders and moved the locations to the SD card. After that the tablet wouldn't work very fast or wouldn't perform at all. It had to be rebooted multiple times. I finally did a refresh but keep my files & apps and that didn't fix things. I finally did a wipe & restore to factory and had to manually update portions of the Windows updates at a time until I finally had the tablet working again.

So, how do you reliably move SkyDrive and possibly the Photos, Videos, and Music folder to the SD card?

Edit: It doesn't seem to matter whether I have BitLocker enabled or not.