How to enable BitLocker on USB Flash Drives to Protect Data

in bitlocker, data encrypte

You can protects the your data stored on the volume by using encrypting USB flash drives . Any USB flash drive formatted with FAT, FAT32, or NTFS can be encrypted with BitLocker. Size of the drive, the level of activity on the system and processing speed of the your system are  considered the length of time it takes to encrypt a drive. Follow the below steps to enable BitLocker encryption on a USB flash drive easily.

Step 1: Insert the USB flash drive, and Open Computer window.

Step 2: Now right click the USB flash drive, and click turn on BitLocker. There you can see BitLocker initializes the drive.

Step 3: Select one or more for the following  options on the choose how you want to unlock this drive page and click Next:

• Use A Password To Unlock This Drive - if you need the user to be prompted for a password to unlock the drive select this option.
• Use My Smart Card To Unlock The Drive - if you need the user to use a smart card and enter the smart card PIN to unlock the drive select this option. This feature requires a smart card reader and it is generally used to unlock a drive in the office and don't for drives that might be used outside the office.

Step 4: Click save the recovery key and then  select save location in the save BitLocker Recovery Key dialog box and click Save.

Step 5: if you need to print the recovery key now you can print it . After you have finished, click Next. 

Step 6: Finally click Start Encrypting, on the are you ready to encrypt this drive page and do not remove the USB flash drive until the encryption process is complete.

After these steps, when AutoPlay is enabled and you plug the encrypted USB flash drive into a USB slot on a computer running Windows 7, the BitLocker to go reader, which in turn displays a dialog box. When you are prompted, enter the password, smart card PIN or both to unlock the drive. Finally, click Unlock to unlock the volume.