this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2025
129 points (97.8% liked)
Tech
1450 readers
85 users here now
A community for high quality news and discussion around technological advancements and changes
Things that fit:
- New tech releases
- Major tech changes
- Major milestones for tech
- Major tech news such as data breaches, discontinuation
Things that don't fit
- Minor app updates
- Government legislation
- Company news
- Opinion pieces
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I don't think I grasp this at all. They say the encryption is forced, so that means that I can't just access my files with Linux or whatever? But then at the end they say to use an extra hard drive as backup, so that can't be right. Is their problem that the cloud storage is encrypted? Wouldn't it be a huge, glaring issue if it wasn't? Regardless, I would expect to be locked out of my files on a cloud storage service I got locked out of, so I don't know what encryption has to do with it. I don't get it.
I had an offline windows account on my laptop.
I was freelancing for a company that gave me a Microsoft account.
I logged into teams, but was very careful not to assign my laptop to that account. I had to use teams, but I didn't want my client to manage my device.
Shortly after I installed Linux, which broke windows bitlocker, and I had to get my bitlocker key.
I hadn't set up bitlocker, I wasn't expecting it. As far as I was concerned, I had bricked my device.
On a hunch of "hmm, maybe", I checked my Microsoft account from the client, and it has a bitlocker key which unlocked my windows install.
At which point, I disabled bitlocker and now primary Linux.
But yeh, in my experience bitlocker is transparently applied during windows install and you never know your bitlocker key. If you never log in to a Microsoft account, you will never be able to recover it if you don't save it in advance. And if you don't know its happened, why would you know to save it in advance?!
The fact that I was able to recover my bitlocker key for my offline/local windows account because I had installed & logged-in to teams via a client provided Microsoft account is strange as fuck.