... if you like to brick your shiny new laptop. Bottom line, if your software encrypts your hard drive, using either the free truecrypt or the $400 bitlocker option, you will turn your laptop or desktop into a paperweight. The reasons are two-fold:
(1) The encryption/decryption kicks in every single time the hard drive is accessed. Yes, that includes all those times the virtual ram is read/written to. It'll turn the simple act of installing an update to your system into an exercise in sainthood. That brand new laptop you bought and spent way too much money for that shiny I7 and a zillion GB of RAM now runs about as fast as an Pentium II with 128 Mb of Ram.
(2) If your system "bytes the bullet", i.e. if the hard drive crashes, there's a good chance you will not be able to recover the data from your backup. Most backup software is not encryption aware. I also don't know anyone that owns MS Win 7 Ultimate, which is what you need to run bitlocker on your system - for obvious $$ reasons. You can run backup software from inside the OS if you don't mind spending 6 hours a day backing up your system, rather than 20-30 minutes if it's not encrypted. If you do a drive-level backup from outside of the OS I have to tell you that most backup software does a poor job of restoring the data to another drive,i.e. it plainly fails. The fun part? You won't know that your backup is toast until you really need it. And don't get me started on incremental backups on encrypted drives. Makes you want to commit seppuku with a spoon.
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