File encryption for Windows 7

Encryption of private files is a habit of many friends. There are many third-party software that can achieve this goal, and many of them are charged for it. In fact, it is a little bit tricky to use the vhd and bitlocker functions, windows 7 itself can complete this task.

Create a vhd file to prepare for encryption

Create a virtual hard disk in the system using the vhd function, and then use bitlocker encryption to save our privacy files to this encrypted disk.

Vhd is a virtual disk file of Microsoft Virtual PC. In win7, we can create and mount vhd separately.

Right-click "computer" and choose "manage". In "Computer Management", right-click "disk management" and choose "create vhd ". Click "Browse" or enter the path of the vhd to be created. After confirming, fill in the size of the virtual hard disk. The size can be determined based on the available space of the hard disk and your own needs. For other options, select the default value. After confirmation, the system starts to create a new disk.

On the disk management page, we can see the newly created disk as "unknown. Right-click and choose "initialize disk". Then we can partition this unallocated disk. Right-click "new simple volume" and select "partition" in the displayed dialog box, or continue "Next" until the process is complete.

At this point, the task of creating vhd is complete. But now others can access the vhd we created.

Use bitlocker to encrypt the disk

Bitlocker is a data encryption feature added from Vista. In win7, we can easily use this feature for disk encryption.

In resource manager, select the new vhd partition and right-click Enable bitlocker. In the displayed dialog box, select "unlock drive with password", enter the password, and click Next. In the next step, select "Save recovery key to file ", so that you do not accidentally forget your password. Click "Start encryption" to complete the encryption task.

After a long encryption process, the created vhd is truly our own encrypted disk. Now we can put our privacy files in it. To use private files in the future, you only need to right-click "APPEND vhd" in disk management and mount the vhd file to the system, since a password is required to access the disk after mounting, encryption is achieved.

Encryption can be completed only by using system functions. Is it more convenient than installing software?