Vista's Bitlocker vs. OS X's FileVault, a duel to the death

In one corner, the lightweight FileVault with its home directory encryption designed to keep your files reasonably safe without too much intrusion. In the other corner stands Bit Locker, the 800lb gorilla of whole drive encryption; a roach motel for data.. once it goes in, it doesn't come out (unless you have the key).
The verdict? Gina says, "I'd choose BitLocker - simply for the total-lockdown factor." Adding, "Yes, the annoying repartitioning rigamarole and cost of Vista Ultimate or Enterprise suck, but a thief ain't gonna come close to anything on that drive, no matter where it's stored, and I like it that way."












Comments
4
Subscribe to commentsG. Steve ArnoldMar 20th 2007 10:28PM
Bitlocker vs. File Vault? Who cares! Use TrueCrypt and you won't have to choose. Version 4.3 came out today: it's open source, uses AES-256, Serpent, and Twofish to create encrypted block files that act as a mountable volume.(You access the files stored inside using a password supplied at mount time.) It's also platform independent! (Linux, Windows + source is available to compile for other platforms!)
MooreMar 21st 2007 6:47AM
Here, here! TrueCrypt kicks a$$.
PeterMar 21st 2007 10:01AM
I agree TrueCrypt is awesome. But for laptops, BitLocker is fantastic.
With TrueCrypt you can't encrypt the OS drive, and do you really trust your mobile employees to save their data to the proper location on their machine?
With BitLocker you just encrypt everything and you don't have to rely on the user to save to the proper location. Since most machines ship with 1 giant partition, it is easier on the end user to encrypt everything and not have to worry about where data is or what might or might not be encrypted.
If a BitLocker protected laptop is lost, all you're out is the hardware, you don't have to worry about the data. With TrueCrypt, there will always be some data exposed and you really have no way of knowing what that data is.
Brian MMar 22nd 2007 5:33PM
How come it is not a fair fight until leopard comes out? Seriously why is it when there is a feature in apple that is not in a msft OS the claim is Microsoft is WAAYYY behind, but when an innovative feature makes it into a windows OS before Apple, then it is not a fair comparison. For christs sake Apple releases a new OS every 6 months, and drops support for the previous ones just as quickly, MSFT on the other hand takes about 4-5 years and supports the thing for 10 years. And apple I-TV is a damn joke, Vista and a $30 tuner card with an XBox 360 as an extender completely blows it away but no one talks about that innovation either, try doing that with your i-life crap