Bitlocker Chewing Up Hard Drive Space

For whatever reason, you may want to enable Bitlocker on the internal drives on one or more computers to prevent others from getting access to your data should they attempt to read those drives on other computers. This isn’t such a bad idea if you use a laptop for business use.

However, once you kick off the encryption process with Bitlocker then you may be alarmed by an apparent loss of hard disk or solid state drive space as the encryption is taking place to the extent that it appears that the computer will reach its capacity. This might have you worried about the ongoing stability and performance of the system and perhaps consider attempting to stop the encryption process.

Relax, this is normal and simply a side effect of how Bitlocker encrypts drives.

What Bitlocker does is fill the empty space on the drive with a massive file consuming all but 6GB of the available space. When space is freed up as files are deleted or files shrink in size then Bitlocker physically wipes those sectors and allocates them into the massive file. This is only temporary until the whole drive is eventually encrypted after which the free space will be released.

In a nutshell, just let Bitlocker do its thing and everything should be fine!

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