 Today we will show you how to use BitLocker to encrypt a portable hard drive and protect your research data files. BitLocker is a built-in feature on some versions of Microsoft Windows, typically the professional, ultimate or enterprise versions. BitLocker works well with Windows computers as once the drive has been encrypted it can be opened on Windows computers that do not have the full BitLocker program installed. However, if you wish to use the drive with a Mac or Linux computer the files will not be readable. Please see our tutorial on Veracrypt for cross-platform encryption. We can access the BitLocker feature by searching for BitLocker in the Windows search bar or by highlighting the drive that we wish to encrypt. We then need to right-click on the drive and select turn on BitLocker. Next we need to choose a password the longer and more complex this is the better. However, for this example I will use a simple password. Then we are greeted with the recovery key screen. Here you will need to choose whether to save the recovery key to a file or to print the recovery key out. As this is tutorial I will simply save the key to my desktop. Then we click next. Next we are required to confirm that we are ready to encrypt the drive. This process may take a while depending on the size of a drive we are encrypting. It is worth noting here that BitLocker will encrypt any files already on the drive and will not delete these. Once this is completed we are greeted with the following screen. It is as simple as that to encrypt an external drive using BitLocker. This concludes our tutorial on using BitLocker to encrypt a portable hard drive. Thank you for watching.