Ed Bott - Windows 10 Support Secrets

42 CHAPTER 3 | Staying secure Figure 3-5: Backing up the recovery key for an encrypted drive is an essential precaution against accidentally losing all data on that drive. For a PC you own and control, saving the BitLocker recovery key to your Microsoft account is the most convenient option and the fastest way to ensure that you can get back in business in the event of encryption problems. Tell your users to go to https://onedrive.com/recoverykey and sign in to see an online listing of encryption keys for all drives for which they’ve turned on encryption. In fact, it’s a good idea to visit this page occasionally to clean up listings for old keys that are no longer necessary. Keeping Windows up to date The single most important thing anyone can do to keep a computer safe is to keep it up to date. Historically, the most widely distributed types of malware take advantage of vulnerabilities that were previously patched, sometimes months or even years earlier. Windows 10 makes several major changes in the way Windows Update works. New users, with or without a technical background, need to be aware of these changes so that they can avoid interruptions in their work. The first major change is that all updates are cumulative. Longtime users are familiar with the tedious task of restoring an operating system image and then having to download dozens or even hundreds of individual updates just to get caught up. With each newly released update in Windows 10 (like the one shown in Figure 3-6), you can “catch up” in a single step.