I have managed to activate BitLocker without TPM support on my Windows 10 installation. Is there any security advantage of using this over BestCrypt (paid)?
To be noted that I'm only interested in securing my data against common computer theft, not against governments.
To be noted that I'm only interested in securing my data against common computer theft, not against governments.
Hard-drive encryption only helps against data at rest. If someone uses a vulnerability in your running system, it doesn't help at all.
So, when your threat scenario is that someone remotely steals your data, this doesn't help at all.
In case you need to protect against unauthorized access to an unused (i.e. powered off, not mounted) storage device, for built-in storage devices (hard drives, SSDs), don't use either of your softwares. Simply use the device's own security (basically all modern SSDs have that, and many hard drives); whilst hardware encryption is hard to audit, it's highly unlikely a non-state attacker can gain access to your data. The drive won't give you access to the ciphertext, and if you try to brute-force the password, you will simply be permanently locked out. Also, since this happens before your OS even boots, usually there's no traces in software-accessible RAM of the password or use a software keylogger to sniff it.
For exchangeable storage (USB sticks etc), it essentially doesn't matter and you should choose what fits your application best. Often, simply encrypting the backup files before putting them into backup actually is simpler from a data management perspective – you can simply copy the same files savely from one drive to the next without decrypting them, for example.
