Bitlocker has been around for almost 20 years. I've never chose to use it, but it's been on by default and my policy is generally to give something a go and not rock the boat unless it's seems to be required. It's never given me any issues; I've tended to print out recovery keys if they are thrust in my face but it's never given me a reason to look into it more or remove it.
Recently though I've had two issues. One with my new ASUS where on a start it asked for the recovery key, which I didn't have, so I just rebooted and it worked. This gave me some concerns so I exported the recovery key and mostly moved on. A few weeks back though I was setting up my old-ish Surface Pro 3 as a video tablet while I was on a rowing machine and it asked for the recovery key. Darn! I thought. This is the end... but no. It turns out they are all online in your Microsoft account.
I had no idea this was a thing. While it did save my machine at the same time it does seem kinda bad to me as I thought Microsoft had no access to your encrypted drive, and that it was all hardware locked, but maybe not?
Looks like a new research project to me....
