One of the best things you could do for yourself is encrypt your drive. I highly recommend it. I will take this opportunity to show you how.
The benefits to encryption is data security. Encrypting your drive will create security keys on all your files that cannot be removed without the encryption key. What is nice about Microsoft Bitlocker, is this encryption key is stored on the computer and unlocks the data automatically, so you don’t notice a thing. Should you take your hard drive out, then you will have to use the encryption key to access it.
One major con to encryption exists though. Disk encryption is mainly for data-at-rest, NOT data-in-transit. For data-in-transit protection you will have to make sure TLS 1.2 or IPSec is enabled (Don’t use TLS1.0 or TLS 1.1 as it has become easier to decrypt). That is for another lesson.
Check out the video I did below on full disk encryption:
-Dave (Cyber Dad)
The Cyber Dudes 