I know of at least 10 instances of a company laptop being stolen. From the back of a car, from a coffee shop, from a hotel room, etc. It happens.

Knowing any data on it cannot be recovered by malicious actors can be very reassuring.

Surely this is an issue for there not being an easy mechanism for backing up?

The proper solution should be secure by design and user friendly. We shouldn’t compromise the former for the latter.

> It just means that when something goes wrong, such as a forgotten password or a botched update, their data that would have otherwise been recoverable is now lost forever.

Not at all. You can get your recovery key back via a few different means (for 11 Home, OneDrive/printed/PDF, for enterprises, various ways) and boot into the Windows Recovery Mode environment to perform the same repair options one would have without BitLocker in place.

> I'm not sure I know anyone who's had a computer stolen, but I know lots of people who have lost data.

That's exactly where you got your priorities wrong.

Yes there is a tradeoff. But backing up your data is easy (especially in a corporate environment), while security is hard.

And computers do get stolen a lot all the time, just not in your circle.