BitLocker best practices??

I never seem to find any articles that cover the subject from A to Z.
Everyone who helps online just says "Turn it on". But what they fail to say or highlight is the appropriate set-up procedure and habits to not lose access to the encryption key / backup key whatever.

Can someone please indicate: how to set up BitLocker so that the OS drive / partition is encrypted BUT a) if using a USB Boot disk, b) Boot CD or c) pre-boot option, so that I can gain access to the encrypted partitions and drives; repair volumes; restore MFT / GPT and hidden boot volumes; resize partitions; perform offline/cold backups; etc?? Thank you!

I would hate to lose access or be unable to fix issues (e.g. in Paragon, Veeam, Macrium, Hasleo or Acronis; EasyRE, MiniTool, Stellar Phoenix, R-Drive and other recovery tools; and Ventoy, Sergei Strelec and other suites of tools on a boot image) and have no access to my data.

Can anyone please help with
- device encryption / Bitlocker best practices. in English?
- guide to setting it up correctly? (instead of "quickly")
- when you should unlock a volume? (eg. for what purpose or actions)
- any specific limitations or conflicts with commonly used software?

Thank you!

If you want a secure implementation.

The assumption here is that you are on Pro, Edu or Ent editions of Windows otherwise with Home you only get Device Encryption.

1. Open gpedit and go to Computer > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Bitlocker Drive Encryption > Operating System Drives
2. Enable "Require additional authentication at startup"
3. From an elevated powershell prompt run gpupate /force
4. Run the below powershell to enable Bitlocker with high security

Store the long numeric password somewhere (or multiple places) securely. You will need to enter that recovery password anytime you need to recover or boot into something like WinRM.

Additionally you could also add a usb startup key protector and use that during recovery processes, but since it is a key protector you will need to safeguard that usb device since it can unlock your device

BitLocker best practices??​

If your laptop runs Home version, By default, device encryption is enabled on ALL drives connected to the machine.
If you run Pro which has bitlocker, you can choose which drives to encrypt.

As far as your question you will get varied answers since some users choose to lock their devices down tighter than other users do. Any answer you get with be subjective to the user's personal opinions. Some of us would never choose to encrypt any drive...ever.