I’m new to using Bitwarden, and was wondering if I could ask a question regarding Vault Lock.
Is it good practice to manually lock your vault before you shut down your PC?
The reason I ask is because I shut down my PC last night and the vault was unlocked. I am using the Desktop App on my desktop PC, and I have it set to lock on System Sleep, but it occurred to me, if I shut down my PC would the Bitwarden App have sufficient time to lock and encrypt the contents of my vault before my PC shut down?
I know it might sound dumb, but I have thoughts of a half-encrypted vault on my PC, hence my question of manually locking it before shutdown.
Has this ever happened, or am I misunderstanding the mechanics of vault lock?
When you lock the vault, the contents are not re-encrypted. The way that it works is that an encrypted cache of of your vault contents is stored on your computer hard drive, for as long as your Bitwarden client app remains logged in (the cache is deleted when you log out). When the vault is unlocked, the Bitwarden client app reads the encrypted cache from the disk, decrypts it, and then stores the decrypted vault contents in the computers volatile memory (RAM).
Locking the vault will clear the decrypted vault contents from RAM. But clearly, shutting down the PC will also clear the RAM. So in the unlikely event that the locking process is interrupted by a shutdown, the end effect will be the same.
I would, however, make sure that all Bitwarden vaults are locked before Hibernating a PC (because hibernation will save all memory contents, including decrypted vault data, to your hard drive).
