Patent ID: 8689279

Claim:
A method comprising: receiving, at a computing device, a request to activate a policy for the computing device, the policy indicating that data written by the computing device to a storage volume after activation of the policy be encrypted; activating the policy for the computing device despite one or more sectors of the storage volume being unencrypted, the activating including encrypting data written to the storage volume after returning an indication of compliance with the policy, and further including using an encrypted chunks map to identify which chunks of sectors of the storage volume are unencrypted, the encrypted chunks map identifying, for each chunk of sectors of a storage volume, when the sectors in the chunk are not unencrypted that the sectors in the chunk are encrypted or not in use, the using the encrypted chunks map comprising: checking, in response to a request to write data to a sector, the encrypted chunks map to determine whether a chunk that includes the sector is unencrypted; in response to the chunk that includes the sector being unencrypted, holding the request to write data until the sectors in the chunk are encrypted, further comprising while the request to write the data is held: reading the content of the sectors included in the chunk; encrypting the content of the sectors included in the chunk; writing the encrypted content of the sectors to the sectors included in the chunk; and updating the encrypted chunks map to indicate that the chunk is encrypted; and otherwise encrypting the data to be written to the sector and writing the encrypted data to the sector; and returning, in response to the request, the indication of compliance with the policy despite one or more sectors of the storage volume being unencrypted.