I thought about encrypting my hard disks, or at least part of them that contain personal data, for at least one year. I never did it because I thought it would be a lot of work involved. I had to find a good program, one that would offer good encryption algorithms, would be free and easy to use.
It should be able to encrypt complete partitions, offer real-time-encryption and hidden partitions. Today, I finally decided to give this a try. I bought a external hard drive, installed the program true crypt and used true crypt to encrypt the complete external drive.
It took about five hours to format and encrypt the drive which is connect to my pc using usb 2.0. I then moved all files and programs to the encrypted drive which showed up as just another hard drive. One great feature is that I can run programs from the encrypted hard drive, it should not be a problem to run bittorrent, emule, ftp, browsers aso from the encrypted drive. As of now, I did not encounter errors or slow downs.
Another great feature is that True Crypt has the option to place a hidden partition inside the encrypted drive. If someone forces you to reveal the content of the drive the hidden partition remains untouched. And no one is able to find out that easily that there is a hidden area inside the revealed area.
True Crypt comes with a step by step guide. Its really easy to setup and run. A highly frequented forum helps if you encounter problems that are not explained in the user guide.
Let me know if you try it out and write about your experience using the software.
[tags]true crypt, freeware, encryption, decrypt, hidden partition, hard drive, encrypted drive, aes, blowfish, serpent[/tags]
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9 Responses to “Encrypt your Hard Drives”
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[...] I´ve already written a large article about true crypt and can recommend it fully. I´am using it at home where I encrypted my entire external hard drive using true crypt. It´s running fine and the read / write speed does not differ a lot from my unencrypted drives. [...]
I’ve used True Crypt for the last 18 months and love it. I’ve always used it to create mountable disks out of files on my local hard drive so that sensitive data can be stored in an encrypted area.
Its working fine for me, I feared that true crypt would slow down my system but I cannot notice that. I moved a large part of my files to the encrypted file and defragmented the other hard drives afterwards.
Can recommend this to everyone who has sensible data stored on his computer.
TrueCrypt is awesome… been using it for a while now. Cant do without it. Carry it in my USB drive too :)
I installed True Crypt and ‘mounted’ the file but for some reason it allows unimpeded access and doesn’t apply a password – can’t figure out why. Bit disappointed.
If you mount a file or drive you are free to use it and don’t need to provide a password. If you dismount the drive or file you will have to mount it again providing the password.
Thanks Martin, but isn’t the reason for Truecrypt that it provides password protection to the file? I can’t figure out why it doesn’t ask for the password after mounting the file to a drive.
S
As a follow up to my comment Sep 24th. I thought truecrypt created an encrypted file that needed a p/w to access. After I have ‘mounted’ it onto a drive it seems to offer free access. is that right? If so then how does it protect the contents?
S
Wow this was two years ago but, simon: Once you’ve mounted the drive then yes, you are allowed free access. If someone were to seize your computer before you had the chance to close Truecrypt then they would have access. However, Truecrypt auto-dismounts whenever your computer is interrupted (restarted, shut down, etc)…in which case said intruder would have to know the key in order to mount the driver again.