This article is going to show everyone, even the inexperienced, how to create a data safe that can store as much personal information and files as you want using the open source program True Crypt. True Crypt makes it very easy to encrypt almost every piece of hardware including partitions, hard drives, usb keys and other storage devices. Once everything is setup you would mount the True Crypt container using the password that you have selected while creating the encrypted container. This is actually the only password that you have to remember, everything else can be kept in the encrypted container for safety reasons. A big advantage is the fact that you can start any applications from that container once it is mounted, this includes torrent clients, ftp clients, usenet clients and everything else that you can think off.
True Crypt is available for Linux and several Windows editions including Vista and XP. Please download the software from the location above and install it afterwards. The only other thing that you need is some free space on a hard drive or a storage device. I would suggest an usb key for instance, size does not really matter that much. If you ask me I encrypted a complete external hard drive with 320 Gigabytes of space that stores my private files that no one else should be able to access.
- Launch True Crypt
- Click on Create Volume
- Create a Standard Volume, click Next
- Decide if you want to encrypt a device or create a encrypted container. Select File creates an container of x megabytes that you specify, select device encrypts the device. I’m using the second option for my hard drive but this is really up to you and does not change the data safe that we create
- If you select File: Browse to a location that you want to store the file and name it, something like test, data or whatever. Click save, then next.
- Select an encryption algorithm, AES is fine for instance. Click Next
- Select a file size for the container. It should be at least some megabytes, the limit is the space on the device that the file is created on
- Create a secure password that you can remember. Write it down for the first time if you want to be sure that you do not forget it. Get rid of that paper as soon as possible.
- Click on Next, move the mouse around for a minimum of 30 seconds and click on format afterwards.
- A message should appear that the container was created.
- To mount it simply select a drive letter that is not taken and click on Select File and browse to the file that you created
- click on mount and enter the password that you have selected during installation
- If everything worked out fine the container should be mounted and you can use it like any other drive letter.You could for instance move important files into the container or create a textfile that contains all of your passwords.
- do not forget to unmount the partition if you leave the computer for a longer time. Booting or shutting down automatically unmounts the drive.
- It would be nearly the same process if you want to encrypt a whole partition or drive.
- Instead of selecting a file at the beginning you select the drive letter of that partition and follow the same menus as before.
- Mounting it is similar as well, you only click on Select Devices instead of Select File before you click on mount
So, where are the advantages of this method over tools that work like password safes ? The main advantage is that you can not only store passwords in the encrypted container but also files and everything else that you can think off. Just move the files inside and no one can access them unless they can provide the password to this True Crypt container.
As I said earlier True Crypt works with big hard drives and there is no visible loss in speed during read and write operations. The devices work as usual once mounted. You could for instance run your favorite torrent client from that drive saving those torrents on it as well.
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