Protecting External Drive

Richard

I had a brief flash of paranoia this morning when I realized that with very few exceptions, all of my data are freely accessible on my external drive. If it were to be stolen, there's not even a global password that would prevent access.

Now, I understand the issues of security fairly well. My really important documents are encrypted and my really important passwords are never saved by my browser. I don't back up my browser cache. I do have a sign-on password on my computer, but I realize that only gives protection against the least skillful bad guys. Still, since I use an external drive for backup, the data there are not even protected from them.

So, I was wondering what other people are doing/using to deal with external drives. I have so far resisted encrypting everything because I don't want to incur the overhead. My backup software (Syncback SE) does offer encryption, but only if it puts stuff into ZIP format, which is a little inconvenient and also has overhead. Can anyone suggest a middle ground between full-blown encryption and leaving the door wide open?

Thanks,

cmason

Important, personal stuff, I put in a hidden, encrypted TrueCrypt partition. This includes password lists, financial docs, etc etc. And this file gets backed up easily, as it is just a file to the PC. I actually keep this on a 4GB thumbdrive now.

On my wife's laptop, the Quicken files (even the actual ones used by the program) are in a truecrypt partition (she only knows that she has to enter a password before she launches Quicken), and the Quicken Backup is on a truecrypt partition on her thumbdrive. Paranoid? nah, this takes no time to set up, it is so simple, and is easy to use. I get AES strong encryption and don't have to work at it.

http://www.truecrypt.org/

Richard

Thanks for the tip on TrueCrypt. Looks interesting.

Cheers,

Rhuarc

THat TrueCrupt does indeed look interesting. Gonna have to check that out.

THanks!

TexPhotog

Encryption
Just an awesome find... I'll be downloading it tonite when I get home...

CraigF

TrueCrypt
I can vouch for TrueCrypt. I've been using it for a few years now. If you use it and like, donate some cash to the creators please.

I create encrypted containers for anything that I want to protect. These reside on internal and external hard drives and usb flash drives. All work great. I do not use it to encrypt the entire drive, but I'll check it out with one of my many USB drives sitting around. If I see anything odd I'll post it here.

Keep in mind that physical security should always be your first choice. At some point, in the wrong situation, you could protect your data from yourself.

http://www.truecrypt.org/downloads.php

CraigF

CraigF

TrueCrypt
OK, that was easy enough but I don't recommend it. When you go to create the encrypted drive TrueCrypt even warns you of how easy it would be to wipe our an entire drive and in fact, it would be very easy. You are not presented with the drive letter. Instead you see a partition number. That alone means you could easily make a mistake and do some serious damage. I HIGHLY recommend that you just create containers. That way the worst thing that will happen is that you won't have enough space to create the container. Also, when creating a container on an external device I put the Truecrypt install there also. That way in a pinch you can install it on a machine that does not have it. You are also storing the version that you used to create the container with the container.

cmason

CraigF wrote:

OK, that was easy enough but I don't recommend it. When you go to create the encrypted drive TrueCrypt even warns you of how easy it would be to wipe our an entire drive and in fact, it would be very easy. You are not presented with the drive letter. Instead you see a partition number. That alone means you could easily make a mistake and do some serious damage. I HIGHLY recommend that you just create containers. That way the worst thing that will happen is that you won't have enough space to create the container. Also, when creating a container on an external device I put the Truecrypt install there also. That way in a pinch you can install it on a machine that does not have it. You are also storing the version that you used to create the container with the container.

Agree: you can encrypt an entire drive, that is a new feature. However, I find that simply creating a 'virtual partition' is quite enough. Truecrypt does this by creating an entrypted file, and creates a virtual drive that writes to that file container. To your PC and the world, it appears as a file. In fact, you can name the file anything you like. I happen to name all mine with an .iso, and call it something like test.iso, or virsusfilled.iso, etc. This way it appears uninteresting, and not something that can just be opened and examined. It also makes it completely portable. Just move the file to another drive, and use Truecrypt to open it.