Bitlocker Alternatives for Win7?

mrk

mrk

Man of Honour
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
105,182
Location
South Coast
I have Win7 pro so don't have bitlocker, I wanted to move my external USB2 drive inside the PC to speed up backups and at the same time encrypt the drive so when it's not being used it's sitting there all locked up and safe.

Plus moving it inside the case means it's always on rather than being turned on and off a few times a week which can decrease the drive lifespan.

Just wondering if anyone knows of a good alternative that can just lock a drive with a simple context menu action or similar?
 
I'm a bit puzzled - if the primary data is not encrypted, what's the point of encrypting an internal backup drive? Or have I completely misunderstood what you're trying to do?

Having said that, I think Truecrypt should do what you want...
 
I was going to suggest TrueCrypt as well. Haven't used it in a while so couldn't guarantee the "simple context menu action" but I would have thought it possible. :)
 
Well because the drive is on all the time inside having the data encrypted will safeguard it from being deleted or otherwise, purely as a safeguard measure.

Will check out Trucrypt ta!
 
It would be a lot safer if the backup drive weren't sat inside your PC and always connected. Yes you're covered if, say, Windows borks or the main HDD goes kaput.. but if the computer is stolen, blows up, power surges, floods, artillery strikes and/or lizardmen then you lose your data and your backup...

Seems a bit silly to me! I would just buy a new internal HDD and backup to that. Use the removable USB drive as a backup you can take away and put somewhere safe.
 
Hmm those incidents are far and between though but in the interest of ultimate security that should be considered!

I think I'll hang on to USB2 until I can get a USB3 caddy and install the drive to that!
 
USB2 is just a tad slow when creating system images :p
hmmm... if you're backing up system images, that rather rules out encryption in any case. If your OS becomes unbootable and you need to recover the system partition from an image, how would you access that image if it's stored on an encrypted volume?

I suppose you could create some kind of customised bootable recovery environment which would load the Truecrypt drivers and application *before* launching your imaging app - I'm not saying it couldn't be done, but I could see it all ending in tears if/when you had to depend on it all working reliably.

As far as speed is concerned, have you considered an eSATA caddy for your external drive?
 
With Windows system image backup you can reinstall Windows and restore the image through Windows Backup and Restore centre using said image, Windows will reboot into restore mode and do the rest!

It's a VHD image though so selective backup is also possible at anypoint I guess.

I did consider eSATA but the caddys seem quite pricey for decent ones?
 
Back
Top Bottom