Password protection?

AWBbox · 23 Sep 2007 at 17:26

Can anyone recommended me a (preferably free) program to password protect my external hard drive? I backup everything I have to it once a week then for the rest of the time I leave it at where I work. I want to have some sort of method for preventing any of my collegues from looking at my stuff. I've been using Exlades' 'Disk Password Protection' that puts a password on the boot sector of the drive in question, but just recently I think it was the reason I lost all the data on the drive so I can't trust it any more. Any advice greatfully received!

jbloggs · 23 Sep 2007 at 19:38

TrueCrypt

AxCrypt

AWBbox · 23 Sep 2007 at 19:53

Thanks for the reply, but don't those programs physically encrypt the data itself? This time round I want to be able to retrieve the data if things go wrong so I'm worried that encrypting the files might just be shooting myself in the foot again. If these programs are safe, are they time consuming to encrypt/decrypt? I have hundreds of gigabytes of data here.

AWBbox · 25 Sep 2007 at 07:53

Still need help with this please, i'm carrying the thing around with me at the moment cos I don't feel save leaving it anywhere as it is

It's heavy.

eXor · 25 Sep 2007 at 08:28

If you don't mind using a Linux solution then check out LUKS / dm-crypt.

It's free and it works flawlessly. It encrypts the OS and the data, only the boot partition is unencrypted. I'm using it with Arch Linux. It prompts for a password at bootup and then unlocks the partition(s). I don't even need to bother with a user login and just boot straight into the desktop.

On the windows side, how about making a huge password protected zip archive? Slow, I know, and you still have to cover your tracks ( Recent Documents, swap file, temp files that Windows loves to scatter around, e.t.c. )

You could also just get a "mini safe", lock up the disk in there and put it in a drawer.