Portable Drive Security?

quackers

quackers

quackers

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
5,832
Location
Liverpool :-)
Lo all,

I'm thinking about picking up a 160gb - 250gb portable flash drive for use with my netbook, i'm looking at something like this:

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showp...isk 2.5" 250GB USB 2.0 Portable Drive (301278)

People on here must use them, what security software is available for this type of thing? There is only really going to be music, videos on it but it's just incase it's goes missing.

Is there anything free?
 
You can encrypt the drive using Truecrypt either as a volume or with whole drive encryption. If you use the former then anyone trying to access the drive will just see a large file whilst the latter will make it look more like an unformatted disk, (so remember this is what you've done as if you subsequently format that disk bang goes your data!). Note that formatting a drive that size through Truecrypt is likely to take a few hours.

In both cases you have to mount the encrypted area through Truecrypt giving a passphrase or using a key and without that you cannot access the files. The area then appears in My Computer as a local drive.

I have two 320GB WD Passport drives with my Asus 901 ... one is just unecrypted (media files) and the other uses Truecrypt full disk encryption (backups of personal data). I also have PortableApps installed in a Truecrypt volume on the machine so that if anyone stals it or I loose it then they cannot get at saved passwords in Firefox etc.

Truecrypt is free software. On the commercial front there is a similar product from PGP which we are supposedly getting at work.
 
Truecrypt sounds idea for this situation, i won't be keeping any sensitive/personal data on it but i'd like it to be secure.

Is it fast decrypting the data from the flash drive? As i'll be using it on a netbook with 1gb of ram
 
it should be fine but depends on the type of encryption you use its all explained in the wizard and you can benchmark to see which is the fastest on your machine etc its all very simple and explained on the install .... :)
 
I had a quick look through the tutorial on the site, it doesnt look too difficult to complete.

I love open source software
 
its pretty simple i must admit i was scard sh**less when i first used it i thought i was gonna wipe my drive but it didnt :) oss its amazing :D
 
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