Earlier this month, the University of Alberta Hospital reported two laptops stolen. Along with the hardware, the thieves also made off with names and personal health numbers of about 250,000 Alberta patients.Yes, this is a disturbing news report, but what can be learned from it? I consider myself a fairly tech-savvy dude, but when my wife read this article, then asked me "So, if either of our computers are stolen, can anyone get at our personal info?" I'm chagrined to have to say I answered "Yes." And you can bet I promptly started researching and implementing an effective solution.It's Free, but...I discovered that data security is not cheap -- time-wise. You'll likely have to invest a bit of time reading up to better protect your data. Though the software has gotten better, it's not something I'd give to my Mom to set up. You do need to have a bit of an understanding as to what's going on.How it worksMy research led me to look for an application that would encrypt the data as it's written to the hard drive. This makes the drive unreadable to anyone without the proper password (or password / keyfile combination -- supersecure!). Back in the day of slower computers (Pentium anyone?) on-the-fly encryption was not practical. It is now. And, I found some software that's free. But, as I said, free doesn't mean it's cheap.So, what did I choose?

If you weren't able to figure it out by the links or image above, I selected TrueCrypt , for the following reasons:
Secure : AES-256, Serpent, Twofish, and other encryption protocols...and it'll cascade them (apply one after the other).
Simple : Somewhat. You need a good understanding of your Windows / Mac / Linux file system and how the operating system treats hard drives, folders and files.
Power-up Protection : Before you can actually boot into your operating system (or systems on a multi-boot computer), you'll need to enter a password to enable decryption.

Those two sold me, but here's a more complete list of TwoCrypt features:


It all sounds a bit James Bond-like, and it actually is. You are protecting your personal data with Government grade encryption. This technology is classified as a munition or weapon and export to certain countries is prohibited.

As with anything you use to protect your information, be it a password utility, backup application or system encryption process such as TrueCrypt, the more you learn, the better you'll understand how to use the tools to make your data safer.

Ok, I'm feeling much better now that my drives are encrypted...how 'bout you? What are you doing to keep your data safe?




Message Edited by bgrier on 06-29-2009 10:15 PM