Data loss sucks, but I reckon data theft would suck a whole lot more. Think of someone going through all of your e-stuff (cheesy, yes). All those photos, personal emails, appeals against conviction, … err… I mean… apples… against… convection… currents… reports… for… science class… and stuff. <phew!>
Sure, a home computer isn’t too likely to go AWOL along with your … unusual science reports? But a notebook computer, or a nice compact USB flash drive on the other hand; well, wouldn’t you prefer that the new “owner” of your device ended up with a big fat unusable file instead of your whole unencrypted personal life?
Enter TrueCrypt. It has the magical ability to turn a big fat file into a virtual drive. You point it at your big fat file, type in the password, and you end up with G: drive, which stands for “Good luck getting my files out of this, suckers!” You could of course select another drive letter if you could come up with an equally witty mnemonic.
In my TrueCrypt drive I keep my Thunderbird Portable, KeePass databases, PDA backups, CV, job apps, and of course fruit-in-thermal-flows experiment reports. It’s so easy to use – I just save all of my personal stuff to my X: drive.
And back to the USB flash drive thing, a couple of clicks of the “Traveller Disk Setup” wizard and you’re good to go on any computer you can get Administrator access to (just the once).
TrueCrypt supports several encryption algorithms, but after several painstaking minutes of research I chose TwoFish and Whirlpool as the hash algorithm solely because they both had (somewhat obscure) links to water.
OK, enough unencrypted chit chat; go and get TrueCrypt.
