I have had many emails over time about security of thumb drives.  For instance, am I worried about leaving my thumb drive lying on a desk somewhere and having someone take it.  They are then able to open my private files on that drive.

That used to be a concern but for the past five or six years I have been using a great free application called TrueCrypt.

Before I start telling you what this application will do I will warn you of a few things up front.  It is very, very good at what it does.  It is not as easy to set up as many programs I have mentioned here before.  You will have to read a bit to learn how to use and install it; however, it will be worth the work if you need something like this.

TC will make it so your entire thumb drive, a portion of it or even a folder on your hard drive cannot be opened and accessed unless TrueCrypt is running.  Not only does the TC application have to be running on the computer but the proper password is needs to be entered.

One interesting feature is that you can create a “container”.  The container is set up on a drive somewhere and when opened you may place as many files as will fit in it.  The size of a container is determined by you when it is created.  Then as all other TrueCrypts you need to open it to access the files later.  The neat thing is that you may copy this container to any other location and use it as a container there.  For instance, you could copy your important files to this container (it actually acts like a folder when opened) and transport it to another computer via email, thumb drive, etc.  When you take it to the new computer you copy it to that system, open the container and presto-chango there are your files in a new place.  If you encrypt the entire thumb drive or a portion of your hard drive you can’t move it from place to place.

Also, I told you to use this on a portable drive you must have TC running on that computer.  Hmm, what do you do if TrueCrypt is not on the computer you are trying to use?  They take care of that too.  When you set up the drive you can install TC on that portable device so you may run it from there when using someone else’s computer.

If you have a need to encrypt your files I highly recommend TrueCrypt.  If you give it a try let me know what you think.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 21st, 2009 at 7:00 am and is filed under Columns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.