Evan Sims

Encrypting Your Drive with TrueCrypt

Today I thought I’d try my hand at a video tip, a screencast walkthrough of encrypting your hard disk using TrueCrypt. TrueCrypt whole-disk encryption is a fantastic option to further secure your data against prying eyes, and the software is free and open source. Whole-disk encryption is precisely what you might think it is, encrypting your whole hard disk and locking it down with a password. After your encrypt your disk, you’ll need to enter a password every time you boot up or resume from hibernation to unlock the data on your drive.

Whole-disk encryption is a far superior method of securing your data than BIOS passwords or user accounts; user account passwords are easily bypassed or cracked, and BIOS passwords are locked inside the motherboard rather than the hard drive, so anyone could just yank your drive out of your machine, hook it up to theirs and access your data as if you’d never set a password at all. Whole-disk encryption is per-disk or per-partition, and uses a variety of very high level encryption algorithms, so you can’t get much more secure than this.

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This video is also available on Vimeo, Viddler and YouTube. Please favorite it on your service of choice if you find it useful!

You can download TrueCrypt from it’s website, http://www.truecrypt.org, and if you’d like to use the image burning software I use it’s available for free from http://www.imgburn.com/.

Any questions? Don’t hesitate to ask!

Getting FolderShare for Mac to Play Nice

I’ve been using Microsoft’s FolderShare (now Windows Live FolderShare blah blah blah) service for years now, and I’ve got to admit that as much as I hate most of Microsoft’s Live apps, FolderShare is one utility that I couldn’t live without. Well, OK- I could, but I wouldn’t want to.

My recent addition of a shiny new MacBook Air to the household introduced an odd problem; while my Mac Pro has never had issues syncing files to the PCs in the house using FolderShare, the Air refused to do so. After some cursing, I did a bit of Googling and came across the solution.

Disable FolderShare encryption across all the Macs and PCs you want to sync. Yep.

Now, don’t ask me why my Mac Pro didn’t have the problem with encryption; both machines run Leopard, and neither have their Firewalls enabled. In any case, disabling encryption solves the problem, though I’m not at all a fan of the fact that my data is getting tossed around in plain text now. I suppose I could funnel everything through my Hamachi network to encrypt it, but… bleh.

Anyway, there’s the solution, Mr. Googler with a Mac. Hopefully Microsoft will fix the problem sooner rather than later, but if their track record with FolderShare updates is any indication I wouldn’t hold my breath. I’m hoping to get a Dropbox invite to see if it’s a worthy replacement. Stay tuned on that.