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.

Subscribe with iTunes Subscribe with RSS

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!