Hard Disk Encryption Software Provides Better Security!

As a regular computer user or business person, you might notice that you have a lot of confidential data stored on your computer. Imagine this scenario: someone breaks into your office or your home and steals your computer. Now, if you have personal information stored on that computer and if the bugler is intelligent enough to to know the value of the data, he can make severe misuse of it. You might be thinking that stealing a computer from a building, which is locked, might be far-fetched. How about the thief going for your laptop? This is a very possible scenario and can happen to you any time.

This is why you need to protect your data using a proven method. The question now is: which method? Using password protection on your operating system is pretty useless nowadays. The thief only has to unmount the hard disk from your computer and plug it into his one and access your data using his operating system. If you are thinking about using password protection features of popular office packages or zipping tools, you might as well know it now that these passwords can easily be recovered using any of the numerous password recovery tools availbe on the internet for these types of software.

So the obvious anwser to this problem is encrypting your data. However, not all types of encryption methods will be good for every use. You need to choose one which will make your life easy. If you decide to use single file encryption, then you might be heading for a frustrating method. If you have to access 10 files on a day, you will need to provide the password 10 times! You can see how stressing this can be, especially if you choose a long password for security reasons.

So the most appropriate method of encrypting your data is to use a hard disk encryption utility, which are also known as OTFE (On The Fly Encryption). These software can encrypt your files in three possible ways which are very similar.

The first way to encrypt your files is to use the tool and encrypt your whole hard disk. This means that whenever you want to access the files on that drive, you will need to provide your passowrd or whatever means of identification (figerprint, iris/voice recognition, keys, etc). However, there is one major problem with hard complete disk encryption. If you encrypt the whole hard disk, you encrypt the boot sector of the drive. If the boot sector of the drive is encrypted, the operating system cannot load the drive. Thus you cannnot access your files and a reformatting is required. There may be work-arounds to this problem but I do not recommended complete hard disk encryption.

The second way is to encrypt specific folders using the disk encrypion tool. This might work okay but if you encrypt too many folders, you might have the original problem of sinlge file encryption unearthed again. What I means here is that you will need to re-enter your passwords for each folder you have encrypted.

The final and best method is to create a virtual hard disk or encrypted container as they call it. This will create a file which you will be able to mount as a virtual drive, of course after providing necessay identifications. Then you will see a hard disk appear alongside your other hard disk in your computer, You can then use it as a regular one. After using it, you can unmount it and have your file safeguarded since nobody can access the container witohut the proper identification.

To conclude this, I would like to ask you to choose a good password. Choosing a good password is vital since if you choose an easy to crack password, encryption of data will be futile.

Hirvesh Marshall maintains a web page on FREE On The Fly Disk Encryption Software (http://www.codefusionlab.co.cc/freeontheflydiskfileencryption.html) at Codefusion Lab. Codefusion Lab is a site dedicated to provide free and useful software to other persons. You can get more software at Codefusion Lab: Free PC Tools and Webmaster's Resource (http://www.codefusionlab.co.cc).