Keep Your Data Safe

Data matters — it's usually worth far more than the hardware it sits on. Beyond backup and restore, some data is sensitive enough that no one else should see it. A few weeks ago my notebook broke, and I dropped it off for repair without a second thought about the data on it, because it was safe.

Some operating systems already offer this, like Windows 8 with BitLocker, and some hardware bundles encryption with its portable drives, as WDC does. But there's another option — the one I went with — a free, genuinely good third-party app: TrueCrypt.

A few of its features:

• Secure — its encryption is, by any measure, very strong.
• It can take the form of a disk: open it and it appears as a brand-new drive.
• It can encrypt a partition, a whole storage device, or a single file. I use the single-file approach, so opening it mounts a new drive.
• Once it's open, you write data to it directly, like an ordinary hard disk — unlike a zip or rar archive. It's parallelized and pipelined, automatic, real-time, and transparent.
• It has a “plausible deniability” feature: two separate hidden volumes. Useful if someone forces you to open your secret file — you can open the decoy instead and keep the real one hidden.

For me there's one more upside: there are versions for Windows, macOS, and Linux. I just carry a USB stick with the data and open it on whatever OS I'm on (if I format it as NTFS, opening it on macOS needs an extra app to read NTFS). The file can even live in Dropbox.

Hope it's useful.

— Mico Wendy