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True File Security

     - Thursday, April 29, 2004

There's not much I fear more than a breach of my computer's security. It would be a bloody nightmare if someone got ahold of the files on my machine. I've got tax returns going back several years (I file online, of course), credit reports, lists of passwords for every website imaginable, you name it - my entire financial history!

Seems like I needed an encryption program. I wasn't looking forward to dealing with more passwords, or something that gets in the way of making backups. The solution is PGP Personal Desktop. More well known for their email encryption, PGP also makes a powerful disk encryption program which is included with PGP Personal Desktop. This thing is great.

Using the program you can create encrypted container files. To open the files, just double-click on them and enter your password. The newly opened file will now appear on your computer as a hard drive. Then you can use all the files in the container for as long as you want.

Best of all, if the computer loses power, then the file will automatically be locked again. Even though you can have 1 big container file, I make mine about 600 megabytes. Then I can just burn the locked file onto a CD for easy backups.

posted by Kevin Watts |  Permalink |