SillyDog701

[James]

Do any of you encrypt your entire hard drive? If so, does it affect the speed of your computer to perform operations? Are there any disadvantages to encrypting one's hard drive? Having read the current issue of PC World, it strongly recommends we do this and provides a link to a free program: www.truecrypt.org.

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[Antony]

Not me, but I used to encrypt a section of the Hard Drive.

Without a doubt, encryption/decryption does make the access a bit slower, however, with today's fast processor, it should not be any noticable to end users. One main drawback about encryption is... shall the disk (hardware) fails, disk recovery is virtually impossible (or extremely difficult). The rate of hard drive failing is not high, however, it does happen.

I have had a hard drive sent for data recovery early last year, since then, I have different approaches on hard disk/data organising and backups. (Paid the money, learned the lesson )

Don is an expert on encryption entire computer, he should know more.

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[Don_HH2K]

While I'm not an expert in the matter as Antony claims I am, I do use some forms of encryption when I store data on my hard drives.

On my laptop (which runs Windows) I encrypt a couple of directories containing sensitive data using EFS, which is built into Windows. EFS is fully transparent, meaning that I don't need to do any decryption prior to using whatever files I want. Encryption is performed by a key that's linked to your user account, so your Windows password is required to do any decryption.

I also have a FreeBSD box that I dump backups to. It boots off a CD and saves volatile files to a floppy, so I use the built-in geli utility, which encrypts the drive at the block level. Geli is useful because it's fast (especially if I use Blowfish instead of AES, seeing as this is an old Pentium 3), but again it is a full disk encryption solution.

The reason I prefer encryption of just a few files rather than the entire disk is that there are certain files, say those that belong to the OS, that don't need to be encrypted. If I encrypt those, there's a ton of additional overhead required just to boot up, let alone do anything else. I'd rather encrypt sensitive data like my browsing history, e-mail, and IM chats, and leave non-sensitive data in the clear.

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[James]

Thanks Don and Antony. I appreciate the thorough information. I'm going to look into this a bit more rather than rush into things. You've given me a lot to think about, Don. Thanks.

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