Encryption

Iconic

A.Penny.Saved wrote: »

I think that encrypting the whole drive is only for paranoiacs and totally unnecessary except for very rare occasions.

My laptop only has personal data on it but I would still not want someone who pinches it to have access to my personal files,music,videos and photos.

A.Penny.Saved wrote: »

If your using a good password manager, why would you need to worry about anyone getting the password database? A good password manager such as Keepass with a fairly decent master password is never going to be broken into in a persons lifetime with the current increases in computer power, unless computer computing power rises much faster than it currently is.

I already use Keepass and initially thought I would only encrypt the .kdb file and MS Money .mny file. Then I thought about Opera Password Manager and then the rest.

A.Penny.Saved wrote: »

Encrypting everything is just going to slow everything down too much IMO. Why encrypt applications or the windows folder?

I think you might be right but I need to get to know Truecrypt first.

Iconic

mr_fishbulb wrote: »

Sandboxie and truecrypt are a good way of doing this. You sandbox the browser and tell sandboxie to user the space in a truecrypt volume.

I have tried Sandboxie and gave it up after a couple of months. Might look at it again.

epninety

A.Penny.Saved wrote: »

Encrypting everything is just going to slow everything down too much IMO. Why encrypt applications or the windows folder?

Because it's well understood that if you make security get in the way, people will find ways to circumvent it, and not always safe and secure ways.

If you encrypt the entire drive, and only have to enter the password at boot, then it doesn't really get in the way.

Having to fire up the encryption program every time you want to read your email, or go to a website is a PITA. Users typically stop using such things quickly when it becomes an added distraction from the job at hand.

Also it means you don't have to decide what is worth encrypting - everything is encrypted by default. This adds another layer of security if you are concerned about snooping - when everything is encrypted, it's not obvious which are the 'interesting' files.

When (god forbid) I have to go to my customers and admit that my I've lost my laptop and I need new copies of some of their documents, I will at least be able to say that I know 100% that everything that could possibly be of interest to anyone was as secure as I could make it.

I lock my whole house, not just the rooms that I think have something valuable in them. I put all my letters in envelopes, not just the ones with any privacy implications. I treat my computer data the same way.

And using a reasonably modern machine, on-the-fly encryption to a reasonable level does not noticeably slow things down. Measurable yes, but not perceptible to most users. I have two machines here of very similar spec, but one has a fully encrypted drive. The only difference I've ever spotted was recording video direct to the HDD, which is 100% drive access - not a terribly common application for a laptop, and both are rather underpowered for that job in any case - 1GHz processors and laptop IDE HDDs.

S0litaire

I'm using Ubuntu and I've got my whole "/home" directory encrypted.
It does not slow the laptop down and is invisible to the user and programs running on it.

I only need to use my single normal login.

Jeff_Bridges_hair

I use a variation of PGP and some home made encryption and those with work... PGP works quite well for me not having to let work know what i am doing me not letting anything go free..

Aiadi

Iconic wrote: »

I think I will give encryption of the whole drive a go and see how long it takes.

Why is this of concern? just let it do its thing and you can carry on using your computer in the meantime. you can even pause the process and resume it whenever you like.

Iconic

Thanks to everyone for your help.

In the end I encrypted the whole drive and I was surprised how easy the process was. Yes it took about 3 hours to encrypt but that was the hardest part of it.

I was mistakenly under the impression that encryption would take place every time I used the laptop!!!! After the initial encryption I have not noticed any delay in shut down or start up apart from entering the new password.