
USB pen drives are great - all that storage in your pocket and for a low cost too. I used to have a 128MB drive a couple of years back - I thought it was the dogs - I carried around a whole heap of stuff I never could dream of way back when all I had was floppy disks. Then I got a 256MB drive, then 1GB, then 2GB and recently I picked up an 8GB drive that is less than 5cm long (MyMemory.com) for peanuts. Cheap peanuts at that.
Back when I got the 1GB pen drive, I started running lots of Portable Apps on it: portable versions of Thunderbird; Firefox; Sunbird; Toucan; Abiword; Gaim (now Pidgin); Foxit and many more. Then I started to worry about what would happen if it fell into the wrong hands - all my email, my calendar, IM contacts and personal documents would be there for anyone to see. So I decided that I needed to encrypt as much of this personal / application data as possible
After a fairly thorough search, I found two freeware / open source applications that appeared to fit the bill (there were a load of slower, more cumbersome ones):
- Dekart Private Disk (only Lite is free)
- TrueCrypt
Both applications allow create a virtual drive of a predetermined size from a single file. To activate the private disk, you simply start the program, point it at the encrypted file and open it - the file appears as a virtual drive with a pre-assigned (fixed) drive letter, e.g. O:\.

Back when I was testing this out originally (sometime back last August/September), I found Dekart to be better. It could be stored and run from the USB pen drive itself, and ran very smoothly. I found TrueCrypt performed not quite so well.
However, recently, I moved all my portable apps into the virtual drive and found performance to be terrible - Thunderbird was so slow opening up and working with email proved to be unbearable. With a new version of TrueCrypt now available, I find myself curious as to whether or not it has improved and perhaps overtaken Dekart Private Disk.
For now, my email and other data from portable apps remains unencrypted, and I have to remember to disconnect my pen drive every time I leave my desk :(
I hope that TrueCrypt, or a future offering from Dekart will change things.
1 comments:
Update:
TrueCrypt is waaaay better than it used to be.
I've been testing t for the last few days and I'd say it's left Dekart Private Disk Light 1.22 way behind.
Dekart Private Disk (full version) still sves you a couple of clicks, but you have to pay for it...
TrueCrypt is the best sort of open source software.
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