Encrypted file systems: do whole volume, plus are old files wiped?

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Date: 20 Mar 2004 10:57:00 -0800

I recently installed WinXP Pro on my new home machine, and one of the
most exciting features to me is that you can encrypt files to protect
them in case your hard drive gets stolen.

But reading thru the documentation, it seems as if MS has set up
encryption on a folder/file basis, but what I need is to enforce
ewncryption on a volume basis. That is, I want to make sure that
everything that is ever put on one of my disk partitions, say D:, is
ALWAYS encrypted.

Does anyone know how I can do that?

Yes, I know that I can simply select all the existing contents and
encrypt them, but the problem is that whenever I create a new folder
or file on the volume which lives right below the root level (e.g. if
I create the file d:\someFile.txt), it is by default NOT encrypted.
Thus, to keep the volume encrypted, I have to remember to manually
encrypt it which is a bit of a pain and can easily lead to oversight.

This brings up a related issue: file wiping. It is critical if your
files are not encrypted that you completely wipe your hard drive
before, say, you donate your computer. Merely erasing them does not
suffice, since someone can simply use the right tools to read the old
data which is physically still on the drive and reconstruct the files;
see for instance
        http://www.stack.nl/~galactus/remailers/index-wipe.html
        http://www.stack.nl/~galactus/remailers/why-real-delete.html

Does anyone know how intelligent XP is regarding file wiping and
encrypted file systems? In particular, if a new unencrypted file is
placed on a volume and subsequently encrypted, is the old unencrypted
version automatically thoroughly wiped out at the end of the
encryption process, or does XP take a shortcut and merely delete its
file table entry, leaving the old unencrypted data still on the disk?

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