Re: File encryption in Win XP Professional

"billtc" <billtc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:799BAD64-883D-4DA8-BE0D-AE0642845EA4@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I have an external hard drive connected to my desktop PC running Win XP
Professional, and am concerned about protecting the data on it should it ever
be lost or stolen, and I have the following questions:

You could use TrueCrypt to encrypt a partition or create a container which mounts as a drive. Unlike EFS, you don't need to export a certificate. You do need to remember the password so obviously you need to use a strong password if you want strong protection.

Would encryption of the folders on the external drive prevent them from
being read on another PC? Secondly, if that's a reasonable solution, what
would happen if the system hard drive on my desktop failed and had to be
replaced? In other words, is the encryption key (or whatever) stored on my
system hard drive, and would its loss prevent me from recovering the
encrypted data on my external drive?

Start doing backups. If you use TrueCrypt to create containers, those files get included in your backups. If you encrypt an entire partition, you should password-protect your backups (since the backups will be reading from the partition and storing the files (unencrypted) in the backup file unless you tell the backup program to encrypt the backup file, too.

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