Password protecting external hard drives

[jerry thirsty]

Hi folks,

 

I just got a Western Digital 80 gig external hard drive to use for

data backup. I plan to copy everything over to it every so often and

then keep it at work (so if my house burns down I haven't lost

everything). Can anyone recommend software that I could use to

password-protect this drive? Or, alternatively, would encrypting the

entire contents of the drive be feasible, or would it consume huge

amounts of processor time? I have looked on-line and see most of the

little cigar-shaped USB flash disks have built-in password protection

and can't help but wonder why the same feature isn't offered for

external drives. Obviously it's much easier to lose a flash drive,

but a hard drive would be a juicier target for theft.

 

thanks,

[ricardojmendez]

The safest way would be to create a PGP disk (www.pgp.com or www.pgpi.com) on this external drive, which is basically a huge file that you can then mount as a separate disk and access it transparently.

 

If you really want to be paranoid, keep your private PGP keyrings not on the machine but on a floppy or zip disk.

[bobatkins]

DriveCrypt.

[steven_clark]

I think Windows 2000 and XP Pro have support for encrypted file systems built in.

[majid]

Encryption would slow down your backup times considerably. Wiebetech makees an

enclosure with hardware encryption, but you have already bought a drive. Windows

2000 and presumably XP have encryption capabilities built into NTFS (EFS), but you

have to be careful to back up your keys if you want to be able to recover your data.

[oskar_ojala]

Password protection without encryption would be useless; to protect your data you must encrypt. The Windows NTFS file system offers built-in encryption and I believe ReiserFS offers encryption too (if you're into unix/linux).

 

Encryption will slow things down, how much I'm not sure.

[jwink3101]

Winzip can do encryption

[jerry thirsty]

Thanks to everyone who responded. This afternoon I started messing around with various encryption schemes and demos and it looks kind of harsh; using the Windows EFS takes 90 minutes to encrypt 6 GB of data. I tried the demo of a product called Safehouse and that takes about 12 minutes for 700 MB (and the demo only uses a 40 or 50 bit key; presumably a 128 bit key would take even longer). I haven't tried DriveCrypt or PGP yet, although my understanding is that, while PGP is very good and open source code to boot, it works better for small files such as e-mail, but not so fast as other encryption schemes for large volumes of data. I will keep trying.

[oskar_ojala]

<i>(and the demo only uses a 40 or 50 bit key; presumably a 128 bit key would take even longer)</i>

 

<p>A 128-bit key really takes much longer. Symmetrical crypting schemes are faster than asymmetrical (public key) schemes, but with symmetrical schemes you might have problems with where to safely store the key - a problem much more easily solved with asymmetrical schemes.

 

<p>In general, an asymmetrical scheme such as RSA should have a absolute minimum key length of 128 bits, preferably 256 bits. With symmetrical schemes you get away with less.

[jack_leo]

Please try the software http://www.storagecrypt.com