Secure That FlashDrive!

As the price of a FlashDrive (or thumbdrive, or flashdisk) continue to spiral downwards, more and more people are using this fabulous piece of technology to store backups of their important documents (both personal and business). Others use it to shuttle data from one computer to another since most modern PCs (and Macs) nowadays have at least two free USB ports.

But as more people utilize the flashdrive as a means of carrying copies of their data with them, the risk of losing data gets bigger. Losing data altogether may not be such a big deal but what a lot of people are afraid of is letting those data get into the wrong hands. There are flashdrives out there that have built-in security features but they add to the cost of the flashdrive itself and most of them are "branded" drives making them even more expensive.

Luckily, there's this nifty little free and open source program called TrueCrypt. TrueCrypt is a program that creates either an encrypted drive -- allowing users to encrypt the whole flashdrive, or to create an encrypted partition within a drive (called traveller mode). When used in traveller mode, TrueCrypt will automatically run each time it is inserted into a PC and once it is running, the encrypted partition can then be mounted.

The encrypted partition is or course protected by a password and should that all important flash drive indeed falls into the "wrong hands", they will have to enter a password in order for them to read the contents of the encrypted partition.

technorati tags: security