Solo Technology

TrueCrypt is a big part of keeping my work laptop secure. Dunno about you, but I live in mortal fear of losing a mobile machine that also happens to be my primary work computer! I have created a handful of encrypted volumes on it for some of our more “proprietary” documents and have other volumes to keep client specific information nicely locked away. The hope is that if I were to lose the laptop, we wouldn’t lose the keys to the kingdom (and rest assured, I’m still darned picky about what I carry around on it).

I last wrote about TrueCrypt in mid-March. I’m pleased to say that this is one of those products that I downloaded just to see what all the fuss was about and immediately found uses for it. I also love the fact that something this solid is also free and open source.

And with all that having been said (man, what a leadup!) I’m happy to see updates were released today. Nothing necessarily earth-shattering to me, but I can see where the linux crowd has to be happy. I do like the sounds of this one though:

Ability to create a ‘dynamic’ container whose physical size (actual disk space used) grows as new data is added to it. (Dynamic containers are pre-allocated NTFS sparse files).

If that works the way I think it will, it’ll save me a few GB of disk space!

[Update!] Beware the dynamic container. In fact, when trying to create one, you’ll get a popup message that you definitely want to pay attention to:

Click that to see the full dialog. Food for thought, eh? I’m thinking that the dynamic container would be much more interesting to me if I was actually very low on space. But I’m not. So … after reading that, I think I’ll stick with my current containers. Any readers have thoughts on that they’d like to share?

One Response to “TrueCrypt updates”

1. James on May 3rd, 2006 1:18 pm
   

   Would love to see you expand on Truecrypt in an upcoming blog entry. I too have discussed this. Curious what your thinking is in choosing file/container level encyrption over full disk encryption…

Leave a Reply