Ian
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- Joined
- Feb 23, 2002
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I've learnt many lessons when dealing with computers, but the most important one has been to have verified backups of important data... It's hard to realise how important this is until you actually need it.
Most of my backups are on an external drive and some are on DVDs. However, that doesn't solve the problem if something like water or fire damage destroyed the physical copies. Very unlikely, but possible!
So I went and bought myself a 32GB Corsair Survivor USB drive that comes in a reasonably strong, watertight casing. Essentially it's a mid-range ruggedised USB drive. That's plenty of storage space for most of my important data
I was a little concerned about security, as loosing a USB drive would be an easy thing to do so I've used an application called TrueCrypt (http://www.truecrypt.org/) to encrypt folders on the drive using a pretty strong method (you'd have to be extremely determined and have considerable cracking power to break it!).
If anyone else wants a secure way to store data, I think this is a pretty good solution for the price. The 32GB drive was £55 from Amazon and the software is free! There are more secure drives with hardware encryption and better ruggedised cases but they cost much more than this, so it's a good compromise for general personal data.
Most of my backups are on an external drive and some are on DVDs. However, that doesn't solve the problem if something like water or fire damage destroyed the physical copies. Very unlikely, but possible!
So I went and bought myself a 32GB Corsair Survivor USB drive that comes in a reasonably strong, watertight casing. Essentially it's a mid-range ruggedised USB drive. That's plenty of storage space for most of my important data
I was a little concerned about security, as loosing a USB drive would be an easy thing to do so I've used an application called TrueCrypt (http://www.truecrypt.org/) to encrypt folders on the drive using a pretty strong method (you'd have to be extremely determined and have considerable cracking power to break it!).
If anyone else wants a secure way to store data, I think this is a pretty good solution for the price. The 32GB drive was £55 from Amazon and the software is free! There are more secure drives with hardware encryption and better ruggedised cases but they cost much more than this, so it's a good compromise for general personal data.
