File encryption in Win XP Professional

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Guest

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:

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?

Thanks much for any help/suggestions!
 
billtc said:
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:

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?

Thanks much for any help/suggestions!
Click to expand...

Yes and yes - unless you researched and read up and followed proper
procedure for the use of EFS.

Best practices for the Encrypting File System
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/223316
 
billtc said:
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:
Click to expand...

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?
Click to expand...

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.
 
Thanks for the link to the article. I thought there had to be more to the
process than just going through the steps of encrypting, but I obviously
didn't look in the right places to find out what I needed. Thanks again.
 
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