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encrypted external enclosures

W

Wang191

[H]ard|Gawd
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I'm looking for any reccomendations on encrypted hard drive enclosures or prebuilt external hard drives. I prefer ones with passwords instead of biometrics but I won't limit my search yet.

Hopefully some of you have had some experience with them.
thanks
 
depending on what O S you are running, there are methods to encrypt any external HDD. I believe that windows has and encrypted FS built in (I am certain that it supports encrypted folders). Otherwise, there's PGPdisk, which should also work for linux if there isn't a kernel level implementation.

Let me ask you what exactly you expect from a retail "ecrypted HDD"?
 
I backup my laptop to two external drives (i alternate them every week) using windows backup. I plan on switching to retrospect within the next two weeks. I want something so that if somone steals my external they cant plug it in and use it. I also expect that if they take the drive out of the external case that they can't pop it in the comptuer and read the files off the drive.

From what i have seen most externals like this only offer 40 bit encryption. I'm looking into software such as Safeboot for usb devices to compliment this build in encryption. The more protection the better, in my opinion.

The reason i wanted to stay away from biometrics was that for some reason if my family needs to get at the information I may not be able to be at the drive to unlock it with a thumb print. So I wanted password protection instead. At least that way I can put the code somewhere safe, just incase.

I don't want to use windows encryption because if I need to reformat or something, i would need to back up the encryption key, and i dont want that key laying around on a disk that could get ruined. And I just don't like the fact that if i am logged in windows all my encrypted stuff is viewable. I want it shut until i explicitly want it open.

I also have my laptop harddrive encrypted with safe boot just incase it gets stolen. at least then I can take the backups from the drive and my ghost image of the laptop and have my system back. The way i have it setup is that OS is on one partition and all data is on another. so when i reinstall the ghost image all my documents and pointers are already in the right spot.

(i like to have my data secure.)

That's pretty much my situation and reasoning for asking about it.
 
I would say that almost regardless of what you end up using, there will be some key that is needed to decrypt the content. The key itself is either generated through your password or is in itself encrypted with your password...

As my previous post had mentioned, PGPdisk is supposedly able to encrypt a disk.
Either you get something like the pro version which will -apparently- encrypt even the partitioning table, or just the regular home version of PGP which only supports volume encryption. The latter means that people will be able to tell: "There are files on here", but cannot read them.

Since PGP isn't built into windows, the key it creates is separate from your user login and requires a separate password to be unlocked, so your files are not readable until you enter that. This also means that it is rather easy to export the key to a CD R for safekeeping in the bank...

I am sure that RSA has a similar product, I am just not familiar with their lineup at all...
 
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