Mobile Warrior - Part 1, Disk Encryption

As a mobile warrior, doing active work on our laptop is part of the daily event. The laptop is the closest device to us next to the mobile phone.

We keep almost anything in it, personal and work matter. It is not a common news that important data are lost and there are no proper means of protecting it.

Is the company to blame or should we as the data custodian responsible? While these questions can open up a whole new can of worms for discussion. We can take some simple measures into our own hand to ensure something can be done or at least things are safe during your watch.

Thanks to the new power of Open Source, most of the applications are free and with qualities equal if not better than the paid version. In addition, some are just simple behavior changes and prospective that can be considered that are again: Free.

To start off let consider disk encryption. The simple thing to do is to hide the data from easy access. This can be done by simply use any encryption software that create single or multi-folders that look like partitioned disk which you can mount and dismount accordingly.

A good example of such disk encryption software (Open Source) : http://www.truecrypt.org/
After playing with it, you might get addicted to have everything encrypted down to the last thumb-drive but remember to back up the key files as well as the good strong password that you had created.

If not, you will be having more problems trying to recover it. Have fun.