Here’s something that makes me shudder – when I hear someone complain that they lost their USB memory ‘keychain’ drive, and then to hear them say “yeah, now I’m out $30 to buy a new one”. It’s not the money, silly, it’s the data. How many documents with private information are on that drive, open for reading by whoever finds it? Backups of your email contact list? Last month’s archive of your company’s customer or prospect data? That handy word processing file that has all those file and web passwords that you can never remember? Yikes!
The best investment you can make is free – the open source encryption program TrueCrypt http://www.truecrypt.org/ . It is cross platform Win/Mac/Linux so you can encrypt and password protect a folder (up to 8 GB on OSX or NTFS drives, or 3.9 GB on a FAT32 volume like a USB stick) and then unlock and read it on another machine. The only stipulation is that you have TrueCrypt software installed on whatever machine you are reading it on.
There are some hard drives and USB keychain drives that include AES encryption, but they are mostly dependent on Windows software and are not cross-platform.
Please, make backups of your data, certainly. But protect any sensitive data that is on any kind of portable storage with a program like TrueCrypt.
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