Are you concerned that others may get hold of your sensitive data, or do you have a need to hide certain files so that nobody except you and the people you want can have access to them? These days protecting yourselves against computer crime such as data theft is undeniably something that everybody needs to keep in mind. And certain data, files or drives are so personal to you that they can be devastating in the hands of the wrong people. This is where TrueCrypt comes in handy.
TrueCrypt is an encryption utility that uses AES, Serpent and Twofish algorithms, or a combination of those, to encrypt your data. It creates a virtual disk for you where you can save all your work, and this "disk" is continuously encrypted. You can chose to encrypt a file, a partition on your hard drive, or the entire hard drive. Using a file as a TrueCrypt encrypted disk is the easiest, and will be what most people use. To do this, you create a file using TrueCrypt, and give this the size you'll need to save all your sensitive data. Then you use TrueCrypt to mount this file as a disk. It will show up as a disk by itself, just as if you had plugged in a USB-drive. Now you can save or load to this disk, just as with any other disk. When your work is done, you dismount it using TrueCrypt, and it is completely unreadable to anyone. The file may be copied or sent just like any other file, but it will seem like just random data to anyone trying to access it.
When you install TrueCrypt, you can choose to have it installed on your system, or just unpack the files and use it as a Portable Version. The biggest difference is that since TrueCrypt requires Admin-privelegies, you will need to allow this every time you run it if you are using it in portable way. If you install it, you will only need to do this once when you install.
| Producer | TrueCrypt Foundation | Alternatives | |
| Size | 3 461 728 bytes | ||
| Homepage | www.truecrypt.org | ||
| Forum | Forum | ||
| Relevant sites | Documentation | ||
| Open source | Yes | ||
| Specal requirements | None | ||
| Requirements | |||