Losing your HD with important information on it

[crazycat]

Hello all, my name is Crazycat and i am a backup freak. I backup every 2-3 days, i backup my windows PC, Mac Desktop and Mac laptop. The problem i have is that i carry my laptop HD with me when i travel, i can easily misplace it or lose it. What is the best way to protect my data so that even if my HD got lost i can be assured that no one will get there hands on the information it contains?

 

[wrldwzrd89]

Mac OS X's built-in FileVault mechanism is designed to address exactly this need. It can be enabled in System Preferences -> Security.

 

[iMeowbot]

(You can make encrypted disk images with Disk Utility to store things as a second level of protection.)

 

[crazycat]

Thanks i just got it working.

 

[crazycat]

Is there any way to encrypt my external hard drive only? so that if someone took it and want to take the data he would not be able to.

 

[sfisher]

Is there any way to encrypt my external hard drive only? so that if someone took it and want to take the data he would not be able to.

As iMeowBot mentioned, create an encrypted disk image with a password on the external hard drive. Then drag all of your files into it to back it up. This would only work from Mac OS X - how do you back up your other machines? Doing it over a network from the other computers onto the OS X machine would allow this to work for all files. This wouldn't work if you have separate partitions for the PC and you plug it into that machine directly to back it up. There are alternatives for disk encryption available in Windows.