Does anyone know of a free program that I can use to encrypt huge files on a external hd without having to install onto a host machine (my computer)? File sizes range from 50 mb - 4 gb
Encryption - what a subject. If it is an external hard drive, the first question has to be are you planning to use it on other PCs? if not use EFS which is part of the OS from Win2K onwards. It is not the safest product, as law enforcement agencies can break it in 2 minutes. But it is good enough to stop most people. If a third party product, how can it encrypt if you don't load the software encryption/decryption engine? What type of encryption are you looking for? Vault, Folder or Whole Disk? What algorythm 3 DES is fast and works on a bite basis, and AES is good as well. You need to research your subject because encryption scrambles your data - so how do you perform a recovery? Free in my opinion is dangerous. The reason - if you use a free piece of software it works or doesn't. No big deal. If you encrypt then it doesn't work - well .... what happens next - you have no data.
sorry the late reply... A free encryption software isn't as secure as a share ware version? I was looking for something to encrypt big files on the drive...
Free, Shareware, Paid for, - all of them could be secure - thats not the point I was trying to make. You need to consider Data Recovery issues in the event of a lost password or a key being corrupted. Read this on EFS: http://www.msdn.microsoft.com/libra...ecure/html/WinNETSrvr-EncryptedFileSystem.asp
