Is it possible to password encrypt some folders on my external hard drive?

Question

Unfortunately my laptop hard drive gave up at the weekend so I took it in to get fixed. They are replacing it, but will try and recover any data from the old hard drive if at all possible, but they need an external hard drive from myself to move any rescued files on to.

The problem is I have an external hard drive, but it's a family one that has backups of the family desktop PC. I have no other software medium large enough to temporarily move these obviously private backups on to while I leave the hard drive to the repair people. I was wondering if there is any way to put any backups into a folder and encrypt and/or password that folder, whilst leaving the remaining memory on the external hard drive available to move any rescued files on to.

I don't know if it matters but I run Windows 7 (on both my desktop and laptop) and the external hard drive is a 500GB Phillips.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

You're making this more difficult than it needs to be. You ought to go out and buy a hard drive. It doesn't even have to be external, any shop can hook up any drive to any computer with a cheap adaptor any shop should have, and then hand that to the repair people. Don't you backup your hard drive regularly? I have years of photos and novels on my hard drive I couldn't bear to lose so I back up my entire 1TB hard drive to an encrypted external 1TB drive every month, which I keep in a waterproof fireproof safe!



You can get this WD Elements 1TB External HD for $90: http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Elements-External-WDBAAU0010HBK-NESN/dp/B002QEBMB4/



As for encryption TrueCrypt is the standard Free Open-Source Disk Encryption Software, unbreakable even by the government, and it's free. With TrueCrypt you can create a file of any size on your hard drive, call it whatever you want, put it wherever you want, hidden or out in the open, open it and drag and drop any files you want to encrypt into it, unmount it and it's encrypted, mount it and open it again and the files can be read "on the fly" meaning there's no lag. You can even encrypt your entire hard drive including the operating system, which you should do on your laptop.



TrueCrypt

http://www.truecrypt.org/downloads.php

Answer 2

The case you search for suggestion from with is an american one, contained in the country you're literally not allowed to furnish information if the end results of the information incriminates you so that you dont might want to furnish out your password even to a courtroom.yet usually the courtroom will punish you for not giving it out, As for notebook safe practices, on residing house windows the password is only a ingredient to sluggish you down, or on company networks to provide up you from getting access to the community, a residing house windows password doesnt preserve a lot of a few thing, in case you boot a similar computer from a linux stay CD each and every thing is accessable and may want to be study with out limit. the in elementary words thanks to preserve achronic is to encrypt it, definite it takes time initially yet once its executed its executed, ifyou use truecrypt you in elementary words loose about 2% overall performance yet its preserve.

Answer 3

Buy another external hard drive! Even if you could protect individual folders (you kind of can using permissions, but it can be overridden), there's a high chance they will reformat the external drive before copying the files.

Answer 4

Use TrueCrypt its simple and effective

http://www.truecrypt.org