Stammy Says Whole Disk Encryption Doesn’t Have To Be Painful
This post was published 1 year 5 months 1 day ago which may make its actuality or expire date not be valid anymore. This site is not responsible for any misunderstanding.This one is a shout out to the tin foil types who, like me, think all their data is insecure or is worried about losing a device that contains personal data.
To secure this information the holy grail is whole disk encryption or WDE. PGP recently released a VERY Mac friendly product (They have had a PC one for ages) that makes sure your data stays yours.
A good blogging buddy of mine, Paul Stamatiou, took a look at PGP’s WDE for Mac and has concluded that having great security doesn’t have to be hard and kill all the resources of your computer.
Setting up PGP WDE had quite a few steps but was a pretty smooth process overall. After installing the actual PGP Desktop application, I was led through creating and publishing a PGP key. When that was done, it was time to embark on the task of actually encrypting my hard drive.
PGP Whole Disk provides the next level of security and convenience by encrypting your entire disk. The encryption process can be lengthy, however PGP desktop runs in the background. You may also pause and resume the process at your convenience.
All I had to do was select my hard drive, provide a passphrase and it began encrypting my hard drive. As the snippet above explained, PGP WDE encrypts in the background, unlike Apple’s FileVault which locks you out for hours while it encrypts. The entire encryption process took about 2.5 hours on my 1.6GHz MacBook Air, which had 55GB of data in use. [...]
The first question I get asked when people find out that my hard drive is encrypted is how the performance of my computer is affected with the constant encryption/decryption process going on in the background. I’m pleased to report that I have not experienced any negative, discernible performance issues. It feels exactly the same as before I installed PGP WDE.
Check out his site for the whole write up which I feel is written so that the average security paranoid person can understand why or why not they need this protection. Very well done!
Great read Dan, like you, I’m a very paranoid person about things like this.
He should come out with a iphone version for the app store. Not sure if that would fly with apple’s rules or not, if it would have to run in the background!
Going to give it a try today, thanks again!
WTF, $119 is he crazy. Thanks but no thanks I’ll stick to my encrypted disk images on Leopard!
P.S. He should offer a free trial so I can {k} it, LOL:)
Thanks for the linkage Dan. I had heard PGP was working on WDE for quite a while and when it finally came out I decided to give it a try. After having close friends have their laptops stolen and worry about having their identity stolen from all the personal information and saved emails on their computer, I had no problem spending the $120.
@ DOC – there is a cheaper $83 version for a 1 year license, as opposed to the $120’s perpetual license. Also by the way, there is a 30-day trial with PGP WDE. If you’re a security nut, I highly recommend giving it a shot.