Computer advice

[aldorax]

The other day my external USB hard drive crashed hard. Physically collapsed, which is to be expected after 5 years or so.

Since I had stuff on it ranging from my old doctoral research archives to music/movie backups and more (including my pr0n collection) I decided to send the drive out to a recovery service. Long story short, I got 100% recovery ... for a price.

But more importantly: I am very happy that my geek tendencies paid off. I've always dreaded someone finding my stash of fetish/pr0n stuff that's been collected over the years.

As such, I store all my pr0n in a giant Disk Image (OSX) file that was encrypted. When in the mood, i just doubleclick the image, type in the password, and the image is mounted like any other hard drive on my computer. When I'm done, drag the image to the Trash and it unmounts and re-encrypts itself.

So why bring this up?

When I sent the drive out for repair, I could rest easy knowing all the techs could see/recover as they tried to save my hard drive was this BigHonkingFile and have no idea what was inside it. Same if a girlfriend/wife/friend comes over and they peruse your computer ... they won't find anything.

Bottom line, this practice saved me a ton of worry, wonder, embarrassment and was *exactly* why I did what I did to begin with. Of course, I'm more happy that the *entire* drive got recovered!!

Just something to think about since I'm happy to report my planning paid off in this case! :)

[Snot]

Nice!

I save my stuff as disk images as well but never thought of encrypting it.

[les]

T r u e C r y p t
Free open-source disk encryption software for Windows 7/Vista/XP, Mac OS X, and Linux is very good as well as free.
For really important data have a second backup stored on different media and separate location.
Then if you have a failure it is a lot cheaper to recover.
I have heard of a wireless hard drive bolted to a joist in the loft.

[gizmo686]

If your a computer geek, or just hang out with them, I would be careful with how much faith you put in these security measures. I had a friend use truecrypt on his computer and I was able to get to the data (using the method described here: http://citp.princeton.edu/pub/coldboot.pdf) Granted that is probably more than most people have to worry about.

[aldorax]

If your a computer geek, or just hang out with them, I would be careful with how much faith you put in these security measures. I had a friend use truecrypt on his computer and I was able to get to the data (using the method described here: http://citp.princeton.edu/pub/coldboot.pdf) Granted that is probably more than most people have to worry about.

*laughs*

Yeah, really. Anyone THAT desperate to get at my pr0n stash needs to get a life themselves!