[Ian]

I've learnt many lessons when dealing with computers, but the most important one has been to have verified backups of important data... It's hard to realise how important this is until you actually need it.

Most of my backups are on an external drive and some are on DVDs. However, that doesn't solve the problem if something like water or fire damage destroyed the physical copies. Very unlikely, but possible!

So I went and bought myself a 32GB Corsair Survivor USB drive that comes in a reasonably strong, watertight casing. Essentially it's a mid-range ruggedised USB drive. That's plenty of storage space for most of my important data

I was a little concerned about security, as loosing a USB drive would be an easy thing to do so I've used an application called TrueCrypt (http://www.truecrypt.org/) to encrypt folders on the drive using a pretty strong method (you'd have to be extremely determined and have considerable cracking power to break it!).

If anyone else wants a secure way to store data, I think this is a pretty good solution for the price. The 32GB drive was £55 from Amazon and the software is free! There are more secure drives with hardware encryption and better ruggedised cases but they cost much more than this, so it's a good compromise for general personal data.

[V_R]

Interesting, will have to look into this.

[Me__2001]

I have the 16GB version of the survivor, had it for what seems like forever and its still in pretty good nick considering its been on keys since i got it.

I did use the truecrypt software for a bit when i first got it but i never really got on with it so i got rid of it. Might have another play with it considering i have some fairly important work on there

One thing i never looked into was what happens when you plug it into a machine that hasn't got the software installed?

[Ian]

Originally Posted by Me__2001

One thing i never looked into was what happens when you plug it into a machine that hasn't got the software installed?

If that happens you need to install the software on it. It's a pain, but if you copy the setup exe's to the drive it's not so bad. Real hardware based encryption is much more expensive, so it's a cheaper alternative