I'm going to be doing a lot of traveling in 2006 and I want to bring my business with me; this means having to store passwords and other sensitive information on my laptop. I need some way of securing this data. I want to just boot up Windows, then mount a password-protected virtual drive that contains the secure information. If my laptop is ever lost or stolen I want to be able to sleep soundly knowning that no one will break into the secure drive (at least not during my lifetime).

Does anyone have any suggestions on the best software to use? I'm looking at TrueCrypt. Anybody have any experience or feedback on this program?

I've looked at a couple of commercial packages but they seem really bloated and have questionable reviews. Reliability is very important to me; I don't need this thing to crash Windows or corrupt my hard drive.

If anyone has suggestions please let me know.

I've used TrueCrypt a bit on borrowed hardware, and had no problems whatsoever with it. It was exactly what I expected, and did everything it was supposed to. Basically, I didn't have to think about it.

I'd also be much more inclined to trust OSS in the realm of security. It's pretty easy to really screw up the implementation of a cipher or key selection algorithm, and with a proprietary solution, there's no way you'll ever know if the software you're using is weak.

As always though, chances are the system will only be as secure as your passphrase -- if you care about the security of your data beyond deterring casual theives, use a good one (read the documentation for what 'good' means in this context).

I would recommend going with PGP which has PGP disk in its software package. This is exactly what your looking for and you can use it to sign/encrypt your emails as well. I have used this on both personal computers and gov/military computers and its been quite stable and effective. Actually if you even wanted to go the extra step you could have pgp store your private key used to decrypt your hard drive on a smart card which you can keep in your wallet or a keychain dongle of some sort.

There's one other piece of software you should be very wary of using if you're going to store encrypted data on disk ;) Keep in mind that Windows is virus prone and a trojan or key logger would be just as damaging, if not MORE, than someone stealing your disk and maybe knowing what to do with it.

I'm not saying that you shouldn't encrypt -- you definitely should do that, but you may want to go even further. Maybe you can look online for a Linux/FreeBSD LiveCD with disk-encryption capabilities (and you can specifically stop any daemons that are available on public IPs). If you can find a LiveCD that works with your laptop, you can reboot in to that when you're going to do work and maybe mount an encrypted partition with work data or even use a thumb drive for that.

I understand that it's asking a lot for a LiveCD to work on a laptop, and it may be even more difficult to find a LiveCD that supports FS encryption without some work. Last, depending on what software you require, all of this may not be feasable.

At the very least, you should consider disconnecting yourself from any networks when the encrypted data is mounted/available or at least making sure your virus scanning software is up to date.

http://www.safeboot.com/

Although its already been mentioned, truecrypt does the job and is very easy to use. I reccomend it.

If you've got the money and want to spend it then PGP Disk is a valid option. But truecrypt is just as good and for free.

NTFS itself offers an encryption option, so you don't neccessarily need any extra software. As far as PGP goes, I've used it at work and I am not exactly happy with it. At any rate, if you want a really secure notebook, you should use something else than Windows. If you like tinkering, just use your existing notebook and install something like OpenBSD on it and use the best available open source tools to lock it down real hard. Or if you want a secure solution that works out of the box, go and buy an Apple iBook or Powerbook, Mac OS X has a lot of security built in and the rest can be enabled with a couple of clicks, like FileVault which is similar to PGP Disk Encryption but I find it a much better solution.

If you are willing to use Apple OS X, it has encryption available per user. It's accessible via the System Preferences panel.

Yep, that is FileVault. :)

I use the free version of cryptainer http://www.cypherix.com/cryptainerle/

BestCrypt (http://www.jetico.com/download.htm) is what I use.
Reasons:
- Strong encryption, secure remove
- Linux compatability

After some reading and evaluation I've decided to go with TrueCrypt. So far it's working out superbly. It has the exact features I wanted and it's a no-brainer to setup and use.

Thanks for the suggestions.