I’m packing the computer room up today which means I need to consider how the hell I’m going to get all my data safely across the atlantic. Safe as in it will reach the other side and that no-one will read my data if one of the disks goes astray. I don’t need someone running riot on identity theft or some heavy handed security gorilla going through personal files and photos.

I’ve two 160GB IDE drives, one will hold Windows in an 8GB partition, the rest of the disk will be encrypted, the other disk will be completly encrypted. I’m going to use Truecrypt to secure my data then copy backups across both disks; mirroring each other.

I also have two external USB2 hard disks, a 260GB and a 300GB, both of these are formatted in JFS+ for OS X. I think I’ll take those two through as hand luggage, each disk mirroring the other. Those can’t be encrypted in the same manner as Truecrypt isn’t available for OS X as yet.

One solution is to create a DMG on each partition and encrypt that, a free solution which is pretty straight forward, you can read Apple’s guide on how to do that here. I’ve got a long day ahead of me, shuffling data around five different hard disks and encrypting four of those. My PowerBook’s internal hard disk will remain unencrypted, except for the 128bit AES encrypted Filevault which is a built in OS X feature. It’s going to be a long day waiting for those small blue bars to fill up.

It took about 3 hours to encrypt those 160GB disks, about 30 mins for Filevault and I’ve yet to tackle the external disks. If you want an external USB hard disk you really can’t go wrong with Western Digital.

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