Ok, I just stumbled across an article about Truecrypt and thought it couldn’t encrypt full hard drives , went to their website and then read that it can. Thats is all good but its a windows software which doesn’t do me any good really. But I read some comments on that article regarding FileVault on Mac OS X and I would like to clarify a few things.
YES it encrypts quite securely your home folder. It is also very transparent and does not take much CPU power. You wont notice it at least. However there is no quick way of creating volumes like Truecrypt does with FileVault. Volumes meaning they are encrypted files (heavily) that you can mount (attach to a drive letter like e:) or unmount as needed and in their unmounted state they are perfectly safe and portable since you are copying one file, However once they are mounted they are like hard drives so you can copy data to them and from them once they are mounted. This is very cool to transfer data on a USB stick for example. Only problem arises when you move data in an encrypted volume from a PC to a Mac… Don’t because the Mac wont be able to read the volume.

Now from Windows to Windows that is a neat feature, a feature that the Mac does not have.. does it?

Of course it does and it is actually quite simple and does not require any additional installations It comes built into the system!. Here is a 10 step guide on how to:

Step 1: find the Disk Utility program. It is located in your APLICATIONS FOLDER and then under UTILITIES:

Step 2: Double click the application to launch it. You will be presented with a window that has a lot of stuff and all your mounted disks are shown on the left side, like in Finder. We are however only interested in the Menubar. There is an icon called NEW IMAGE, click on it:

Step 3: You will be presented with a small window with several fields. All the fields are pretty self explanatory but we will go through this anyway just so that you know what each option does. In the top field, you need to enter the name that you want to give the file, in our case ?encrypted-disk?. You might want to choose something less obvious but it is up to you. Anything goes. At the WHERE field you can choose where the file will be saved. In our case we leave it on the desktop but you can save it anywhere really:

Step 4:  Click on the Size and you will get a lot of options. You will notice you have predefined the sizes of CDR and DVDR as well as DVDR-DL media. This ie meant so that you can create images that will fit on a CD or DVD and fill the data then into it.That way you can burn it to CD or DVD and you know it will fit. You can also create images that you can manipulate and even make bootable but that is for another post. In our case we choose CUSTOM and you will see how flexible the sizes are that you can put there, you are not limited by the sizes you have predefined.

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