Encryption : My Journey With TrueCrypt

Like every other human being there are definitely going to be some files you would like to protect from prying eyes or the general access without you giving the permission for it to be accessed. This was the case with my Western Digital "WD" 500gb External hard drive.

This hard drive of mine was full to the brim and contained lots of games and software. It was more than just a backup of my system as it had files and scripts i could not keep on the system as it was also  full... I have just 250gb hard drive on my HP Compaq Presario Cq56 laptop....

To cut the long story short... I had decided to encrypt the 500gb external hard drive using Truecrypt just to protect my important files.

Using TrueCrypt, you are presented with different methods or kinds of encryption.. your choice to make... you could choose to just select a chunk of the drive and encrypt. Doing this you can now copy your important files into the encrypted chunk or you could just encrypt the whole drive and require a password before any file can be accessed on it.

I downloaded the TrueCrypt encryption software from their website www.truecrypt.org and started the full encryption of my 500gb hard drive...

5 hours into encryption and i was already frustrated... The damn thing was just in 7%... i began having a change of mind, but i couldnt stop anymore, not when i had started... about 20 hours later, the encryption was done... And i felt relieved...

Anytime i insert the hard drive into a system it pops up a dialog that the drive is not formatted and asks you to format.. To access the files in the drive, you just close that dialog, run your truecrypt and unlock the drive. Remembering to always lock unmount it before ejecting.

I started using the encrypted hard drive with my other flash drive as the key to the hard drive. Things were going smoothly for a while until a friend who knew nothing about the encrypted drive picked it up and tried to connect it to his system. The format dialog box appeared as usual and he clicked format.... At this moment i walked in but it was already too late..

The filesystem was damaged.

And that spelt the end of my hard drive... i started searching for solutions online to repair the file system and also try to at least recover some of my files..

I went as far as trying testdisk all to no avail....

After a while and series of experiments, my hard drive was no longer detected by my system and that was the end... Thank you truecrypt...

Moral of the story, be careful when enjoying yourself and most importantly... DONT ENCRYPT BLINDLY!!! just like i did....