[Macpartners] disk encryption

[David Schloerb]

Hi All,

I am looking for an easy way to protect some of the data on my Mac G4 
computers (office desktop and home laptop) running OS 10.4.11, plus a 
portable hard disk that I carry with me. I think the solution is to 
use Disk Utility to create encrypted disk images for the small number 
of things that need protection, but I would like to know more about 
the pros and cons of this approach (and other options) before I start 
doing it.

Please let me know if you have any wisdom about this that you would 
like to share.

My main concerns are:

1) It needs to be easy to set up, use, and maintain.

2) I want to keep things like my SS number out of the wrong hands in 
the event that my computers or hard disk are lost or stolen--I'm not 
worried about the NSA or a supper hacker so much as a thief who might 
use my personal data if it was obvious.

3) I don't want to be locked out of my data in the future because the 
software is no longer around to support reading my files!

4) Although, encrypting the entire disk has some appeal (e.g., PGP or 
TrueCrypt), some of my work is computationally intensive (e.g., 
analysis of experimental data) and I don't want to slow it down with 
an encryption layer. Also, as I am currently in the midst of dealing 
with some OS problems, my guess is that encryption of the OS would 
make recovery from such problems much harder.

Thanks,

David