Question: I bought a new USB Hard Drive that I want to use as a back up for my Linux (Ubuntu 14.04 LTS at the moment) and my Mac Mini (running Mac OS X 10.9). I can do this perfectly at the moment, but I want to be able to encrypt the files that are on the hard drive. I know I can do this if the hard drive was to be used by either machine exclusively, but unfortunately it s used by more than one machine running two different operating systems.
Is it possible to do this? I d prefer a whole drive encryption, but if an encrypted folder solution is the only way or is the better way then I d like to know how to do it.
Answer: The program Truecrypt is commonly used for this purpose and is cross-platform. ?There was a famous announcement about it being discontinued with a suggestion to use (windows-specific) ntfs encryption. I’ve not looked into the status lately, but use a version from before the hiatus. Meanwhile, a peer-review code review and audit was already underway, so it may be “back” under a new team.
In my experience, formatting the USB with FAT32 and then using a container file, as opposed to giving a raw partition to Truecrypt, is portable and less cranky to get working right. ?That also makes it trivial to encrypt just part of the drive.
Some USB flash drives are sold with encryption as a feature, but the fine print suggests that it’s just a bundled program like that. Some rare units do have drive-level encryption inside the drive itself.