Full drive encryption questions?

[burgergetsbored]

Hey just got a couple of questions here. I'm currently a university student studying computer science and was just wondering if full drive encryption using truecrypt is really worth it on my windows partition? I don't really have anything that important on my laptop at the moment but I do torrent using it, and it's taken to lectures/on trains etc.. And was just wondering in your opinion is it really worth it for the effort it is?

Was thinking what happens if say windows suddenly becomes unbootable (as it does) I'd normally boot into ubuntu and copy files from the hard drive from that but if the windows partition is encrypted there isn't going to be that opportunity, I'm guessing the only thing that can be done against that is to have a constant external backup? (can anyone recommend any good backup software while I'm at it ) Also it's a fairly powerful laptop 6GB RAM, core i7, would the encryption show any signs of system slowdown? Especially when doing things like gaming, or wouldn't you be able to tell any difference? Thanks, Adam.

 

[Celegorm]

A lot of times (or at least in the few programs I've seen), full drive encyption asks for a password on bootup to access the data. So in theory if the drives were in another computer you could pull data off after a re-boot.

But, I'll let someone who's actually done this confirm that.

 

[burgergetsbored]

Ah okay, I thought it decrypts it on the fly as everything is done, not all in one go, so if you were on another partition/computer the data will still be encrypted. But if someone does know please tell!

 

[robertg]

Bit locker is a good program.