PCA Forums

What ways do you guys keep your files safe from prying eyes?

like, for example, if you make digital backups of confidential files...


-encryption (w/ Windows XP)?

-passwords to open files?

-3rd party encryption programs?

-or do you NOT store ANYTHING confidential on your harddrive?

I don't have to "hide" anything. My comp and my laptop are forbidden territory to anyone but me.

I don't store anything I want secure on any PC that accesses the net, unless I absolutely have to, plain and simple.

I have an older pc I use for most things I want secure like checking and billing and even a sales database and it is stand alone, no network conection either!

It is password protected also in several ways like bios and boot up, but I think all that stuff can be easily defeated if a person wanted too do it. Like if it were stolen, just move a jumper and clear cmos and you disabled the bios password!

If you just don't want the kid seeing your girly files in the favorites and history stuff, then probably easest to just use user profiles and each person have their own user id and password.

Realy depends what you have you want secure and from who I guess as for the best way to do that!

Personally I don't think there is any way to truely keep out prying eyes? It depends what type prying your reffering to also. You mean a nosey neighber that you let use the system once in awhile, or workers unattended at the store that want to see who your wholesale suppliers are?

Once I had that last problem, nosey empoyee long ago. I had my system setup to boot from floppie and the autoexec.bat file on the hardrive had echo off and was set to format the hardrive! If it were booted directly from the hardrive it just sat there running the drive but never loaded win3.1!
Everyday I did a backup of any changes and took it and the boot disk when I left.

That might seem paraniod, but geuss what I found on my system one day? A blank hardrive!!

Someone was trying to get something they shouldn't have had, and they did not get it!
All my info was safe and secure, in my pocket ready to be restored!
The good old days of small hardrives and larger tape backups


canton_kid

I'm the only one in this house that can use a computer


It is still the best method to use a good password policy for you and your users. This should make it to hard for the casual script kiddie / disgruntled employer (half of the intrusions come from inside a company!).

Using the builtin file encryption from Win2000/XP requires some extra care. You don't want to hose your OS when you don't have a backup of the certificate for the recovery agent ... all encrypted data will be unaccessable ... unless you have a full working backup of that system

You should store backup media conaining confidential files in a secure area to prevent physical access for not authorized people. They certainly should be also password protected.

The users should use password protected screensavers.
Disable the floppy in the (password protected) BIOS and /or change bootorder to HDD first.

There's a lot more advanced stuff you can do but this won't fit in a reply here.

I use Winzip to put important data in a password protected Zip file.

Basically I have one big Zip file and everything that I consider a security risk goes into it (my and my client's account passwords, my credit card numbers - so I can copy and paste to order forms, web client's FTP and domain accounts, etc).

Everything is in individual text files all in this one big zip and protected with a password. I have a copy of that zip in my desktop and laptop (laptop gets synced to the desktop every other day).

Not the ultimate security mind you - there's a commercially available ZIP password cracker out there, but I doubt anyone likely to steal my computer around here will be that savvy.

As far as the internet, I'm behind a router and a firewall, and all shared resources on the network have good passwords.