I am using Truecrypt to encrypt an external hard drive...?

Question

I am using Truecrypt to encrypt an external hard drive.
I followed the tutorial and I did everything correctly, unfortunately 10 hours into the encryption,
my computer froze due to other programs that were trying to run in the background.
I was forced to reboot my PC. When I rebooted it up, my external terrabyte drive that I was trying to encrypt would not show up as being plugged in. It must be invisible. The Truecrypt program will not let me continue encrypting it. Sucks too, because it was about 50% done. Did I lose all my valuable information? or Is there a way to get it back? Please help.

Answer 1

Im using truecrypt on my external hard drive, its very easy and ive had no problems at all.



Maybe bec im not encrypting the entire HD but a container within it ( described in the earlier steps of the manual ) Why dont you try that, you cant have too much to encrypt, unless its a full load of po.rn files. In that case make many true crpt containers in one drive. ( one for BBW, one for skinny, one for Voyeur....LOL )



Maybe you have less Ram space or maybe you can try to check your external drive on another computer, you may have a faulty usb port



Check your drive too, i hope that hasn't crashed.

Answer 2

I routinely use 30gb truecrypt folders, and I have a 300gb USB disk that I encrypted completely. I don't see any performance issues. It does take some time to do the initial encryption, and that time seems to be linearly dependent upon the size of the encrypted object. I believe that either truecrypt approach (files / disk) will make it impossible for anyone to read the disks. My concern would be backup of the data and whether when backing up the information was unencrypted. Having the disk entirely encrypted, provides some added security in that nobody can easily copy the encrypted information and then set machines to break the encryption on the copy. However, having the disk encrypted means that copying the data even to another encrypted disk means it is being transmitted as clear text. It also means that you can't backup the information very easily to some other disk. I think if you pick a reasonably good AES key, then the probability that a copy of the encrypted information will be broken is really really small. The backup capability is really worthwhile, because the probability of a disk failure is higher than the probability of breaking the encryption. This means I would go with an encrypted folder and come up with some backup solution. The amount of work to access the encrypted information is about the same in both cases. I thought that truecrypt would ask me for the password when I plugged in my encrypted disk. However, I have to access the encrypted information in the same manner whether the disk is encrypted or the encrypted information is in a folder.

Answer 3

Unplug it from the computer. Boot the computer up, wait a minute, plug it in, wait a minute and shut down the computer. Unplug it and boot back up, wait a minute then plug it in again. If it shows this time it was left in an open state.