File encryption question --EDIT-- (PGP not compatable with XP)

[BScott881]

Anyone know of a program that will encript files, or better yet whole directories or drives ?? or at least password protect them??
thanks.....

 

[Nothinman]

PGP.

But be very carefull, if you lose the key you create to encrypt them with you just lost all the encrypted data.

 

[GigaCluster]

Or if you're an open-source / "free software" fanatic like me, you would use GNU Privacy Guard.

Both are pretty much equivalent, except GPG can be only used via the command line, unless you download some front-end. On the upside, it's open-source, unlike PGP, so we know for a fact that GPG doesn't have any backdoors built in. PGP cannot make that claim.

 

[Nothinman]

May I ask what this is then?

 

[manly]

Nothinman,

As you probably know, the creator of PGP, Phil Zimmerman was an employee of NAI after they acquired PGP. He made it an important point that they release PGP source code for the obvious reasons.

However, they stopped doing so, and he left after version 7.0.3. So any version after that is arguably somewhat more suspect. In other words, he's on record as vouching for PGP while he was there.

PGP has been canned anyhow. Even though they have a version 7.5 completed that's well tested on WXP, it won't ship because they shut the division down.

 

[Nothinman]

All that doesn't work well in XP in the older PGP versions is PGPDisk, the rest is fine, so use a version <7.0.3 if you're that paranoid.

 

[BScott881]

I tried loading PGP v 7.0.3 and it says it's not compatable with WIN XP. Is there any way around this or some other version?

 

[Workin']

PGP 6.5.3 works fine on my XP machine.

 

[manly]

While we're on the subject.