Thread: Do right By your data

Do Right by Your Data Whether you carry work files with you on your flash drive or store them online, you still must take a number of precautions to protect those files-and your privacy and your computers-from harm, whether accidental or malicious. Keep in mind the following steps for maintaining such security.

Scan for safety: Since using your USB drive on an unknown computer exposes the drive to additional risks, be sure to install both antispyware and antivirus software as part of your set of portable applications. As an extra precaution, scan the flash drive itself from your regular computer the next time you return home to make sure it didn't pick up any malware.

Use common sense: Because a host computer, such as one in a hotel business center or an Internet cafe, may have keyloggers that record your passwords, portable computing can never be 100 percent safe. But you can limit the risk by avoiding credit-card transactions when using your portable system on another machine. And it goes without saying that you should avoid online banking in such situations.



Shred it; don't sweat it: If you are working on sensi¬tive documents, you should keep them encrypted while they reside on your flash drive. The open-source tool TrueCrypt (on the DVD) and the freeware archiving pro¬gram IZArc2Go (on the DVD), for example, both have encryption features that run on a flash drive.
In most cases, you'll have to copy documents out of the encrypted folder or con¬tainer before working on them, and then copy them back when you're done. For added security, use a shredding application to destroy the work copies (after you have put a copy back in the encrypted folder, of course). CyberShredder and UltraShredder (find both on the DVD) are two free portable utilities that do the job.
Back up your portable, too:

Since these devices are small and easily misplaced, backing up your portable USB "computer" is arguably even more important than creating backups for your main system. The applications are much smaller, so backing up is faster, and the resulting files take less room on your backup drive. All of the suites mentioned above include backup utilities. Of course, you don't really need such a utility; you can always just use Windows Explorer to drag and drop the contents of your flash drive to a backup disk. The important thing is to do it regularly.