True Crypt - How to Encrypt Your Files Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
1,613 words · ~8 min read
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welcome to lineus Tech tips today we're going to show you how to encrypt a
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volume on your computer and that can be kind of like a like a container like a
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folder that you put a bunch of stuff in or it can be in the form of an entire
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Drive in your PC or even something like a removable drive so it's done at a
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partition level and we're going to start with how to create that container so the
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first thing you do is use true Crypt basically thumbs up true cryp does
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things right you want to never save history that's important click create
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volume here you get a bunch of different options so we're going to show you the
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create encrypted file container although create a non encrypt a non-system
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partition Drive is a good one as well and it has a couple slightly different
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steps that we'll show you at the end we're going to use a standard true Crypt
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volume a hidden true Crypt volume is a little bit different from a standard one
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so what that is is it's an encrypted it's an encrypted container that has an
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encrypted container Within that's invisible so if you guys understand what
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that means it's like if someone had a gun to your head and was like let me
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into that encrypted folder or I'm going to pop you one you know and stuff um then you could
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give them the password for that one and they would actually think you put some
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fake stuff in there so they would think they're getting your important stuff but
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it's actually within another container inside of it so that's probably
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unnecessary for 99% of people unless
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you're like the CEO of you know Toyota and you have a new car coming that's
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better than all of your other cars and you don't want people to know about it um okay so you create a volume location
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select a file so we're gonna we have we have one that we created already as a
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test so this is just going to be the test one save and this file you can put
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anywhere in the computer won't even know what to do with it if you double click
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on it it'll just ask how to open it and it won't yeah won't know what to do
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never save history and you can hide that anywhere you can throw it in like a
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system folder you can even keep it on the desktop because it won't look like anything you could call it a and it
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wouldn't be descriptive at all for encryption algorithm use AES and the
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default hash algorithm is also fine click next you can specify the size of
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your volume much like a folder you can just say okay we're going to create this
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sort of this container that's going to be 10 gigs big and that's what we can
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put in there so we're going to create one that's 10 gigs shows you how much
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free space you have on the drive where you created the container next password
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okay password creation lots of special characters are good it has limit of 64
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characters but some of the strongest passwords and easiest to remember could
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actually be a phrase like Capital Rumble
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the cat is a good pet is actually an
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extremely strong password because of how many characters it is you can confirm it
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Rumble the cat is a good pet and then you can actually display password to
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make sure that you typed it correctly as you were going next large files do you
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want large files I would pretty much go with yes because that's just the uh the
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file system that it's using so we're in NTFS this stage is important you want to
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move your mouse around as randomly as possible because computers can't be
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completely random they just don't work that way and they want you to kind of
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make it more random by being random
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about the way that you move the mouse so there you go that's about as random as I
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think I can be the longer you go the stronger the volume will be so if you
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want to sit there for an hour you could but I suspect there's a law of diminishing returns at some point there
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now we format our encrypted volume and Y
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SSD and fast processors it is uh creating itself at around 600 megabytes
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per second so we'll be able to uh come back and well you know what whatever you
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guys can just chill you know what's a good joke you hear the one about the uh
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actually I don't I can't think of any jokes right now you hear the one about the uh SSD
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that uh race a hard drive they beat
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it and I'm getting like the thumbs up from slick do you hear the one about the
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mechanical keyboard that died and I'm getting the sad face from
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slick and apparently it's alive now so Slick's keyboard is fine there we go and
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we're done so now what we're going to do is go
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into our documents folder be
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done okay you know what it doesn't matter because I can show you guys the other one I created so here legitimate
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G-rated movies is right here it's some file it's five gigs if you double click
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on it it has no idea what to do with it so the way that you actually access it
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is you go to there we go that one's done now so
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you only click next if you want to create another one so actually yeah I
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said I'd do that at the end so let's do this first so mounting a
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drive look okay so you enter a hold on
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yeah you have to select a file first so we're going to go with legitimate G-rated movies we are going to mount it
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to drive letter m so this one was this
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strong password
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okay yeah this oh I don't think I
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capitalized okay no really this is a good way to do
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it there we go so now it is mounted in
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Drive M so now our computer actually just sees it as a normal disc so you can
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see that there are legitimate G-rated movies inside if we wanted to create if
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we wanted to mount another encrypted volume we would just select another Drive letter select a different file
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such as test one and click Mount typing
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in uh Rumble the cat is a good pet and
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that one is now mounted in Drive letter oh there you go there's our 10
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gig volume now the procedure is slightly different for something like a USB drive
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so in this case we're going to take it one step further by not only encrypting
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our volume but also having it hidden inside a pen so this USB drive is going
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to go into the computer somehow there we
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go okay that did not fit that well so
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we're going to go ahead and put it in that one all right so removable dis e
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encrypt a non-system part okay so we're going to create a standard one again
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we're going to select our device so you actually select the partition right
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there partition 1 3.7 gigs which is essentially the whole drive you can
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select a whole drive but it won't work if you already have partitions on it
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click next create encrypted volume and format it there we go and from there all
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of the options are pretty much the same
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it takes a while to create the encrypted partition on a USB drive because they're
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so slow so what we've done is we've finished that I'm going to go ahead and
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plug this in now there's a couple different ways that you can access them
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you can see here you need to format the disc and drive E before you can use it
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if you format it it will format it it'll wipe it because Windows doesn't know
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what to do with this encrypted volume on here so a couple different things you
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can do you can Auto Mount devices so that true Crypt will look for it and
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help Windows find it or you can select a device and go manually to the device
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and mount I actually forget the password
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for this what was the password for this one is it wasn't the no it wasn't like
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this is a good password this is a strong password oh wait no it was the rumble
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one it was the rumble Rumble is a good
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pet
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no Rumble is a good cat whatever the point is if someone doesn't know your
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password it'll take them years and years and years to Brute Force this so uh make
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sure that you remember your password or you're going to end up in a situation
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like this and you cannot get it back
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