Can I Password Protect Data CDs ?

Hi,

I regularly back up my data on the CDs.

I would like to protect that data and would like to know if I can lock those CDs using the password just in case if it falls into the wrong hands.

If yes can somebody please explain how?

I have Win XP ( Home )

I am using “Sonic Record Now V. 6.5 ” software to burn the CDs.

Thank You.

Regards,
Greg

Just put them in a password protected archive before burning them.

BTW Office XP's encryption is seriously flawed, a file always keeps the same encryption key, and if someone gets several revisions of a file they can crack the encryption in a matter of days.

Microsoft isn't taking this seriously because they think it is unlikey a hacker would have access to multipe revisions of the same file.

A more secure option than offices password protection would be to use a program like BestCrypt to create a encrypted virtual hard drive and keep your documents there.

I have tried BestCrypt it worked perfectly.

You can create a 20 GB virutal drive, which will exist as a 20 GB file on one of your hard drives. You can use a compression utilty to divide the files into parts small enough to fit on CD/DVD but you would have to restore all the parts to access any of the files.

Another option would be to create 5 different 4GB containers, each of which could be burnt on to one DVDR.

You can then mount the containers from the DVD. Or copy the file to your hard drive and mount it from there.

You will only be able to access the data from PCs with bestcrypt installed, but there is a 15 day trial, and when it expires you can still have read only access to the containers.

I can't really think of any con's other than the compainion program bestwipe (erases deleted/moved files so that they can't be recovered from the hard drive), kept crashing and wouldn't run on my old XP SP2 installation. I kept having small problems like that after upgrading from SP1a to SP2.


After I did a clean install of XP SP2 BestCrypt worked fine.

Also file transfers are so disc bound that I didn't notice any delay or slowdown do to the encryption. The CPU can encrypt the files faster than the hard drive can transfer them.