Microsoft should have protected my porn stash

Oh, lastly (addendum to previous post):

ENCRYPT FILES AT YOUR OWN RISK.
POSSIBLE CONSEQUENCES OF INCORRECTLY APPLYING ENCRYPTION INCLUDE:
- CRASHING YOUR SYSTEM IRRECOVERABLY
- PREVENT YOU FROM EVER LOGGING ON AGAIN
- MAKING YOUR FILES AND DATA COMPLETELY UNRECOVERABLE IN THE EVENT OF A CRASH.

Also:
**** DO NOT ENCRYPT YOUR ENTIRE C: DRIVE ****

There are a few reasons for this.
1. It decreases your chances of recovery if your system crashes.
2. It could cause your system to crash or not boot up.

3. Encrypting files can take a long time.
4. Decrypting files can take a long time.

What this means is that you should be very selective about which files you encrypt, and be sure to ONLY encrypt those folders which are necessary.

Two excellent folders to encrypt in Windows XP:
1. Your "My Documents" folder.
2. Your "Desktop" folder.

DO NOT encrypt your entire profile directory.
This could:
a) Prevent you from ever logging on again, ever,
b) if not, at the very least drastically increase the time it takes to log on, because your ENTIRE PROFILE has to be decrypted first.

Only encrypt those folders which contain directly and explicitly within them your documents or private data.

Be sure to read the Microsoft links in the above post before doing any of this.

I have no connections to The Inquierer.

Neither I, nor theinquierer.net or its owners, affiliates, or employees (none of whom I have any ties to), bear any responsibility to anything you do to your own computer, or anyone else's.

The information provided here is for educational purposes only.

You are solely responsible for ensuring that you are educated, knowledgeable, and wise enough about file encryption to implement it without negative consequences and/or harm or damage to yourself, your prosperity, or your data, should you choose to do so.

Microsoft *does* provide ways to prevent data from being obtained or recoverable.

Here's how:
The feature is called Encrypting File System, and is only available on the "professional" or business-orientated versions of Microsoft's operating systems.
- So if using Windows XP, you need the Professional edition, not Home edition.
- If using Vista, I believe you need Business or Ultimate.

To use it in Windows XP:
1. Right-click on a folder, choose Properties.
2. Under the General tab, click the Advanced button.
3. Under "Compress or Encrypt attributes," select the "Encrypt contents to secure data" check box, and click OK.
4. In the "Confirm Attribute Changes," choose "Apply attributes to this folder only," or, if you want to encrypt all of the folder's contents as well, click "Apply Changes to this folder, subfolders and files."

This will not prevent anyone from listing the contents of the folder, but it will prevent anyone from opening or viewing files (such as pictures or Word documents) within the folder.

Note that this only works *if someone cannot log in as you*, meaning you should have a strong password protecting your Windows login account. (Start menu - Control Panel - Users and Groups - [your account] - change/create password)

Here's how it works:
It uses an encryption key to scramble the contents of the data. The only way to de-scramble the contents of the data is to have the key.

If you're logged in as yourself, you automatically have access to the key, and it's used whenever you view your own encrypted files.

If you're not logged in as yourself -- for instance, if someone else is logged in on the same computer, or if some steals your hard drive and hooks it up to their computer -- then they will need access to the encryption key in order to open your files.

What this means is that if you encrypt your data, and then your computer crashes irrecoverably -- you're SOL as far as your data goes, unless you've made a copy of the key, and stored it in a safe place (say, on CD-ROM). Then, even if your PC won't boot up, you can put the hard drive in another computer, and use the encryption key stored on the CD to recover your data.

Here are the links to Microsoft's pages on this -- the first is a how-to, the second are best practices:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308989
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/223316

Finally, you need to use a file-shredding utility, if you want to make files completely unrecoverable.
"Spybot Search & Destroy" is an anti-spyware application that can also, optionally, be installed with a File Shredder.
Spybot is available here:
http://www.safer-networking.org/index2.html
*** Note that when you install Spybot, you will be asked whether to use the TeaTimer or not. Unless you are a computer expert, DO NOT install TeaTimer -- it will constantly ask you whether to Allow or Deny every single registry change that comes up. Without TeaTimer, all changes are allowed by default. If you deny the wrong change, it can crash your system.
**** To be sure you do *not* install TeaTimer with Spybot, be sure you *carefully read through every step of the installation process* (except for the license agreement). Do not just click Next or Yes to everything without reading it first.

Hope this helps some of you users out there.