I have an external USB hard drive plugged in to my laptop some of the time. The external drive is whole drive encrypted using TrueCrypt.
I always check "Mount volume as removable medium" in the hope that it will offer better data corruption protection from accidental disconnection of the external drive. However, according to the TrueCrypt manual:
Mount volume as removable medium
Check this option, for example, if you
need to prevent Windows from
automatically creating the 'Recycled'
and/or 'System Volume Information'
folders on the volume (these folders
are used by the Recycle Bin and System
Restore facilities).
I don't mind these folders being created, so are there any other advantages in selecting "Mount volume as removable medium"?
My reason behind this questions is that I would like to mount it as a non-removable drive so I can add some its contents to my Windows 7 libraries (which don't support removable drives).
Answer
That corruption may happen if you disconnect your drive before all of the data was written. TrueCrypt acts as a middleman, encrypting/decrypting data on the fly as it is read/written. It does not affect the way your OS or programs write to the disk.
So, if some program write()s a lot of data without flush()ing, and you disconnect that external hard drive, some data may be not fully written at that moment. But it has nothing to do with TrueCrypt.
If windows, or the program you are using doesn't treat removable media in some special way, then there is no difference how you mount that drive (beyond those pesky folders).
No comments:
Post a Comment