Monitoring and Diagnostic Hard Drive(s)…?
August 7th, 2016
1. I’m looking softwares that use to Monitoring and Diagnostic Hard Drives? Health, Status, Temp, volt..?
2. Folder Lock? How good is this software ? This software offers 256-bit AES on-the-fly encryption so…….?
3. I’m using “Ccleaner -FREE and latest version” right now so after I run this Ccleaner can someone still trace websites that I visited? I saw Business Version but don’t know if it any better or any softwares better than this program?
I’m paranoid too much, I think I need to take a break away from Computer.
1. Hard Disk Sentinel:
http://2baksa.net/news/95390/
Do keep in mind however that any HDD can go bad at random (Even it appeared to be in perfect health the day before!) So if you value your data, You should maintain regular backup.
2. So-so. It basically has two modes of operation:
A) Folder locking, Which is what it’s most well known for.
You can’t really lock a folder, What it does is just uses rootkit-like technology to hide it from windows explorer til you unlock it. So the data in fact remains untouched and it’s only the OS that’s being manipulated!
It can still be found and accessed from command prompt, A live CD, Or by removing the HDD and attaching it as secondary to another computer.
B) Encryption (Using file containers, Which is quite a common feature in many encryption apps)
Basically, It means you’d be creating one or more files of a specific size (10GB for example), Which will be encrypted, And by itself, It’d just look like a random file, But once you mount it, It’d function like a hard drive (Would appear as a drive letter and such) and any files/folders you’d copy into it would be automatically encrypted. This is much safer than the other method. But here too, Caution is advised. If you delete the original files/folders (After you copied em into the encrypted container) or if you move em to it instead of copying & deleting, It’d still be possible to recover em with a data recovery app (As long as they haven’t been overwritten by new data!) which is why you should either:
A) Move the files/folders into the container, And then wipe the free space of the particular partition they originated from (Can be done with bcwipe or east-tec eraser)
B) Copy em instead, And then shred the original files (Can also be done with the apps previously mentioned^)
On a side note, I’d also to point out that bcwipe has a unique feature which is quite handy, It supports swap (pagefile) encryption, And it’d be a good idea to enable it for extra protection. (Usually the pagefile would only be used after the physical memory is maxed out) Also, I strongly advise you to disable hibernation (And delete hiberfil.sys from [C:] if you have it in there) hibernation is a security risk as it basically dumps the entire memory content into the HDD before it goes into power-saving mode.
3. Probably not, But if you wanna know for sure, Use this app:
http://www.2baksa.net/news/92565/
But the best way to go about it would be creating an encrypted container, And then use portable Internet apps from it! (Portable Firefox/Skype/Thunderbird or whatever) just install it there and create shortcuts for it on your desktop if you want, Or just manually access em each time. As I mentioned in your previous topic, Portable apps keep all of their data in one place, Which for obvious reasons, Comes quite handy! (If going this way, You wouldn’t need to worry about clearing history and stuff like that, As the history/bookmarks and such wouldn’t even be accessible whenever your container is unmounted!)
Do keep in mind however that Windows is not a privacy-aware OS and does keep tabs on your activities!
Such as recently accessed documents, (Can be disabled with a registry tweak), Recently opened applications and other file types, Search results history, And external storage devices, For example, If you use this app from nirsoft:
http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/usb_devices_view.html
It’d list ALL USB devices you ever hooked up to your computer (Such as flash drives/external HDDs by model etc!) Also, Some apps do keep history by default (For example, WinRAR keeps history of the last few archives you opened, And foxit reader of the last few PDFs you read) most apps have an option to disable such logging.
Also, There are apps for clearing some of that history (Such as the ones I mentioned before) But overall, Fully encrypting the OS partition would be the best approach!
But overall, Fully encrypting the OS partition would be the best approach!
Yeah, I’ll do that soon. Thanks alot Bro.
You’re welcome!
Just don’t forget what I said before about proper partitioning.
If you’d keep it as a single partition, It’d take you a lot more time to decrypt/re-encrypt it when a reinstall is needed. 70GB would be more than enough for OS use.
If you’re thinking about encrypting the whole system I’d suggest TrueCrypt, it’s free and very good. Can’t add any more information because pretty much summed it all up