Review: SafeGuard Private Disk/SafeGuard Easy

SafeGuard Private Disk establishes a new virtual drive on your PC where you can save files you want encrypted. Access to these (after you are identified as the correct user) is transparent, with Private Disk encrypting and decrypting on the fly, but decrypting into memory only and not leaving plain text files floating around.

Support is provided for smartcards, the use of which mounts or closes down the virtual drive according to insertion and removal of the card, which stores the associated user credentials. This is intuitive and even inexperienced users will be able to secure their data.

SafeGuard Easy takes a different approach in that it seeks to encrypt everything on either fixed or removable media, thus providing a complete encryption facility for a given machine and user. Together with pre-boot authentication, this provides a confident approach to securing information held on laptops, for example. If the laptop is stolen or misappropriated, users will be able to start it, but they will not be able to decrypt the contents of your hard drive.

Encryption can be undertaken via a choice of algorithms including AES, Blowfish, and DES. All Windows 32-bit operating systems are supported, as are FAT-12, FAT-16, FAT-32, HPFS, NTFS and NTFS5 file systems. However, dual boot Windows 9X and 2000/XP operating systems using different file systems (FAT/NTFS) will need to be considered carefully. When installing SafeGuard Easy, decisions can be made to encrypt all hard drives found on the machine (up to four) or configure encryption on an individual partition basis.

Secure logon functionality is provided, and these products do what they claim with minimum fuss. While we prefer printed manuals, the PDF manuals supplied on the installation disks have logical sections and several screenshots to help new users through the process.

For:

Simple concepts and execution.

Nothing significant.

A straightforward approach to secured data storage.