encryption ?

Dear Friends,
I want to store a lot of photos in the portable hard drive external. My fear is that I loose it and somebody else and get hold of the data.

what is the best way to prevent this ?

1. can i some how put a password into the drive so that they ask the user to enter this before they have access to the drive? what program does this? does window 7 home 64 user or vista ultimate 64 do this?
and how secure is this way? i mean , can anybody just crack the code?

2. there is another term called encryption, not sure what this means, but is there any use to encrpt the data? is it a program to put your pictures into mumbo jumbo signal and then to put it back together again at the other end?

Sorry for this basic question. I didnt see a post like this.

Thanks for your insight.

Dennis

http://www.truecrypt.o​rg/
I've used this for a few years.

windpig wrote in post #10191006
http://www.truecrypt.o​rg/
I've used this for a few years.

Same here,
one of the best free solution available.

I have been using it for a few years without any issue whatsoever.

I've been using R-crypto for about 6 months and it seems to work fine.
http://www.r-tt.com/data_security_s​oftware/

I have been making a copy of the encrypted file every couple of weeks also to have some sense of security.

Thanks everybody.

How about these 2 software? They are paid, ( is this better since we are paying for it?)

PGP? - which version is good?
bitarmor?

Anyone using the above 2?

dennis

TrueCrypt is great. You can use it to encrypt the entire drive. If someone plugs the drive into their computer, it will look like an unformatted drive. TrueCrypt will mount the encrypted drive as a drive letter than you can use with any program. It is free and very reliable.