I'm encrypting a 1TB drive with truecrypt, but it says 16 hours remaining. Is this just a "non calculated number based on what has been encrypted so far"? Only the system is installed, with the adds of avast. but nothing more.
It can, there are some actions that take over night, even days. Like DBAN, which writes 0's to the entire HDD, depending on the settings, could be 3-4 hours or 1-2 days. :/
I use Folder Lock for encrypting and secure just what need to be secured! Works fast but it's Payware (40 bucks)!
A simple '0' pass takes about 7 hours =). If I use a Linux LiveCD and "sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=16M" it takes about 3 and a half hours. There are some 'left-overs' (swap, hibernation, after deffragging), that's why I've chosen True Crypt and I'll do a Full Disk Encryption in order to ensure that no files can be read from the disk.
I recently used DBAN with the DoD method (no the short method) and it was going for 7 passes, 4 passes done in 7 hours. I opted to stop at pass 5 cause well, I cannot go to long with out my internets lol.
Normally 2 or 3 passes should be much enough! Or you're paranoid that someone need's your soooooo confidential data and/or that would cost your live? than you should use at least an 2048bit Encrytion Key!!
There is a government that grinds their HDD's to dust and then stores them in a lock box somewhere underground. I cannot fathom why. anyway. back on topic. TrueCrypt rocks
Why keep it? Idk- but that seems like it could be a hazard maybe. Also, TrueCrypt DOES rock. As a safety precaution I have made checksum of my key file and db then sent a copy if them separately to separate trusted friends that have never met so if I ever lose my thumb drive I can easily recover my data/passwords and on a funny note, my truecrypt rescue disk is labeled as a Britney Spears album, lol, who listens to that garbage.
There are controversies on wether a single zero pass is enough. I read that Govs can retrieve data even after the drive has passed a DoD with 7 passes (or more), and I also read that some recovery companies were not able to do a simple task after a zeroed text file: Get the file name. I was a security nut a while ago, whenever I needed to re-install Windows I used to do a Zero-Fill on the drive, just to make sure nothing (software) were passing through the standard Windows "format". Now, at most I wipe the boot-sectors (if I'm on Windows) or the partition that the system was installed, if I used Ubuntu for ex, because even after formatting the drive and wiping the boot-sectors some of my files were still there, such as .conf files. I didn't notice any leftovers on openSUSE. Not to mention that if you do a strong encryption you'll never need to wipe the hell out of the drive, it's all going to be encrypted anyways I remember a case where a banker had 5 of his drives taken by the "Brazilian FBI", and they couldn't decrypt it. Then, the real FBI took the drive and yet they couldn't drcrypt it even after a year of trying. The guy was using TryeCrypt. I'm not sure if I will use Windows, I never really trusted MS products. But I can't stick with only Linux, there's not much to do there even with Steam running totally native (lack of $).
Well, TC lets you use two OS's = A decoy one and the real one (hidden), so if you ever need to decrypt the drive you'll present the adversary with just a decoy OS And it's impossible to prove that you have a hidden OS.
I started testing the FDE too, but after realising that I would not be able to re-install Windows without de-crypting the entire drive I decided to do the following: * Encrypt the system drive(sda1) which is 320GB (personal choice). It will take no longer than 5 hours I think, I can let it work over night. * Then, create another partition (Sda2) with what's left of the drive space, and encrypt that. This is done in a matter of seconds . This options is much faster than ecnrypting the whole thing, because there's no need to fill up the entire free-space with random data (since I already had zeroed the drive), and yet, things will be encrypted on-the-fly as well. AND, I won't need to wait 16 hours to encrypt and then more 16 hours to de-crypt
From my experience when I have decided to format a drive that was encrypted I just wrote over it either with a new OS or just zeroed the drive again with DBAN and then formatted to a new OS. But the 1TB I am encrypting/performing passes on now wasn't zeroed using DBAN but with the LLF tool (while running my previous Windows installation to test the app) which may do a good job but not as thorough as DBAN. Either way, I am 71% into this and have come to far to stop/turn around now. Lack of $ for who, steam or you? I recently had dual boot on Win 8/Ubuntu 12.04 and was trying to get some games to install/work. Guild Wars 2 was the one I was going after, several routes taken, all led to my computer freezing for an amount of time. Such a pain in the ass so I said f-it and went back to pure windows and will run Ubuntu in a VM when I want to play around.