Although hindered by the pesky need for administrative privilege or a prior installation on the computer in question-TrueCrypt has to load a device driver for it’s on-the-fly encryption and decryption-TrueCrypt remains a favorite for thumb drives.

In areas where you control the computers or have a friendly local administrator, it’s tough to beat the privacy benefits of TrueCrypt. TrueCrypt creates encrypted file containers that function as independent disk volumes. You could easily create a 2GB container on your 4GB flash drive and stash all your private data in it so that-in the event that you lost your thumb drive-no one could access your personal data.

Traveler Mode

TrueCrypt can run in so-called ‘traveler’ mode, which means that it does not have to be installed on the operating system under which it is run. However, there are two things to keep in mind:

• You need administrator privileges in order to able to run TrueCrypt in ‘traveler’ mode.
• After examining the registry file, it may be possible to tell that TrueCrypt was run (and that a TrueCrypt volume was mounted) on a Windows system even if it is run in traveler mode.

If you need to solve these problems, we recommend using BartPE for this purpose. For further information on BartPE, see the question “Is it possible to use TrueCrypt without leaving any ‘traces’ on Windows?” in the section Frequently Asked Questions.

There are two ways to run TrueCrypt in ‘traveler’ mode:

• After you unpack the binary distribution archive, you can directly run TrueCrypt.exe.
• You can use the Traveler Disk Setup facility to prepare a special ‘traveler’ disk and launch TrueCrypt from there.

TruCrypt