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I don’t have to present to all of you truecrypt. It is a free, open source, portable, powerful, on-the-fly encryption. But I did not find it in the list of portable apps. I am just wondering why? The truecrypt project seems to me to exactly be the software this website is done for…
Mainly because it's not very portable. It requires administrative privileges to run, and a driver has to be installed locally on every machine you want to have access to your encrypted drive.
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fatcerberus@yahoo.com [aim: fatcerberus]
I have no witty remarks or quotes to share at the moment.
IMHO, to be minimally portable software must:
1) Not install parts of itself anywhere other than it's own directory(ies), like in the Windows directories...this will cause the program to fail to run on other PCs.
2) Not require administrator privileges (this is where TrueCrypt "fails")...this will cause the program to fail to run on computers where you don't have that right (most public PCs).
A lot of software that passes those two hurdles is used by us, but to be *truly* portable, it should also:
3) Leave no traces of itself on the host computer (particularly in the registry).
4) Preferably shouldn't require other programs beyond the basic OS (such as Windows) to operate (Java, .NET Framework, etc.).
Would suggest a fifth element:
- Adapt its paths to the drive-letter from which it is run, or use relative paths.
Cheers
Chris
I think that's already covered by #1: "not putting stuff in anything other than its own directories".
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fatcerberus@yahoo.com [aim: fatcerberus]
I have no witty remarks or quotes to share at the moment.
@fatcerberus:
think of a download program, where you have to adapt the download-path upon each change of the USB-stick's drive-letter if this condition is not fulfilled ...
That's what I meant
Cheers
Chris
Minimally, it only needs to not install files it depends on on the host comp that can't be moved to the portable device (assuming you can make the program refer to the moved files), and not rely on host files. Traces left are important, but these are minimal requirements. (I hope I'm not forgetting something!)
----Readme.txt---------
It is also possible to run 'TrueCrypt.exe' directly from the 'Setup Files'
folder without installation ('traveller' mode). However, if an older version
of TrueCrypt is currently installed on the system, it must be uninstalled
first.
--------------------
/Hubbabub
--
Big bubbles! No troubles!
Even in traveller mode the device driver needs to be installed (unless it has been installed at an earlier occasion), and for this to do you need admin rights.
I gave up hope to find a portable program with virtual drives - it seems there is strictly nothing to do about it. There are more programs like TrueCrypt, also free and opensource, but they all suffer from this deficiency.
Cheers
Chris
An alternative I use is bcarchive. While it doesn't mount a drive, it does open an Explorer like window into the archive. Files can be dragged into and out of the archive or opened directly from the archive explorer.
http://www.jetico.com/bcarchive.htm
Jetico also has BestCrypt which seems similar to TrueCrypt. The latest list of fixes mentions "In Windows 2000/NT/XP BestCrypt now supports creating and formatting containers by users with ordinary privileges (i.e. not by Administrators only)." Sounds promising, but it's not free.
Then using it under a virtualised OS may be your only option for true portability, theres a performance penalty and some extra baggage to carry about but it does work... friend made a fairly minimal version based off linux under Qemu some time ago that is fairly quick and will let you create, open and save truecrypt archives without local admin privilages on the host OS...
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