SafeGuard Offers Easy Hard-Drive Protection

Keep your hard drive safe from prying eyes with SafeGuard Easy, now available in version 4.0. This updated hard drive encryption program adds hibernation support and external drive encryption, as well as remote waking from standby and hibernation modes over a network.

SafeGuard 4.0 is aimed at the business market; a single-user license costs $156.

The program encrypts your entire hard drive, not just specific files or folders. This means that no unauthorized user can gain access to your PC. When you turn on the computer, the program loads from the master boot record and asks for your password. You can't even load Windows in safe mode without the password.

Other applications use a similar approach. Both Encryption Plus Hard Disk and SecureDoc Disk Encryption, for example, encrypt your entire hard drive. This approach may limit the versatility of the application (as opposed to software that will encrypt only select files or folders) and these programs may have problems with certain utilities, such as partitioning, image backup, and data recovery programs.

But there are advantages to encrypting your entire hard drive, especially in corporate environments where one person (or committee) decides how others will use their PCs. If everything is encrypted, no one has to worry that sensitive files can be left in a folder where the wrong person can access them. In fact, once SafeGuard Easy has been installed on a computer, the user's only interaction with the program is entering the password at startup.

New and Improved

At least one major new feature was added with just this corporate hierarchy in mind: support for Wake-on-LAN (WOL). This technology, part of Windows XP, allows one PC to wake another out of standby or hibernation mode over a network. IT departments sometimes use WOL to install software or otherwise alter systems across a company network.

But hard drive encryption programs such as SafeGuard Easy can mess up those types of mass upgrades: You can't remotely wake up a system that requires a locally entered password. So SafeGuard has built WOL support into version 4.0. An IT employee on one computer--with proper authentication, of course--can wake up another computer over the network without sitting in front of it.

Other new features in version 4.0 are targeted at notebook users. Drive encryption is especially useful on portable PCs, which are more likely to get stolen than desktops.

Notebook users also tend to hibernate their computers more often--it saves battery power. This was a problem with earlier versions of SafeGuard Easy, which couldn't come out of hibernation without requiring a full reboot. What's more, it didn't encrypt the hibernation file. Version 4.0 fixes both failings, making hibernation practical.

All Things Secure

The new version supports USB device encryption. SafeGuard Easy now encrypts any files you copy to a USB flash card or flash drive. The program can be set up so that this external encryption happens automatically.

Version 4.0 also adds support for certain hardware authentication devices, such as Aladdin's E-Token. These add another level of security; you can't boot unless you know the password and have the right token plugged into your USB port.

None of these precautions will help if someone can break the encryption. SafeGuard Easy 4.0 offers nine different encryption algorithms, including the current popular favorite, 256-bit AES. "There's not a current encryption algorithm we can't do," says Walter Loiselle, SafeGuard Utimaco's vice president of U.S. operations and technology.

The program, says Loiselle, has "never been broken."