Data Privacy-Windows Tools

Here's a few tools that might be useful for Windows users for privacy.

Myself I use them because my main machine is a laptop, and if it were stolen I wouldn't want just anyone to have access to any of my documents. And as well if I carry files to and from work on a USB drive, it may contain some sensitive information.

One program I use is called TrueCrypt:
http://www.truecrypt.org/

This program allows you to create encrypted virtual hard drives. You can create drives of any size, and when you enter your password it will appear like any other drive, and you can easily read and write to it like any other drive, and there is no noticeable performance loss. Without the password it just looks like pure randomized noise. I create DVD sized files so it's easy to back up. One downside is although it has a portable "traveler" mode, it will not run if you don't have administrator access to the computer (which might be the case at work or school).

Another tool is "Sandboxie". When you run a program inside Sandboxie, it won't let the program actually write changes to the real file system or the registry. Instead it saves these changes to it's own files though it seems "real" to the program. So you could for example, run a web browser through Sandboxie, and have it save all the changes to an encrypted TrueCrypt drive.

http://www.sandboxie.com/

Another program that will let you run a different session of Firefox, with separate bookmarks, etc is "Firefox portable"
http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable

This is great if you want to carry all your bookmarks and plug ins around on a USB drive, or you could run it in a Truecrypt volume.

As some people may know, when you delete a file from your hard drive, the file system doesn't clear that part of the hard drive, it just marks the space available for future files, and it is quite easy to undelete files. A good free tool to securely erase files, or clear the empty part of your hard drive is "Eraser". Although not "DoD level of security", I set it to just wipe with one pass of pseudo-random data, which is enough to foul software recovery tools.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/eraser/

There's also a portable version that will fit on a USB drive
http://www.portablefreeware.com/?id=267

DsCrypt is a tiny (25kB) program that will encrypt / decrypt single files. This is good for securely bringing files to and from work or school.
http://www.softpedia.com/get/Security/Encrypting/dsCrypt.shtml

I use the open source 7-zip archiver for most of my Archive uses. It is a small and good performing archiver for reading a wide variety of files, and creating both Zip and it's own 7-Zip format. The open source 7-Zip format achieves higher compression than Zip, and the encryption used is much better than the Zip standard. It also has an option to encrypt the archived file names unlike Zip, because gee, maybe you encrypted the archive because you didn't want anyone to have any idea what's in the archive.

Because I can't install TrueCrypt on my computer at work, I use 7-zip. Once you open up the archive it's easy to drag and drop files in and out. Plus you get the benefit of compression.

http://www.7-zip.org/

And of course there's a portable version:
http://portableapps.com/apps/utilities/7-zip_portable