My fave drive encryption app was updated last month. It now has full Linux support (whoopee) and dynamic drives, which appears to be files that automagically expand in size. That would be seriously useful.

When it comes to updating it, the best thing to do is reboot, not mount any volumes, make sure its closed and then install it. I found that doing an install when the system was up, even with dismounted drives, it had problems. No damage done, just error messages about not being able to install the device driver properly.

I’m also using TrueCrypt at work. We got some 160GB USB 2.0 drives for extra storage and I decided to create a 100GB TrueCrypt drive on it. I found out two things. The first was that it recommended using an encryption method with a 128-bit block cipher, instead of 64-bit.

Not really a problem. Previously I’ve used Blowfish since that appears to be the fastest encryption method. So I went for AES… and then realised TwoFish was faster. As it happens, it doesn’t make too much of a difference.

The second was it takes fecking ages to format a TrueCrypt drive of that size. I don’t know exactly how long it took since I went out but I’d say at least an hour and a half. Actually I’m just creating a 26GB file and that reckons it’ll be 30+ minutes.

Still, once set up, its one of the those pieces of software that just works.