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Drag and Crypt is a tiny application for Windows NT and newer operating systems that provides the user with a dropzone on the desktop that encrypts and decrypts files and folders dropped onto it. I’m a huge fan of True Crypt which can encrypt a full hard drive or part of a hard drive which could be used to encrypt files. Drag and Crypt is like a little snack compared to that but really useful if you want to secure a file instantly without having access to an encrypted container or partition,

True Crypt is my encryption software of choice and I was very pleased with version 5 which added the option to encrypt the complete operating system and increased the performance of the application noticeably. Less than half a year after publishing True Crypt 5 the developers have already finished their work on version 6 and are offering it as a download on their homepage.

My last True Crypt guide dates way back and the purchase of my new shiny 500 Megabyte Maxtor USB drive made me think about writing a new guide that takes the changes of the software into account. My old Teac USB drive started to behave weirdly every now and then which I saw as a first sign of reaching the end of its life cycle and since I did not want to take any chances I decided to buy a new drive, encrypt it with True Crypt and transfer all the files from the old device to it.

A bunch of researchers, among them the famous Bruce Schneier, have discovered that features like Recent Documents list may reveal information about files on an encrypted partition even when used in conjunction with the so called deniability feature which hides data in an encrypted partition.

We all have files on our system that are valuable to us and that we do not want to lose. This could be everything from Word documents to images or mp3 files. But there is still the chance that those files do get deleted, either by chance, by another user or by malicious software. The result is the same in the end, we frantically try to recover the file on the hard drive and pray that we have created backups that contain it.

One of the very first articles that was published here at Ghacks was an article about securing a computer with True Crypt. The True Crypt developers have made several interesting changes both to the functionality of the hard drive encryption software but also to the speed and performance of it.

Here is the problem that I’m currently facing. I sometimes download files from the Internet that are packed and placed into different folders of the same hard drive. I normally unpack them in each folder separately which takes quite a bit of manual work depending on the amount of folders with files that can be unpacked.

A left-click on a file opens it with the default application while a right-click offers a menu with the option to open the file with a different application. You get the choice to pick another application that added itself during installation to that menu or to browse your computer for another application not in that list.

While I was researching one topic I stumbled upon another that is related to CCleaner that might be of interest to everyone who is using that application. CCleaner comes preinstalled with the ability to clean temporary files and data of several applications such as Paintshop Pro, Macromedia Flash or Symantec Antivirus. New applications can be added to this list and there is actually an improved ini file available in the CCleaner forums that adds several new applications such as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Reader or DC++ to the list of applications in CCleaner.