I'm getting a new external HDD and am considering using TrueCrypt to secure it, as I work on many commercial projects and like to have the peace of mind when I travel.
It's a 2TB HDD and I have two options.
- Create a TrueCrypt volume that nearly fills the drive.
- Encrypt the entire drive partition.
What are the pros/cons of each? Keep in mind that this is more than a backup drive, it will be used as an extension of existing HD space on my laptop.
Is one method more resilient to corruption than the other? Especially partition encryption, is it likely that the partition could be altered by a computer that didn't have TrueCrypt and didn't "understand" it (if it was inadvertently connected to a different computer)?
How resilient is it to a system crash while writing? NTFS, being a journaling system has fairly good integrity by itself, but how does TrueCrypt's encryption factor in?
Data safety is more important than raw security, but encryption is a must.