TooMuchGreen

Indeed, it’s all very well and good having all this data flying about, data on your USB key, data in the Drop Box cloud, data on your hard disk, data here, data there….but how secure is it? What if you lose your USB key? It wasn’t password protected was it, no, I didn’t think so, don’t berate yourselves though, I’m invariably slack too sometimes (although only ‘sometimes’ I may add).

If you’re a Mac OSX user there’s a super quick, super efficient and super clean way to keep things in check and secure, it just involves dropping a level, let me explain.

OSX uses a format called the Disk Image File (.DMG), you may have seen these when you’ve downloaded software and installed it, clicking the DMG *mounts* the image on the desktop so you can work with it (it’s a legacy UNIX thing), anyway, what you may not be aware of is that you can create your own DMG file of more or less any size which once mounted you can drag files to and from just like you would to any drive. Once closed (un-mounted) all files are contained inside it as a single entity which you can copy to your cloud storage, USB key or anywhere you like, cool huh, however here’s the real killer – you can encrypt and password protect it using 256-bit AES encryption, sounds impressive? It is, it’s the top level encryption standard as used by the US Government (and we all know those guys don’t mess about).

Interested? Fancy a go? Here’s the procedure, it’s very easy, check the image above and reference with the following bullet points (gotta love a few bullets..!) >

• Open Disk Utility (this is in /Applications/Utilities/)
• Click “New Image” in the toolbar
• In the “Save As” field choose a name for your DMG
• The “Volume Name” is what the name of the disk will be when it’s mounted.
• Choosing a size depends on what you want to store, for general document storage 100 MB should be more than adequate.
• Choose “Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled)“
• Choose “256-bit AES encryption“
• Choose “No partition map“
• Choose “read/write disk image“
• And finally click “Create“

When asked for a password make sure it’s a secure one (it will tell you) and DON’T check the box to save it in your keychain (obviously, doh…!). Disk Utility will mount the image once it’s finished creating it, just drag your files into it and un-mount when your done (ctrl + click & ‘eject’), to re-mount just click the DMG and enter that secure password.

And that’s it, a secure, portable and secure software container for all your sensitive data, and don’t worry if you need to add more stuff, you can easily re-size it later in Disk Utility (mine grew to 250GB due to some scanned docs, say no more).

It would be reassuring if certain people paid more attention to data security as it’s an obvious area of widespread and shameful neglect. Here of course I’m referring to the spate of ‘Government’ owned laptops abundantly stolen from cars over the past few years and the resulting data leakages, there are no excuses, as I’ve shown here data security is both easy and free, well, if you’re a Mac user anyway.