Allah Innovated the Creation: TrueCrypt Tutorial 1

What is TrueCrypt?

True Crypt is a free open source tool which allows you to encrypt your disk this is really usefull for securing your USB thumbdrives as you wouldn't want your documents and datas exposed to third party when it got stolen or lost.

Use Truecrypt, a free encryption package, to protect your private data - Tutorial 1 – Installation (updated for version 6!)

If you want to use Truecrypt to protect private and sensitive documents on your Windows PC, this is the place to start. Version 6.0a of this excellent free encryption package is now available and comes with an easy to use installation wizard. Firstly, download the installation file from the official Truecrypt homepage.Make sure you download the "Latest Stable Version" for Windows, which should be the first "Download" button on the page. Save the file to your desktop or somewhere where you can easily find it.

Once the download is complete, double click on the file to start the installation process.

Windows Vista users only - You may now see a Windows User Account Control prompt appear, asking you to grant permission to install or configure Truecrypt, like the window shown below:-

You must click on "Continue" (you may also be prompted for your password) in order for the installation to continue.

All users

The following window will be displayed:-

Scroll down to read the licence agreement. If you are happy with the terms and conditions, make sure to select "I accept and agree to be bound by the licence terms" and click on "Accept" to move to the next window shown below:-

Make sure that the "Install" option is selected on this window and then click on "Next >" to move to the window shown below:-

Here you can decide where to install the program, as well as choosing to create short-cuts or a system restore point. As from Truecrypt 6, the installer will, by default, disable Windows paging files. What is a paging file? Computers work much more quickly with data in memory or RAM than they can with data on disk, but RAM capacities are much more limited than those of hard disks. Because of this, Windows uses paging files to temporarily store 'pages' of memory on disk. If you've ever noticed a slowdown accompanied by your computers hard drive becoming busy when you switched from one application to another, then it's quite possible Windows was retrieving a stored page of memory from your hard disk back into RAM.

The Truecrypt Foundation recommend disabling this feature as it can mean that sensitive data can get written to unencrypted areas of your hard disk. However, if you disable paging files, you may run out of memory in your system. Because of this we don't recommend disabling paging files unless you have over 1 gigabyte of memory (2 gigabytes for Windows Vista users). If you are unsure, please deselect "Disable Windows paging files". If you do this, you will see the following warning window:-

Truecrypt explains why it recommends disabling Windows paging files, but if you simply don't have enough memory, it's still a bad idea to disable them. We show you how to set your paging files to automatically purge themselves when you shut down Windows in this supplementary tutorial. For now, click "Yes".

Set up the other options however you want or, if you are unsure, just leave them as the defaults and click on "Install". You should then see the following window:-