The new tools provide for greater security though what if you forget the passphrase you use to encrypt an entire hard disk drive? PGP Corporation announced on Monday the launch of a slew of new and updated products including PGP Desktop version 9.0, PGP Universal 2.0 and whole disk encryption. Whole disk encryption allows just what it suggests, encryption of an entire hard disk drive. For those of us using version 8 and below, we are very familiar with the virtual drive encryption provided by PGP. These prior versions allow you to create a virtual drive that you can mount and dismount with the use of a passphrase. This worked quite well for me given that I created a 10MB virtual PGP Disk to store information of a sensitive nature...ok, taxes. Stupidly I chose not to backup the PGP Disk (yes, I learnt from the experience) and subsequently lost it when the PC smoked the drive it was on. Anyway, back to PGP's announcements... Now Windows XP users can buy what the company is calling "PGP Whole Disk encryption," which is a cleaner way to preserve the confidentiality of data on, say, an external hard drive. Alas, OS X users are out of luck for now, PGP's Stephan Somogyi says, because of the way Apple handles additional volumes in OS X. PGP Whole Disk is part of a broader set of its Windows utilities that cost $199. PGP Whole Disk will not work with Mac OS X however PGP 9 will work fine. Source: PGP.com
