Encryption used to be the mainstay of military and other government agencies who need to secure the information they handled preventing anybody who may get access rendering the information useless. Everybody knows about it yet not many use it for the protection of their vital information stores, why? Well there are a hundred reasons why people mistrusts such an extreme measure as encrypting data and one is reliability of technology on which it is used on. Computers as we know have become cheaper and cheaper that has been good on one side but it also raises the risk of failure due to cheaper parts and higher risk for data loss due to failure. I know a lot of people would be going against me on this one but if you have experienced a hard disk crash during my many years of computer use and association with them in my previous line of work as a technical support supervisor, you’d know what I mean.
The technology we have today is of the highest level of quality and technological complexity of the computers I started to work with (386’s and 486’s) but the robustness of these gadgets and gizmos we call peripherals are still quite low except for the extreme types that are too expensive for the ordinary user to afford. Imagine a failed motherboard that has fried circuits, no problem for the hard disks are seldom affected by such incidents. Get the board out and swap it out and you connect the hard disk and you have your data available. Imagine you have a failure in the hard drive itself; you get some software and try to recover that information hoping you get enough of the sensitive files your boss needs in the morning. Now, imagine having a hard disk that was encrypted and had some of its sectors rendered useless, now that’s a nightmare for the encrypted data is useless with the key and the code stored into the hard disk itself.