Is Truecrypt good/stable? Other alternatives?

I use full disk encryption primarily, and have been using Drivecrypt Plus Pack for many years now. It's very stable, even to crashes and other funky stunts that the computer may pull from time to time. However, one issue I had was that it was immensely slow. Transfer speed of large files maxed out at 20-30MB/sec, and considering that my HDDs were getting larger I needed to switch.

About a week back, I switched to Truecrypt, and now I wonder if it is really a good option. Been reading the Truecrypt forums recently, and it seems that Truecrypt is really unstable; people report crashes, missing data, glitches, etc... on an extremely regular basis.

I was hoping I can gather some opinion from this un-moderated forum. Is truecrypt as good as it sounds? Or should I consider alternatives like Bestcrypt and PGP? Also, will commercial software be as fast as Truecrypt? I can get up to 50-60Mb/sec transfer rates now with TC.

 

I am sure that answers to your questions are highly dependent on your specific application. That being said, I have been using TrueCrypt for quite a while now and have never experienced the slightest hint of any of the problems that you mentioned seeing in the TrueCrypt forums. Stability is rock solid and I have never seen signs of missing data.

In my opinion TrueCrypt is the only encryption solution. Open-source is the way to go and the developers at TrueCrypt definitely know what they are doing.

 

I'll second that. I use Truecrypt to encrypt whole disks, partitions and a ton of volumes containers and I've never had an issue (knock on wood). I do back up the volume headers and keep the rescue disk near by just in case. I just bought a new high-end laptop and am about to encrypt the entire drive. I'll report back if I experience any negative impact to performance...but I doubt it will be noticeable (if at all).

 

I've been using TC since TrueCrypt 1.0 in 2004. The only problems I have ever had were transitioning between versions, but I have always backed up and have never lost a single thing. Keep in mind, on the TrueCrypt forums you have people who - surprise - are having problems. Few people, besides those who love to tinker and are TC aficionados, will be at the forums other than those having problems. So going by troubleshooting requests is not a really good gauge on the stability of the program. 80% or more of the problems are users who have not read the documentation and don't understand many times even the basics of encryption software.

Sarah Dean's FreeOTFE is another excellent option if you just want container encryption and want to try out various programs. But for system encryption, TrueCrypt (in my opinion) can't be beat. I've used DriveCrypt as well, which at one time was a worthwhile project by a former E4M developer. But, as they say, things happen. Today, I wouldn't trust SecurStar with anything.

 

I use TC as file container. That leaves my whole windows system running smooth and fast, and I run portableapps.com stuff from a TC container. Runs beautifully.

 

As stated above, I just encrypted the hard drive on my new laptop and am reporting back. No performance hit at all that I can tell. I didn't run any hard tests though. Runs as smooth as ever. I've transferred a few gigs between an external disk etc to test a bit, and no hit on the performance there.