Transporting information on portable hard drives and USB drives is a very convenient way of getting information between home and work. However, if you lose that drive then it is possible that someone else who finds the drive may gain access to your personal information stored on the lost drive. A good way around this issue is to encrypt the contents of the portable drive. TrueCrypt is a free encryption program which also has a handy “Portable Mode” allowing TrueCrypt to run as a standalone application on a portable hard drive, requiring nothing to be installed on the destination computer in order to decrypt the drive contents (although you do need administrator rights on the destination computer). TrueCrypt is available for free download from www.truecrypt.org .