Best Way To Protect Personal Files On Laptop

System: Windows 10 Home version 21H1

My laptop has a folder structure (1200 files, 700 MB) with files that contain personal information (banking, investments, taxes, medical info., etc.). Up to now I encrypted this folder structure (but no other folder structure on the laptop) with Axcrypt. But I don't like that product - very, very slow & has no feedback when it is encrypting or decrypting so I have no idea what it is doing.

So I no longer encrypt this personal files folder structure. However this leaves personal data open to potential malware stealing this data. I considered storing these files on an external drive; I have 3 of these. But this creates the problem of backing up changes to the other drives and having a previous backup in case I screw up. and need to go back to an older version of a file. Another solution is to store the personal files in the cloud, but I would rather not use a cloud-based solution.

What other solution would folks suggest to protect this folder structure?

 

Zip with a password. We used a program at work like that, Credant but Dell bought them out and we quit using it - it encrypted certain folders and didn't have any notifications. It was a pain to recover anyone's data if they had an issue.

 

Best, I don't know, but this is what I do, as an individual home computer (laptop) user:

1. I prefer to encrypt files individually (this is just my own preference, of course) - preferring file types that can be encrypted "natively" - like how "office" apps can encrypt/decrypt .xlsx, .docx, .pdf... If not (such as .jpg), then I encrypt using 3rd party app (7-zip).

2. I maintain one complete data set ("working set") on my laptop and manually sync it to a microSD card that's always inserted into my laptop.

3. I also maintain an external drive that contains (1) system image backup's and (2) data folders by year. For example, a worksheet created in 2019 will be backed up to folder 2019 at the end of that year. If changes were made in 2020, the changed file will be backed up to folder 2020 similarly. And if more changes were made in 2021, it will be backed up in folder 2021 as well. This is my "crude" method of ensuring if I accidentally wrote over and synced a critical file, I could at least retrieve older copies from earlier years. This drive is connected via a hub with on/off switches - and turned on only when making backup's.

4. Finally, the "working set" data described in (2) above is manually synced to the cloud (I use Mega.nz).

I think "whole drive" encryption is more secure, but I am just leery about drive crashes and the added complications of system restore with whole drive encryption. Just seems easier to restore system and data without the added layer of "whole drive" encryption (although this may just be my own unfamiliarity). To mitigate, I take the usual precautions of: (1) keeping OS and apps up to date, (2) using my laptop as "standard" user and (3) backup up frequently. As a standard user, most all malware will have a very hard time getting installed onto my laptop to disrupt/steal my data files. Well, that's what Microsoft tells us anyway.

 

has anyone tried to use 'pgp tool' ?

 

No.