Windows Vista® Inside Out Deluxe Edition

Best Practices for Safe Encryption

If you don’t implement EFS correctly, you can undermine your security efforts. For example, your editing program might leave unencrypted temporary files on your drive. Or worse, you can render your encrypted files unusable. To avoid these pitfalls, follow these suggestions:

• Encrypt the Documents folder and any other local folder you use for storing documents.

• Encrypt the %Temp% and %Tmp% folders. This ensures that any temporary files are encrypted.

• Always encrypt folders, not files. When a folder is encrypted, all files created in that folder are encrypted. Many editing programs save a new copy of the document you are editing. This copy will be encrypted if you encrypt the folder, but it will remain unencrypted ...