Maintaining our privacy and security are very important factors that we must take care of in our day to day. There are many attacks that we can suffer on the network, many types of threats that aim to steal our information. Now, we can also make use of different tools and functions that allow us to protect our devices and files. Encryption is something we can apply to our discs and files if we don’t want potential intruders to access them and compromise privacy. We have the possibility to use disk encryption and file level encryption . We will explain what each case is.
Disk encryption vs file encryption
As we have indicated we have the possibility to use disk level encryption or file level encryption. Each of them has its advantages and can be interesting for users depending on the use they are going to give it, the level of privacy and security they want to apply, etc.
We can make use of a wide variety of tools and functions integrated into the operating systems themselves to encrypt our systems. We can encrypt an entire disk or also encrypt only a series of files and folders that interest us.
Disk-level encryption
The first option we are going to talk about is disk level encryption . What does this mean? As its name indicates, this means that we are going to encrypt the disk completely. This can be the hard drive of our computer, an external memory such as a pendrive, etc.
Disk-level encryption will affect all the content on that disk, in that memory. It will encrypt all the folders and files that may be inside. This includes operating systems, installed programs, files of all kinds …
The main objective is clear: to protect all information in the event of loss or theft. Let’s say we lose an external hard drive, a laptop where we store important information or a USB memory. If we have previously used encryption at the disk level we would not have to fear for those files, those documents, that information in general that could compromise our privacy.
Of course, it must be taken into account that those files, those documents, are only encrypted while they are on that disk. In other words, if we copied a folder with files to another memory or another computer, those files would not be encrypted. But the idea is, as we have indicated, that nobody could access that information while they are on that disk.
File-level encryption
Another option we have is that of encryption at the file level . In this case we can apply encryption only on those files that interest us. It is not necessary that the entire disk, that the entire computer, be encrypted; This time we are going to be able to select what we really want to be encrypted.
Also keep in mind that if we encrypt a text file, for example, it will continue to be encrypted even if we transfer it to another computer. It is very interesting to share files securely through the cloud, for example. In this way we will prevent potential intruders from accessing that content and putting systems at risk.
For file level encryption we can make use of a large number of tools . We have at our disposal many programs, both free and paid, which aim to encrypt a series of folders or files that we want and thus protect them. This way we can preserve our privacy in case of problems or that someone can access the content.
In short, as we see, there is the possibility of using encryption at the disk level and also encryption at the file level. They are different, although the objective is the same: preserve our data and not compromise our privacy. It will depend on what we are looking for that we choose one option or another, although as we have mentioned there are many programs in both cases.