US personal finance blogger Nickel has written a couple of useful posts in the past few days with details on how you can secure your sensitive financial data and documents on your computer:
- Secure your sensitive data – Nickel uses encryption software 1password to store sensitive data and remember passwords, with Dropbox adding synching abilities between PCs, Mac, iPhone & Android etc.
- Securing financial documents in electronic form – for protecting other sensitive documents, Nickel uses another piece of encryption software, TrueCrypt, to safely archive files, again using Dropbox to synch between devices.
With more and more sensitive data lying around on our computers, it makes sense to backup and encrypt this data so that you can either retrieve it in the event of accidental deletion, or to protect it in the even of theft.
The tools required are now easier to use than they ever were, and in the case of TrueCrypt and Dropbox, are free, so there’s no excuse for keeping your financial data safe.