im having a "discussion" with my IT people at work who tell me i shouldnt keep stuff on an Iomega zip disk (work stuff) as it should be on my laptops h/drive where it can sit in safty behind a PC start up password.

i know nowt about PCs but is the start up password on my PC more or less secure than an Iomega Zip Password???

Tiggs

 

Wouldn't say either were fully secure. You can normally hack your way round most password protection anyway. Particularly bios passwords.

I've a good old util somewhere that will reset bios to defaults including the password

I thought you could password protect Zip disks if you use their software? (It's a long time since I used one )

Safest way is to encrypt it all using pgp or something.

 

...and where do you keep your laptop backups?

As for PC BIOS passwords...

remove disk, insert in another PC, read data!!!

mb

 

I'm a long term user of Zip and have never come across anybody hacking the password. That aside though, it's good practice to keep a backup and Zip is a better solution than most. What happens if you drop your laptop or it's nicked???

 

thanks for replys, as i thought a pc password is not fullproof- laptop is backed up to a head office server. this issue only came about as the comapny laptop is a Toshiba 430CDT, i dont know much but i know its s**t! so i used my home pc instead and backed up to Zip- hence the claim from my co. that that wasnt safe blah, blah, blah.

Tiggs

 

I have a parallel port adapter that resets Tosh POP's. (Would be silly to make it totally secure in case someone forgot - useless laptop.) You can get the pin out from the web and make it in 10 minutes. I find the best method of security are usually simple personalised ones. E.G Save spreadsheets as text files (with .txt extension as opposed to save as actual text file). Someone gets their hands on the file, they will have no reason to open it in Excel, and will get garbage in notepad. No totally foolproof, but nothing is, and if it is personalised it can be much harder to break