Automating Encryption of Financial files

I’m not the most paranoid person in the world, but I *do* believe in safeguarding my critical files. If my computer is ever compromised I like to ensure that as much as possible, all of my personal information, financial records, etc. are encrypted.

To this end I make use of TrueCrypt. This is such a useful utility that I have also gone ahead and made a donation to support the author. I *highly* recommend you get TrueCrypt and use it to safeguard your own information.

I’ve created a batch file which I execute whenever I want to use Quicken that will mount my encrypted volume, open Quicken, then dismount the volume when Quicken exits

Part of TrueCrypt’s mandate is to try to also thwart folks from figuring out what files you’re using by not updating the timestamps of volume container files when they’ve been modified. I don’t need quite this level of protection, but in command-line mode I can’t get away from it.

My nightly backup solution depends upon timestamps in order to determine what should be backed up. Of course one thing I don’t ever want skipped in my nightly backup is my financial stuff.

So I found a great little Freeware Touch utility written by Steve Miller. It is a part of his “Win32 Console ToolBox 1.0 (Item 10)”.

My final batch file looks like this and works like a charm. It will mount my volume on the Q: drive, prompt me for my password, run Quicken, dismount the drive then update the modified timestamp for me.

“C:\Program Files (x86)\TrueCrypt\truecrypt.exe” /v c:\nameofmyquickenvolumehere /l Q /q

“C:\Program Files (x86)\Quicken\qw.exe”

“C:\Program Files (x86)\TrueCrypt\truecrypt.exe” /d Q /q

“C:\bin\touch.exe” /m c:\nameofmyquickenvolumehere