There are various tools available to help you encrypt and protect your personal private files. On-the-fly-encryption (OTFE) is one of the popular methods used by disk encryption software. This method allows the data to be encrypted just before it is written to disk and decrypted after it is read from the disk transparently on the background.

R-Crypto is an easy-to-use disk encryption software for Windows to protect your personal and private data, in fact, it is very easy to use. R-Crypto can protect your personal confidential files by creating encrypted virtual disks and each disk is a single file-container. This virtual disk is protected with password. A user can only access the files inside the virtual disk when the correct password is provided. After a user provides the correct password, the virtual disk can be mounted and the user can use the encrypted virtual disk just like a normal drive.

To use R-Crypto to protect your personal files, you must first create a new R-Crypto encrypted disk. R-Crypto encrypted disk is a container file which can be mounted as virtual disk. The container file is stored on your system just like a normal file.

1. In R-Crypto Management Panel, click ‘Run new encrypted disk creation wizard’ [1] and click ‘Next’.

2. Specify the name of the container file [2] and choose the location where you want to store the encrypted disk container file [3]. Choose the size for your encrypted disk [4] and click ‘Next’. As for the encryption setting, you can use the default SHA-1, AES-256. Click ‘Next’

3. On the next screen, you can use the default value. Select ‘Automatically connect this drive after creation’ [5] if you want to mount the encrypted virtual disk after the virtual disk is created. Click ‘Next’ to go to the next page. On the next page, choose the password for your encrypted disk. Make sure you use a strong password. Click ‘Next’ and ‘Finish’ to create the encrypted disk file-container. Depending on the size of the encrypted disk and your system speed, the creation of the container file will take some time. If you choose ‘Automatically connect this drive after creation’, the encrypted disk will be connected once the container file is created.

4. There are several ways to connect (or mount) the encrypted disk so you can access the files inside it or store any personal private file into the encrypted disk.

- From R-Crypto management panel, you can click ‘Connect Disk’ [6] or click ‘Connect’ [7] from the recent list of encrypted disk.

- Double-click the encrypted disk file-container in the Windows Explorer.

- Right-click the encrypted disk file-container in the Windows Explorer and select Connect on the shortcut menu.

- Right-click the R-Crypto icon in the system tray, select Recent Disks on the shortcut menu, then select the required encrypted disk.

- Right-click the encrypted disk's file-container in the Windows Explorer select Properties on the shortcut menu, go to the R-Crypto tab, and click the Connect button.

Before the virtual disk is connected, you will be prompt to enter the disk’s password.

You can set R-Crypto to disconnect any encrypted disk under certain cases, for example if the encrypted disk exceeds inactivity period of 15 minutes or when the screen saver is running. You can set this option in R-Crypto settings. The R-Crypto container size can be resized easily from R-Crypto management panel. However in my test, the resizing process take quite some time and sometimes it was too long. You might want to manually create a new container file with larger size, and copy the files from the old encrypted disk to the new one.

Since it is so simple, R-Crypto lacks of advanced features such as the ability to provide plausible deniability (or hidden container), using key file to encrypt the virtual disk or using multiple keys/passwords. R-Crypto is a perfect disk encryption software if you are looking for a simple and easy-to use disk encryption software. R-Crypto is free for home/personal use and free registration is required to obtain a free registration key. If you are looking for more advanced disk encryption software, you might want to try TrueCrypt.