Just Curious about something

[glen pinn]

Hi everyone, recently bagan using VeraCrypt Free edition, although i will be donating to this software soon.
I am curious about something and just wanted to run this by your people.

I encrypted a 2tb external portable Hdd, the complete volume, and i have placed 500gb of personal data onto that drive with the hope that nobody will ever gain access to that data.

Prior to adding those files to the drive they were all placed into various folders, any folder that did not require added security were placed onto the portable drive, any folder that contained personal family related photos were Zipped using 7Zip with a very strong password, and all my personal files (Excel or Word files) were password protected to open and modify, and the folder they were put in was Zipped with a very strong password as well.

The other day i was thinking about some security matters, and it made me wonder just how secure my files really were.

What if i lost that portable drive, and someone connected it to their computer/laptop and found it to be encrypted, couldn't they simply install a File Recovery software and run that in recovery mode to gain access to them, which can be done even if the person was to format the portable drive prior to doing so.

Can VeraCrypt somehow prevent this from happening, so our files are safe from recovery software as well.

The reason for password protecting personal files, and zipping up some folders with 7Zip was done because of my paranoia and wanting my files as safe as i can get them, and this is the way i have been working with my files for a very long time, adding them to an encrypted drive just seemed to add another more secure barrier.

I also want to use a Cloud storage (Sync.com) but i assume that this is not really that secure, but i need a cloud Syncing service as i travel a lot and need to access to many of my files wherever i go.

Cheers

[Philip Smith]

If you placed your encrypted files onto the 2tb encrypted partition - They are now much safer depending on your password.

I see one possible problem with what you have done, you say "any folder that contained personal family related photos were Zipped using 7Zip with a very strong password"
Now the problem here is correct me if I am wrong but you have a folder of things, you then encrypt it but now you have sitting on that computer one set of original things + an encrypted file if you delete those original files someone can use recovery software the recover them - So make sure you delete them properly and ensure the zip program does not keep a log file of what it has done.
As a test get a good recovery program and run it on the partition where the files were see if any show up.

Make sure nothing shows up not even the original name of the file.

Your biggest problem in my opinion is "I also want to use a Cloud storage (Sync.com)" I would not trust ANY as far as I could lift an elephant, simply you can bet some are run by the security services or like other companies they have been given back door access ( just like the internet traffic copied by the NSA which they denied they were doing has been proven to be going on)

One other important thing.
Make sure you NEVER use an online program to test the strenght of your password, you can bet they are all being kept and someone now has a massive file of passwords to try.

[glen pinn]

Hi, i never gave it a thought to use my EaseUS Data Recovery Pro software to try and recover files on that encrypted portable drive, so i will try it tonight and let you know how it went.

Cheers

Edit, this is crazy, i copied 4 simple Word Doc files to that Brand New never used portable drive and so far it has located 271 files with a total size of 548gb.

All bar 3 files so far are ShockWave Files of various sizes, so i don't know what is happening here, but i unboxed that new drive 3 days ago, so is Seagate actually taking used drives and flogging them off as new retail drives, or is there something else going on here.

Image available here = https://ibb.co/4NdTh4g

this is a CDI Disk Info screenshot of this same drive, it does not make sense that this brand new drive can have only 5 power on counts and 34 power on count if it was used before, as 26 of those power on hours was used for the VeraCrypt encryption time.

https://ibb.co/bK48PLp