I'm trying to decide if I should go with TrueCrypt for securing my laptop. I find myself always looking in the direction of my laptop when I'm on the move and can't keep it near me. It's not so much for the laptop itself but for the contents. This is what I use it for:
Personal data, pictures and personal projects.
Commercial projects, all closed source. These are mostly projects for my company, which I own. I want to avoid getting them out into the public, but there's no risk of me getting sued or anything.
The usual password files, login credicentials and so on.
Source code is uploaded to a SVN server regurarly, encrypted using 128-bit AES.
At the same time as the above is important to me, so is performance. I've seen the benchmarks and they claim the difference is quite small and that's relieving. I don't use it for anything disk-intensive, except for compiling which I want to be fast. I don't care about gaming.
So my questions are, would you do this in my situation? If not, why wouldn't you?
Truecrypt will not reduce performance in any case unless you have a prehistoric computer. Modern processors can encrypt data several times faster than the hard drive can read or write (yes, even if you have a solid-state disk). So performance will probably not be an issue, especially considering you will not be using the disk much.
Of course, there's always the issue of data corruption, and/or losing/forgetting your Truecrypt key. But that point is moot when you consider that data corruption can occur anytime. In fact you might drop your laptop by accident tomorrow and break its hard drive, so this is pretty much irrelevant.
That said, I hope you know you still need backups - not being able to read a file doesn't prevent an attacker from destroying it ("if I can't read it, nobody will!"), and Truecrypt will not help you there.
If you only had personal information on the laptop I would've voted... no, not much point. What's a random thief gonna do with family pictures? But since you have professional data on this laptop, I strongly recommend that yes, you use Truecrypt. Even if it's not very important, you definitely cannot afford having this type of information leak out.
“If I understand the standard right it is legal and safe to do this but the resulting value could be anything.”
You mentioned dropping or otherwise damaging the laptop. It's a non issue to me as I upload source to a SVN server regurarly. The rest of the data on the laptop is definatly disposable. (Sorry I forgot to mention this in the OP, I edited it in now) I just don't want the source code to be leaked out.
I might look into encrypting just the source code in the future, but so far I'm not noticing any slowdowns. Impressive!
