Installing the “Traveler” Files to the Drive
In order to have TrueCrypt auto-start when the USB flash drive is inserted, we must first ask TrueCrypt to install the portable files. This is easily done.
1. Start TrueCrypt and click Tools, then Traveler Disc Setup.
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2. In the “File Settings” area, click “Browse” and navigate to the root directory of your USB Flash Drive. Select “Include TrueCrypt Volume Creation Wizard.” Select “Auto-mount TrueCrypt volume (specified below).” Enter the file name you want to use in the following step to create your TrueCrypt volume. You can give it the file extension .tc to help you remember what it is. We named ours “MyData.tc.” Finally, select “Open Explorer Window for Mounted Volume.”
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3. Click “Create” and TrueCrypt will very quickly report success.
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4. Let’s see what was put on the flash drive. In the root directory is “autorun.inf” and a TrueCrypt folder.
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And selecting “Properties" for the drive shows that only about 3 MB of drive space were used.
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Creating the TrueCrypt Container File
The fastest way for the non-expert user to create a TrueCrypt data file is through the Wizard.
1. Start TrueCrypt on the PC and click “Create Volume.” This brings up the “Volume Creation Wizard.”
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2. Select “Create a file container” and click “Next.” Select “Standard TrueCrypt volume” and click “Next.”
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3. Click “Browse” under “Select File” and browse to the root directory of your USB flash drive. In the File Name field, enter the filename you decided on when installing the Traveler files to the drive.
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4. Back in the “Volume Location” dialog, click “Next.” This will open the “Encryption Options” dialog. Since the standard settings are good enough for the US government’s “Top Secret" classification, they are good enough for us. Accept the defaults and click “Next.”
5. The next screen is “Volume Size.” In our case, 7573.14 MB are available. Since it’s probably a good idea to leave some extra space, we selected 7550 MB as the size of our container file.
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6. Here we may need to think about the password a little bit. Is the purpose of encrypting the contents of our USB flash drive to keep out prying eyes from our coworkers, to secure personal or corporate data if the card is lost or stolen, vital to national security, hands-off for the kids, or something in-between? Decide for yourself and then choose your password or passphrase appropriately.
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7. Large files? Do you intend to use files over 4 GB in this volume? We formatted the drive itself to NTFS in order to get large file support for the container file itself, but is it likely that we’ll be using such large files in the container? For us it’s not, at least until high-definition video becomes commonplace, so we’ll select “No” here and click “Next.”
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8. This opens the “Volume Format” dialog. We see that it chose FAT for the file format. The idea here is to waggle the mouse over the dialog for at least thirty seconds in order to get a good “random seed” for your encryption.
Then click "Format."
It took about six minutes to format a 7550 MB volume on our flash drive. The activity light on the drive continued flashing about a minute after TrueCrypt reported success.
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9. Click “OK” in the dialog that reports a successfully created volume, and then click “Exit” to close the Wizard. This concludes creating the TrueCrypt container file.