Encrypting your hard drive is the new cool, and it's about to significantly impact your life. You know that sinking feeling you get when you try to do something important, like check your bank account or pay a bill, and you find out that you can't because someone has stolen your identity and used it? Encrypting data stored on a hard drive is one way to ensure that something like this will never occur again. Encryption of a hard drive transforms the data stored on it into a format that unauthorized users cannot read, thereby preventing that data from being accessed by those individuals. To decrypt the data, you must have the correct key or password. Encrypting data stored on a hard drive provides protection against dangers posed online, such as hackers. The use of encryption is analogous to temporarily donning a pair of sunglasses; while doing so, your vision will be temporarily impeded. You will not be able to see anything in front of you while wearing them. However, as soon as you remove them, everything becomes crystal clear and straightforward to observe once more. Encryption can be thought of as a pair of glasses that make it more difficult to read everything except the information that has been scrambled or scrambled and encrypted. When you put on your glasses, no one else, not even the person standing next to you, can see what is written on the paper you have in front of you. Therefore, it begs the question: why would anybody want to use specialized software that encrypts files? Because once they have been encrypted, it is impossible for anyone who does not possess the necessary keys to decrypt them to read them in any form. Even if someone steals your computer or hard drive and then attempts to hack into it, they won't be able to access any of your files even if they try unless they have access to those keys (which ONLY YOU should have).