Use Veracrypt to Encrypt Your USB Drives

With the proliferation of Remote Online Notarizations it is imperative that Notaries Public have a method to secure their external drives, which stores their Electronic Journal. I walk the user through the steps of configuring your USB drive to store your Encrypted Container.

I read the link ~ interesting. I have a secure external hardrive with 65T that is portable. Evernote also discusses future cloud storage. I’m a non-believer of cloud storage and its security. USB you describe sounds convenient but like Zoom, it has gaps for security if user is not adequately trained.

I too am skeptical of cloud security, so I only store encrypted files on the cloud.

Totally agree that this will require some level of knowledge by the end user on best practices for authenticating yourself while online. The key thing to ensure is that 2FA is enabled and a Password Manager be used to generate one’s passphrase. I have no clue what my passphrase is when I log into Google Drive or Pcloud as I use Keepass to generate a very large passphrase that has upper case, lower case, numbers, and special characters to generate my passphrase.

My Keepass database is backed up in several locations as sh…t happens and one needs to be prepared for the worst case scenario. The largest hurdle I can see with my recommendation is the amount of time it will take to back up your entire Veracrypt Container. It may be better to carve up one’s storage in 500GB blocks to make it more manageable to backup.

I live in California so RON is not an option for me, but if/when it happens I’m planning for that day and want to get feedback from others on how they are backing up their RON data. If there is a request for an entry in your Journal and for some reason remote access to your RON Provider’s Electronic Journal is not available then one must have a copy of this data locally. But this data must be encrypted if its stored on a USB drive.

With respect to Evernote, I too am a fan of Evernote, but encryption at the Note level is NOT available. There are some addons such as Saferoom which allows you to encrypt your notes, but it’s a bit kludgy and is not blessed by Evernote. In addition, the files that will be stored for RON will probably be large as video will be a portion of the RON session.

Bottom line, I want to have a copy of my Journal whether it be Digital or Manual in my personal possession at all times.