Scenario:
I'm working since 2 years as a software developer and sys admin. I never had anything useful on my pc. Now it's full of personal and sensitive data (passwords/source codes, etc).
Now that I realized the risks of losing the laptop, I've taken steps to prevent.
I've bought Acronis True Image to backup my whole computer periodically to an hard disk once, then proceding with incremental backups. The first backup I did today is free of any TrueCrypt use, nothing is encrypted with it. I've just encrypted the backup itself with Acronis True Image. My laptop has 2 hard drives and all of them are backed up.
Now that I have a safe copy of my whole computer, I wanted to proceed to a full drive encryption so that if I lose it, data will be safe.
So I've started documenting myself about the whole process. I have too much files around, spread around the 2 drives, so I wouldn't want to create a smaller container and move everything in there. I'd rather do a whole disk encryption so I'm fully safe about everything.
I've read that one good step is that you make and header backup (a feature truecrypt provides) to recover headers of the container so if you get corrupted container you can get it back.
So questions:
1)What are the steps to reduce the risk of corruption and failures?
2)What are the risks? Do you recommend full encryption or not, considering the backups? Any detailed explanation, article or comment will be much appreciated.
3)I've read here that Acronis and TrueCrypt aren't fully compatible (like you can backup only at container file level. Someone can elaborate? I've found ssome questions here, but nothing really clear.
4)Will TrueCrypt mess up with big files (iso images? Visual studio setup? SQL Server setup?) since it puts unencrypted files in ram? I have 3GB ram, should I not do this?
Thanks everyone for the help