Recover XP with GuardianEdge Installed

Encryption really only helps protect the information on the hard drive while you are travelling away from home or office, or when your laptop is vulnerable to theft.  I recommend moving files off of any encrypted volume at the earliest possible opportunity and suggest storing them on an encrypted thumbdrive (or password protected thumbdrive) as the alternative strategy to data safety.

I am mentioning this not only because I worked with GuardianEdge encryption for four years, but also because the idea of being 'data vulnerable' is not obvious to most users.  If you are the type of business person or user with valuable data on a laptop, you may be a target for information criminals --- and they do not necessarily want a copy of your information so much as they want to deprive you of the benefit of having it.  By this I mean an encrypted laptop seems safe, but there are people (perhaps business competitors) who would steal the laptop and just destroy it!  This tactic is done in the hope of depriving you of data which has not been backed up anywhere yet.  Regardless of whether it is contractual information, bids being prepared, sensitive personnel data or other competitive information, if the purpose is to 'set you back' a week's worth of work or cause a deadline to be missed, a missing laptop is a goal achieved in some scenarios.

Finally, if all the important data is safe on external media (or a network share drive) than when issues with the encryption develop the system may be safely 'slicked' and reloaded; to get the asset and the user back to work as soon as possible!  In a time-critical organization the idea of having extra hard drives preloaded and ready to be swapped into the laptops is also a super-strategy to consider.  Yes, extra hard drives sitting on a shelf (or in an I.T. department's fire resistant safe) is an additional expense, but it only takes one incident avoided to recoup the cost in many business scenarios.*

Notes:
The preloaded hard drive ready to deploy scenario ONLY works if the organization has a standard laptop deployed to all travelling users.  The platform of the unit must be identical; users may have differing external USB devices such as wireless network adapters, mice, keyboards, USB thumbdrives, external drives and card readers (more gadgets to keep track of, but still resource-wise).

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