I keep all my sensitive documents encrypted in Truecrypt volumes (don’t you?). But I ran into a problem when I wanted to share a Truecrypt volume across my home network. I had to setup the share every time I mounted the volume.
Then it hit me; my flaw was that I was trying to set up a share within the Truecrypt volume. I needed to set up a share and then mount the TC volume inside that share. But you can’t mount a Truecrypt volume to a directory. Humm….
Enter Hardlink Shell Extension. HSE will let you create Volume Mount Points in Windows. That will let you “map complete local volumes onto arbitrary disk locations”. So you can create a VMP (as a folder) and point it at the drive letter of your TC volume. That way whenever you mount the TC volume to that drive letter, it will already be shared.
After installing the HSE, Mount your TC volume, right-click, and select “Pick Link Source”
Now go to the drive you are going to set up your shared folder and right click. Then select “Drop As…” and “Volume Mountpoint”.
Now just share the resulting folder.
When you mount the TC volume (or any TC volume for that matter) to the drive letter you selected as your “Link Source” it will be shared.
–Zen
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September 27th, 2009 at 9:01 am
I think this was a very interesting post thanks for writing it!
February 28th, 2010 at 1:58 pm
Just what I was looking for. Thank you Zen
~Ben
May 2nd, 2010 at 10:41 am
hi, do you have any idea on how to do the opposite, i.e. restricting access the mounted volume?
here is my situation:
i use a truecrypt volume to store my data on USB for access on multiple machines. when i mount the volume, it becomes visible to other people on the machine. i tried to set NTFS permission, but then i need to have the files accessible from multiple machines not belonging to the same domain. any suggestion?
May 3rd, 2010 at 8:16 am
Lazy, I may need more info to try to answer your question. But if you are just trying to hide your mounted TC volume on and XP machine, the easiest way would probably be to use TweakUI. In TweakUI, you would go to My Computer and then Drives and uncheck the drive you want to hide.
Or if you use the same drive letter to mount each time, you could then use a registry hack to hide it: http://tinyurl.com/33yzl8a