We generally don't use wifi when we are traveling due to the repeated warnings we here about hacks of public wifi systems like coffee shops, parks, and campgrounds. How risky it actually is, I have no idea, but we tend to be very cautious in general on stuff like this.
For the last decade I have had our main PC setup with 4 hard drives that have 3 of them with their own standalone installation of the same windows license. The fourth is a bit data only drive for backup storage. All are independently switched on manually and any combination of them can be used. One is for my daily use and doesn't have any sensitive stuff on it like financial things. One is used for our financial stuff only and is only on very short periods once a month. One is used as a test drive to see if things are worth using without them messing up the main drive and also if there something I want to see, but the security software says it is risky. It is used to be used for the grandkids to use if needed, but now they all are on phones. I was told by numerous computer geeks that even though they use the same bios in the PC and motherboard, there is not much risk of issues because the operating systems are completely separated and it is very, very rare to have two with operating systems on at the same time, and always disconnect from internet when doing it. Usually just if I am cloning a new copy of one of the drives into it from the test drive.
Back to camping, we use DW's laptop which doesn't have a lot of things on it that could be issues, but still don't want to lose the data or get it locked on it or get it locked to a hack even though we do periodic backups to a standalone drive.
Based on what we have on the PC, I thinking I could add a partition to the portable drive that we have for the laptop so we can recover it when we travel, and then clone the complete laptop hard drive to that new partition so we could boot off that when on traveling wifi. We would only use the wifi if we didn't have a mobile hotspot connection and that doesn't happen very often these days with the Nighthawk hotspot.
The only glitch would the that the backup data would show up on the system booted from the same hard drive, as would the hard drive on the laptop.
Another portable drive would take care of the backup data, but the seeing the laptop if tougher, I think, to take care of.
Anybody know of a way to hide the hard drive on the laptop when booted from the portable drive? I really want to stay away from encryption.
For the last decade I have had our main PC setup with 4 hard drives that have 3 of them with their own standalone installation of the same windows license. The fourth is a bit data only drive for backup storage. All are independently switched on manually and any combination of them can be used. One is for my daily use and doesn't have any sensitive stuff on it like financial things. One is used for our financial stuff only and is only on very short periods once a month. One is used as a test drive to see if things are worth using without them messing up the main drive and also if there something I want to see, but the security software says it is risky. It is used to be used for the grandkids to use if needed, but now they all are on phones. I was told by numerous computer geeks that even though they use the same bios in the PC and motherboard, there is not much risk of issues because the operating systems are completely separated and it is very, very rare to have two with operating systems on at the same time, and always disconnect from internet when doing it. Usually just if I am cloning a new copy of one of the drives into it from the test drive.
Back to camping, we use DW's laptop which doesn't have a lot of things on it that could be issues, but still don't want to lose the data or get it locked on it or get it locked to a hack even though we do periodic backups to a standalone drive.
Based on what we have on the PC, I thinking I could add a partition to the portable drive that we have for the laptop so we can recover it when we travel, and then clone the complete laptop hard drive to that new partition so we could boot off that when on traveling wifi. We would only use the wifi if we didn't have a mobile hotspot connection and that doesn't happen very often these days with the Nighthawk hotspot.
The only glitch would the that the backup data would show up on the system booted from the same hard drive, as would the hard drive on the laptop.
Another portable drive would take care of the backup data, but the seeing the laptop if tougher, I think, to take care of.
Anybody know of a way to hide the hard drive on the laptop when booted from the portable drive? I really want to stay away from encryption.