Security of External Harddrive

[koozie65]

I work for a small home based business. We use Peachtree accounting for payroll and the checking account. I boss is worried that people will be able to get our checking account information since it is on the same computer that we access the internet with. He wants me to try to put the Peachtree on an external hard drive so it can be removed when I am on the internet. Any suggestions? Is this a good or bad idea? If it's not a very smart thing what suggestions are out there?

Thanks

[Rob Pomeroy]

That is a good question, and business-sensitive data particularly needs to be protected.  The best protection would be to have the data on a single PC that is not connected to any network (including the internet).  Alternatively, you could store the data on an encrypted USB pen drive - you would be able to remove that when surfing, for added security.

BUT.

Provided you take suitable precautions when browsing (up to date, reputable virus-checker, anti-spyware software, correctly configured firewall and file and printer sharing turned off unless you really need it) you don't really need to worry so much about this.  NO security is perfect (someone could after all steal the computer/external hard drive); you just do the best you can.

[soybean]

If running Windows XP on a hard drive formatted NTFS, I guess you could enable encryption on the directory in which Peachtree is installed.  I can't explain details of doing this; I really don't know much about this option on an NTFS system.  Just a thought; might be worth getting more info.

Needless to say, using a strong password on Peachtree is probably a good idea.  Other than that, I can't add anything to robpomeroy's good advice.

I would recommend doing your Peachtree backups to an external hard drive.

By the way, here's a Peachtree forum you might find helpful: http://www.peachtreeusers.com/.forums/

[soybean]

An afterthought: I'm familiar with Peachtree.  I have the 2003 version installed on my computer.  If you open Peachtree's Help and enter data path in the search box, you should find some infomation about where Peachtree stores data files.  I believe you could specify a data path, meaning the location where your actual Peachtree accounting data is stored, pointing to an external drive.  In other words, your program files would be installed on your internal hard drive but the data files created by using the program for your accounting would be stored on another partition, internal hard drive, or an external drive.