Securing Your Hard Drive

Being able to browse anonymously is one thing. However, you may choose to download and save sensitive content or material to your computer which you wish to keep private. This may include reading sensitive documents, viewing pictures, or storing any kind of sensitive data.
If you save *anything* to your computer's harddrive, then it is possible for someone who has confiscated your computer to determine what it was you saved. This is often true even if you delete the content. For example, suppose I use the Tor Browser and I navigate to a website containing a sensitive document that I wish to read. If I saved that document somewhere on my harddrive, then it is possible for someone else to find it. If I *delete* that document, it may still be possible for someone to undelete it.
Further, even if I never save it to my harddrive but I simply look at it using my word processing software, it may still be saved in a number of ways including:

1. Often programs keep records of filenames. The filename alone is often enough to incriminate
someone.
2. Often programs keep parts of the content viewed saved for various reasons, such as for
searching. This can include random excerpts of text, thumbnails of images, and more. Often this
"partial" data is more than enough to prove what the original data was. Often the "partial" data is
itself incriminating.
3. Sometimes, especially if you are running low on system memory, your operating system may choose to use your hard-disk as a temporary RAM. This is known as "SWAP". Normally, whenever you turn off your computer, whatever was in RAM is deleted. However, the data that goes to your SWAP may persist and it may be possible for someone to see what content you had open in your programs if that informationis saved in RAM.
Generally speaking, you *must* have a plan to secure any content that is saved to your hard disk.
Therefore, this guide would be incomplete if we did not thoroughly address this. First, there are two kinds of such content:
1. Deliberately saved content.
2. Inadvertently saved content.

Deliberately saved content refers to content that you have chosen to save on your harddisk so
that you can access this content later. We will address how to do this later in the guide.

Inadvertently saved content refers to content that is saved by programs you use, or your operating system. You have no way to even know what this content might be. Therefore, this is the most dangerous. You may browse and find a dozen sensitive documents, utterly delete them, and some program may have saved the file names and excerpts of the data. This will render your previous efforts futile.
Content that is inadvertently saved to your harddisk comes in two flavors:
1. Content that is saved to your SWAP space.
2. Content that is saved by applications running on your computer, including your operating system.
The surest way to prevent content from writing to your SWAP space is to disable your SWAP space altogether.
This may result in your computer running a bit slower than normal, and may mean that you cannot use ram intensive games and applications during the time your SWAP is disabled.
Therefore, if you use this method, simply turn back on the SWAP when you want to use those ram intensive applications.
Also, you may choose not to take this step.

Here is how to disable your swap space if you are using Windows 7:

The next issue we need to address is how to prevent applications and/or your operating system from saving content inadvertently that you do not want saved. For this, we are going to set up a "Virtual Machine".
A "Virtual Machine" is like a computer inside of your computer. Everything you do inside the Virtual Machine (vm for short) will be fully contained within itself and no one will be able to see what the vm has been doing. Ideally, you want *ALL* of your sensitive computer usage of any kind, TOR or NON TOR, to take place within a vm. In this way, you can keep everything private that you wish while still using your computer fully and getting the most out of it.
Don't be afraid of this sounds complicated. This guide will take you through every step slowly and
methodically.