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It can get messy depending how you want to interact with a document or folder. Setting up user accounts and access rights can become a tangled mess. For a one off, eg a safe backup, I would just use 7zip and put a password on the archive. I prefer TrueCrypt and have a compressed drive on a tough USB drive so i can pop it in any Windows machine, run a batch file that mounts the drive and I get a popup to enter my password. Then I use the encrypted drive with any program as normal and everything is encrypted/decrypted on the fly in the background with little performance loss. Unmount the drive, unplug and everything is safely stored on my usb drive in an encrypted state. Realistically ask yourself if you REALLY need encryption or maybe change your practices?
Before someone blindly complains, while TrueCrypt is no longer being developed its still the most secure and trustworthy solution i've seen, The media blew up the rare circumstance where TC is weak which are meaningless if you use it properly. If you insist, I can only suggest BestCrypt (not free), most commercially available solutions are from companies I have experience and reason to mistrust. TC needs nothing installed to work, it uses a small executable to mount and decrypt the virtual drive.
Bitlocker, a proprietry closed source product owned by Microsoft that can not be publically verified its secure with no backdoors, and requires two partitions plus a special chip. My god why would anybody even try to use a transparent leaky sieve as a safe? Read "Crypto" and ask yourself the same question and also get an understanding why the americans locked up people as "arms dealers" for writing encryption algorithms and making them freely available by publishing them.Seriously read it and understand why people throwing away trust and their privacy without a thought scares me.
Truecrypt (no doubt other open source encryption solutions are out there). Dont forget your computer is likely to be online these days and by using encrypted drives you have to unlock them which gives malware the permission to do what they want plus an encrypted drive slows the computer (every little thing Windows is constantly reading and writing to a drive has to be encrypted and decrypted which effects performance of EVERYTHING. Also encrypted files are a tasty treat for malware to send back to someone to bruteforce to look for passwords (which windows stores in a single file with lower encryption on them).
So I use ruggedised Corsair thumbdrives with an encrypted virtual drive I can mount fo just when I need it and only store some essential files in it. Been using this practice for years, drives have been bashed around, dropped, thrown, gone through the wash with laundry. Never a problem with them working or being about to access my encrypted data on ANY windows machine and I make sure the drive lives in my pocket when I step away from a machine. The biggest crypto weakpoint is the user behaviour and misunderstanding. If you think it will guard you from online intruders it won't, if you want to keep your "gentlemans entertainment" away from the kids, burn to a disc
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