Agile's "Knox"

One of my all-time favorite companies, Canada's Agile Web Solutions just acquired Knox. Knox creates and manages standardized encrypted volumes. These function just like any other disk, except that they are "soft" disks, meaning that you can store them on your hard drive just like other files and folders. And they are encrypted so that when they are "closed" nobody can see or figure out what they hold unless they have the password.

Knox uses one of the same types of disks that Apple's Disk Utility uses, and so in that way it is unnecessary. However Knox is prettier, easier to use, and gives you some neat options for managing your disks (you can control whether the disks stay open across restarts, whether each disk is indexed and searchable by Spotlight when it is open, etc.).

TrueCrypt is the open-source alternative to Disk Utility and Knox, and it has a lot more functionality, though it is not as pretty or easy to use.

If I had a need to use multiple encrypted volumes of this kind regularly I would probably buy Knox, which is currently half price to celebrate it's acquisition by Agile. Frankly I am a little bit disappointed that I don't have a good excuse to buy it, since it runs so smoothly and looks so pretty and it is such a joy to use Agile software (or visit the Agile forums and knowledge bases, etc.).