Open source applications have advantages other than free or low cost. The best security products are open source, for example OpenSSH, OpenSSL, GPG, and the iptables firewall. Most commercial products are for Windows only, or sometimes Windows and Mac, while their open source cousins serve Mac, Linux, Unix, and other platforms. In this roundup we look at some good open source apps for securing and rescuing our data on PCs, and for protecting our mobile devices.

The real gold on any of our computers is our personal data. These fine free open source programs scrub hard disks, undelete, recover data from failing and damaged storage media, and securely encrypt our files.