Encrypt your hard drive

As Edward Snowden confirmed, encrypting your hard drive is an effective way to keep people from easily reading your files if they manage to get a hold of them. Lets look at some tools for encrypting your hard drive.

Mac users are in luck, as OS X has a built in solution called FileVault which can be turned on in the system preferences. When you go through the set up you will be given a recovery key which will let you decrypt your data if you ever forget your password, you should record somewhere safe. Once this set-up is complete, you can use your computer as normal while it encrypts your hard drive in the background. All files saved on your drive from now on will be automatically encrypted. For full instructions, here's a step-by step guide. One of the downsides is that a small handful of programs are not compatible with FileVault, Diablo III being one example.

Windows users can download TrueCrypt, a free disk encryption utility that is a bit more robust than FileVault, in additon to encrypting you drive, it enables you to create hidden disk partitions and encrypt them to further increase security. Unfortunately I can't vouch for how well TrueCrypt works as I have not used it, but here are instructions for setting it upon your machine. (Alternatively you can use Bitlocker.)