Arriving for its regular update, the latest version of Steganos Safe still holds at its heart a desire to keep your data away from prying eyes. It does this by, on installation, immediately offering you the chance to create a secure drive.

This is, to all intents and purposes, a virtual drive on your PC to which Steganos will then apply its protection technologies. So we started there. The program, once activated, opens at a menu screen with the option to set up one of these drives or import an existing one from elsewhere.

We chose to create a brand new one, and next had to choose how big we wanted the virtual drive to be. The program takes into account your operating system and space available on the hard drive, and offers a maximum drive size you can set, which in our case was 140GB with a minimum of 2MB. That was on a Vista machine, and 140GB was the remaining space on our test drive. The program supports up to 512GB virtual drives, and you can have plenty of them if you have the necessary drive space.

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You can choose how much space to give over either by inputting an exact amount or moving a sliding bar. We chose our size and then assigned a drive letter, and Safe got down to work.

Then you need to choose a password. The program assesses the quality of the password, also offering the option to generate one on your behalf, or allow you to pick a visual key using PicPass. This is where you choose a selection of images in a certain order, rather than using a textual password that by its nature is a little more vulnerable. You can also choose to store the password as a key on a USB stick or something of that ilk.

The creation of the drive takes a minute or so, dependent on the size you've opted for, and the secure drive then appears on the Safe menu screen. It doesn't, however, appear in Windows Explorer until you've opened it - which requires the password or USB key - and even then, the program asks whether you wish it to appear there.

Once open, you treat your safe just like you would a normal hard drive, with anything you place in there being encrypted immediately. You then close your safe once done, and it can only be opened again once the password or USB key is in place. The safe also shuts down when you log off or put your PC in sleep mode.

We've been testing Safe in various guises for several years now, and have yet to come anywhere near breaking its bulletproof hold on our data. It's comfortable with holding emails as well as documents and multimedia, and also works its magic on portable drives. Finally, the program bundles in an effective file shredder, too, amongst a smattering of other options.

Safe is a utility that's ruthlessly efficient at its critical job, and deservedly continues to attract praise for it. There's not anything close to a seismic leap between this version and the last, though, which is arguably the main criticism against it. But it's more than ample for hiding your data, and heading off the unwanted snooping eyes of both the casual and committed data thief.

A reliable way to contain your data, even if it's hardly a dramatic update. The low price helps, though.