Is moving all the user folders to an encrypted directory enough?

Question

In Windows 7, is it enough to move all the subfolders of c:\Users\Username\ to an encrypted file system to have all the important information, like Firefox, Chrome and Intenet Explorer passwords, encrypted?

Answer 1

basically yes. All well behaved software will store your data in your user profile so placing that on an encrypted drive will give you the benefit of encryption. If you have some older software it might want to save it settings and temp files in odd locations.

Answer 2

As mentioned, some programs might leave sensitive data in the temp folder. However information may also be stored in the registry. A lot get stored in memory, so if your machine is paging, then your pagefile could potentially hold stuff, as your hiberfile.sys if you ever hibernate your machine.

There's always going to be some stupid program doing something it shouldn't, so I'd go for full disk encryption - it's the only way you can be confident about it.