How important is the pass-phrase?
It is critically important. It is almost certainly the weakest link in the encryption chain with most home/amateur users. I provide links at the end of the FAQ, some of these should either help directly or give further links about how to create an effective pass-phrase. For the newbies: never choose a single word, no matter how unusual you think it is. A pass-phrase must be that, a phrase, a series of words, characters and punctuation intermixed. One method that I believe would help is to deliberately mis-spell common words in a phrase. Scruggle in place of struggle, matrificent in place of magnificent. These could be the start of a longer phrase. Taking this a step further, invent words that are pronounceable but totally meaningless. Note it is important to include some figures and keyboard characters such as punctuation. The use of these will ensure that a simple search using just lower case letters will fail.
