So we got a cloud storage for many-many gigabytes.
Now you would want to encrypt the files you upload, so no one except you could ever access it, keeping the same level of user friendliness you already have while syncing the files? Because if you don’t need sync, you can just archive the files with a password and upload them to the cloud. What I need is my local files being automatically encrypted before automatically uploaded to the cloud storage, and any changes of the local files should be reflected in the cloud storage, i.e. deleted files are removed and new files are placed on the cloud, also encrypted. The first utility that comes to mind is Truecrypt. Truecrypt is an extremely reliable piece of software, which I’ve been using for almost 10 years now. It creates an encrypted file – container, and then mounts it in the system like a normal drive. You work with such container as with any thumbdrive, but without password, this container is almost impossible to open. Unfortunately, Truecrypt does a poor job with incremental changes. That means if you have a thousand files inside the container, and you changed one, the entire container has to be reuploaded to the cloud. This is not exactly practical. Another way is to use encrypted filesystem – encfs. Unfortunately, it only works good in Linux. Moreover, to use encfs the cloud storage must support WebDAV protocol, and some free cloud storage providers disable it. Windows has a very raw port of encfs4win, but as it is raw, I cannot recommend it for reliable file storage. A more advanced encfs flavour for Windows is called BoxCryptor. I have to mention this is a commercial product, so you will have to pay if you want full features. The free account supports only 2 connections, that is if you want to sync files between 3 computers, you will have to pay for the 3 connection. Or try to earn it with their referral program. If you decide to stick with BoxCrytor, please follow my referral link in the description so I can get the extra connection. Thank you. Other alternatives are Safemonk, Viivo, Cloud Fogger, to name a few. They all are commercial and start to beg for money at some point. The major concern with this online tools is why I got to have an online account for a purely local, offline procedure? They also seem to require internet connection. Fuck it. I’ll show you a proper tool for that. There is a guy named Stefan. And he makes a very simple but convenient utility name CryptSync. It just archives all the files in the folder with 7Zip encryption, and then syncs all this encrypted files with the source unencrypted folder. Then you sync the folder full of 7Zips with the cloud using standard cloud client software, which uploads and syncs them in the cloud. Simple and genius. The drawback is that you will have two copies of the same files on your local drive. But to compensate for that you get your files compressed, which in my case shrinked 35 gb of documents I wanted to sync to mere 20 Gb. Neat. Another vital characteristic is that CryptSync uses standard software. At any time you can just download the files from the cloud and unpack them with 7Zip or WinRar, entering the proper password you used for encryption. If you need the folder synced to many computers, just setup the cloud client and CryptSync on all of them. So go register at BoxCrypt to get me referrals, but use CryptSync for you needs. And remember to use different passwords for your cloud storage access and the file encryption. In this case if someone finds out one of the passwords, he will still need the other one to access them.