Monday 12 January 2015

Trying out BoxCryptor on my Computers

Encrypting your files for Cloud storage

Whether this would be useful to you really depends upon whether you trust the cloud storage service you are using. With the way things are with requirements for security and the hacking that goes on, I think we can probably expect to have fairly decent security with things like Dropbox. Then again, if you are paranoid you might look at the possibility of encrypting your files before you upload to the cloud services. I have GPG encryption available to me on my Mac and also on my iOS devices. I have recently seen that there is another possibility for encrypting your files before you put them on to dropbox or wherever and it is called Boxcryptor. It has a free version which allows you to connect to one of your client services and that might be all that you need. If you need to work cross-platform there are applications for just about all of the computer platforms you are likely to use. I have downloaded the application for Mac and also for iOS and my next job will be to test to see how this works. The question is, will I be able to encrypt a file on my Mac and upload it to Dropbox and still be able to see this file where I open it up on iOS. The first thing to do after you have downloaded the application and installed it, is to set up an account.

Boxcryptor

Safe, secure and don’t lose your password

When you sign up for an account you are warned that you should make sure to remember your password. For this you should use one of the password managers such as 1Password.

As part of my research into this application I have been installing on my Mac and also onto my iPhone and trying to encrypt a couple of files in Dropbox. I first of all signed up to the service on the web and tried to use the same password when signing into the application which I’d downloaded. This didn’t work and I had to go back to the drawing board. It seems that you have to use a different password on each device and it seemed to be quite a lot of messing around. After trying to set up the application on my iPhone I have to admit to getting rather fed up with it. It has got to the point that I will certainly be deleting the application on all of my devices. There is always a trade-off between security and convenience and it may well be the case that this application works very well and does what you need to do. It is just that it has become too much of a pain in the bottom for me to want to use it. I think I would rather use the GPG encryption process if I need to encrypt anything specifically to put into Dropbox or anywhere else. It seemed to be that I ended up with too many passwords all over the place and it became a password merry-go-round.

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