Dropbox and EncFS- A Great Combo

I have a lot of documents that I want to keep with me, but I don’t want to trust my data to the cloud. What if an unscrupulous sysadmin decides to snoop through my data?

Then again, it’s highly inconvenient to tote along a data stick with me. If I lose it, then I might as well assume that information is lost forever.

Convenience and security.. do those two concepts have to be mutually exclusive?

Not necessarily. I was introduced to Dropbox at a computer security competition a year ago, and I’ve really liked it, but I haven’t really taken the plunge in terms of storing my important data on it. Sure, Dropbox sports encryption, but that doesn’t protect me from Big Brother giving Dropbox a subpoena. The solution I chose to solve that problem was to use a encrypted filesystem and store my files inside of it on Dropbox. This way, Dropbox admins can’t read my files, and nor can people that could steal my laptop/PC/whatever.

The cool thing is: Dropbox is supported on Win/Mac/Linux, and so is EncFS(For Windows, support is somewhat limited) So, now I have 2 GB of data nestled on the cloud tightly secured for free.

Guide: http://blog.bprog.no/index.php/2008/09/dropbox-encfs-fast-and-secure-synchronization-of-data/

Software:
https://www.dropbox.com/ (all platforms)
http://www.arg0.net/encfs (Should find this in your distro)
http://www.chuckknowsbest.com/ikrypt/download.html (mac)