Yes, it’s true. Finally a way to get your personal files on each machine you work with that gets backed up online without any worry of who is rummaging through your data when you aren’t looking! It’s the secure online backup you were looking for!
Windows? Linux? Mac? No problem. Installers are available for all three systems.
DropBox (a glorified subversion system for the rest of us) has finally worked its way out of beta and will become the backbone for our project. Transmission of data to DropBox is via HTTPS, so we at least have half the problem resolved.
The second problem is DropBox’s STORAGE of my files. If they defect to the goverment faster than AT&T did with the NSA, then you can be sure your private key and personal bookmarks to porn sites will be used against you. I wanted the storage of my files encrypted. Since I couldn’t trust DropBox, I turned to my good old friend, TrueCrypt.
The solution here is to create a TrueCrypt volume inside of your DropBox folder. Even though DropBox has a 2GB folder limit, you shouldn’t use all of it for your TrueCrypt drive. Unfortunately, TrueCrypt creates the encrypted partition to it’s maximum capacity, which means if you create a 1GB encrypted volume, it actually takes up 1GB on the harddrive even with nothing in it. And transferring a 1GB file many times for little to no content isn’t the best plan.
Since the volume is filled out to maximum filesize even with no data, it’s best to create a few smaller drives (in the 256MB range) as DropBox has to upload the entire file at least once and you have to download the synchronized file on every computer. TrueCrypt can mount about 12 volumes automatically, so my recommendation is to keep the volumes small and increase the sizes for volumes you don’t modify often.
Don’t feel guilty about using encyption. Don’t be guilted into the “If you have nothing to hide” mantra; privacy is your right as a human, exercise it.
Tags: hacking, recommendation, rumination, software, svn