Recently, I wrote about a product called CloudFogger and provided scenarios on how to use it in your backup solution. Today I wanted to quickly look at one of the other solutions in this Cloud encryption space – Boxcryptor. Boxcryptor is very similar to CloudFogger (or is it that CloudFogger is similar to Boxcryptor), in the fact that it creates a virtual drive and everything saved there gets encrypted and saved to your Cloud storage provider (think DropBox). But there are some differences:
Pro Boxcyptor: BoxCryptor comes in a free or paid version. The free version, the one I tested, allows to store up to 2gb of data on one virtual drive (mapped to one cloud drive) – which is exactly what Cloud Fogger does. However, unlike CloudFogger you can purchase Boxcryptor and the paid version gives a lot more capabilities- unlimited size and unlimited amount of drives. This means I could set up encryption to Skydrive, Dropbox and Google drive all getting encrypted. Which is a huge advatnage over CloudFogger (it only allowed you to do one).
Pro CloudFogger: CloudFogger offers some additional features over BoxCryptor – it allows to “right click” encrypt files and to easily encrypt files with other CloudFoggers (think PKI). I didn’t see these in the free version of Boxcryptor nor did I see nay mention of it on their website.
Summary: If you want a just a cloud encryption solution – the paid version of Boxcryptor is the way to go. If you want a fairly simple encryption solution that can handle most of your encryption needs to include cloud encryption then CloudFogger is your best bet. I am interested in seeing how both these technologies mature over time and what added freatures they will bring to the table in the future.