When it comes to encryption my favorite tool is and will always be (unless something changes) Truecrypt. Nothing beats its diversity: I can encrypt files, drives, hide encrypted drives, amongst many other features. But as I said many times on our podcast I am a geek, and working with Truecrypt is fairly easy for me but it doesn’t stand up to the “wife” test – you need a little tech savy to get it to work. I wanted something that could give me encryption, while also being very simple to my wife and kid could use it, and I think I have found it in CloudFogger.
Where CloudFogger excels is encrypting files in the cloud, after all its in their name. Of course it has the standard “right click encrypt” features (they call it Fogg) but where it really shines is in its virtual drive encryption. During setup you select a virtual drive (the default is X:) and a path where to send the files (the default is Dropbox, although I successfully tested Google Drive, and Skybox along with Dropbox). Any file that is written to the virtual drive is encrypted and sent to your selected destination (i.e. Dropbox). If you listened to our Mega Mess episode, one of the items we discussed was that if you are going to use these cloud services for storage of sensitive data it was best to encrypt it – with CloudFogger its a no brainer.
There is only one draw back that I see, you can only map on virtual dirve. I would have liked to see the ability to map more (i.e. X: drive encrypt and ships to dropbox, while Z: drive encrypts and ships to USB) ; perhaps it will come in a future release. The website states a paid version with more features will be coming soon, so maybe that will have this ability. I can’t wait to see what additional features they bring to the table are.
Thanks Shawn (@shawng) for pointing me to CloudFogger.
May 10 UPDATE: Now that I have been using the product a little longer, I wanted to give an update. CloudFogger has quickly become an integral part of my back up solution. First let me start by going over my back up solutions – for many years I have used SyncBack for my back up solutions but recently switched over to CrashPlan. SyncBack is a great backup/syncing tool, but CrashPlan had two advantages over Syncback – 1. You can backup to the cloud (I didn’t cause I never liked putting my data on cloud unencrypted) and 2. you could backup between computers with realitive ease. Now enter Cloudfogger into the picture: I get everything I ever wanted and can switch back to my ole faithful Syncback (sorry Crashplan you were great while you lasted). Here is my new CloudFogger/SyncBack backup solution:
- On both my desktop and laptop I installed Skydrive (you can use any you choose, but Skydrive offers the most space by default for free) -this syncs anything on Skydrive with my desktop. This gives me the means to store info in the “cloud”
- I then installed Cloudfogger and SyncBack on both machines.
- On the laptop I have set up the virtual drive so that when data is written to the X: drive (pick what you want) it gets encrypted and sent to Skydrive.
- On my laptop I set up SyncBack to backup my documents to the X: drive, thus encrypting them and shipping them to skydrive.
- Since the desktop also has SkyDrive on it, it can see the files too. This was great because it gave me a chance to set up SyncBack to backup from the skydrive folder on my desktop to my remote storage (redundant USB drive).
So there I had it – backup to the cloud (securely), backup to my desktop, and backup to my USB drive. Note that since the SyncBack setup on my desktop is copying from Skydrive to the USB, it is copying encrypted files to the USB (yes I have Truecrypt on my USB but this gives me another layer :)) I am still looking into having SyncBack delete the files from Skydrive in the event that I hit the 7gb limit but haven’t gotten that far in my tooling around.
There are of course limitations to every solution and this has them too: 7gb limit (great for docs and what not but can be eaten quickly w/ software and other larger files), file size limitations to Skydrive, CloudFogger’s stability as a company/product, and the need to be “on-line” for the solution to work. I think even with the draw backs it’s still a kick a** solution – feel free to borrow the idea.