Andrea Olivato’s Blog

While continuing to share datas beetween my two workstations using Dropbox, I started getting worried about data safety. Looking at DropBox wiki I found this interesting page in which I highlighted  the part that attracted me.

DropboxDropbox guys are suggesting to use a simple file-per-file encryption very easy to achieve in any Linux environment thanks to encfs. I tried this method beetween my two Gentoo boxes and I’m very satisfied: it works like a charm, being terribly easy to set up.

Here’s what I did :

sudo emerge sys-fs/encfs
mkdir ~/Dropbox/Safe
mkdir ~/Safe
encfs ~/Dropbox/Safe/ ~/Safe

Encfs prompted me for an installtion method and I choose the automatic one (it set up default protection levels and methods without my unable interaction) then for a password. After setting up the password everything was ready to be used. I started putting my files into the Safe folder in my home and saw the corresponding encrypted files on Dropbox/Safe.

When I got home from work i installed the same ebuild, created the same dirs and typed for the same pass to encfs…Dropbox updated the encrypted folder and encfs did the rest…

I also set up my tomboy notes to be synced into the encrypted folder instead of the common one so that I now can share sensible notes without too many worries!

Easy, fast and seems quite safe to me…