Cases of espionage on the Internet by United States have served so many users become aware of the need to safeguard the privacy of your data. With the idea of improving the security of our information, we dedicate a few minutes to review methods to encrypt files in different operating systems.
How to encrypt files in Windows
Windows offers us the ability to encrypt the contents of folders, natively, from the operating system itself. In general terms, the process is fairly simple and not find too much complications beyond caution keep a safe place, the certificate necessary to decrypt the files.
The choice of encryption that includes Windows natively is, in my opinion, quite simple and I do not think that it is free from unauthorized access. Therefore, I think that we could handle other options and resort to other utilities of recognized solvency.
One of the most popular, and also used within the business sector, utilities is TrueCrypt. This application is a free software that allows us to encrypt information in Windows, OS X and Linux and offers several encryption options. Among other things, TrueCrypt allows you to encrypt the entire contents of the hard drive (including the boot partition), generate a real or virtual partition that is encrypted or, even, to create USB drives that store encrypted content. In addition to all these safety options, once we have the configured application, the process is transparent to the user and this will hardly notice interruptions in their work (with the advantage of having your data more safe).
AES Crypt is another option that is available both for Windows and for OS X and Linux and offers 256-bit AES encryption. In this case, the encryption of files and folders is somewhat more selective and we will be us who manually, we will indicate what we want to store safely. With the idea to make things easier, AES Crypt is integrated into the Windows context menu, so clicking on a file with the right mouse button you can encrypt it comfortably.
Another option to encrypt files without too many complications in Windows is AxCrypt which uses AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) encryption like AES Crypt, though, that Yes, 128-bit.
How to encrypt files in OS X
OS X also includes, natively, the ability to encrypt the entire contents of the hard drive on this operating system. FileVault, which is named this option can be activated from the system preferences (security option, enable FileVault and set a security password). FileVault offers 128-bit AES encryption and, obviously, to cover the content of the system hard disk, at certain times we can see some drop in the performance of the team having to always work with encrypted content.
An alternative more selective than FileVault is iSafe, a fairly cheap application (1.99 euros) that offers us the possibility of creating collections of files encrypted using 256-bit AES encryption. The operation, actually, is very simple; After setting a master password and enter it when starting the application, we will see the collection of encrypted files that we have on the basis of the defined categories (something like folders) and, for each collection, the stored files. With a provision of this form, if you want to store a file in a collection (and thus encrypt it), the only thing we have to do is "drag and drop".
Scrambler and Espionage are two alternatives of payment which, like iSafe, allows us to encrypt files in OS X without too many complications, and of course, being selective in the process (i.e., encrypting only what we want to protect and not entire hard drive).
How to encrypt files in Linux
Finally, for users who are freshly landed in the world of Linux either do not have advanced knowledge in the matter, it is important to know that you can also encrypt your files.
One of the methods known to encrypt files is GnuPG (GNU Privacy Guard) which, incidentally, is a component that requires Enigmail to encrypt emails in Thunderbird. Use is very easy to and, for example, from the Terminal we call gpg and, from the command line, encrypt files comfortably no more than indicate the password that we use for encryption.
eCryptfs is a more advanced option when it comes to encrypt files, a sort of extension of GnuPG applied to the file system with which we can improve the security of our directory home (our personal files). eCryptfs is packaged for multiple distributions and we can install it on Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, openSUSE or Ubuntu.
SeaHorse is a 'classic' project of Gnome that allows us to integrate GnuPG into this desktop environment so we can encrypt files without having to resort to the console. After installing this package we have at our disposal options to encrypt / decrypt files in the menu that appears when you press the right button of the mouse on a file or folder.
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Thanx for all your Feedback .... and don't post to promote your site's ...
I kept the option as Comment moderation mode. So if you try to promote your site from here.. I do delete your comment's ..