Art Clemons on 9 Mar 2014 12:19:59 -0700


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Re: [PLUG] Encrypting Sensitive Personal Information In the Cloud?


On 03/09/2014 01:32 PM, Louis Kratz wrote:
I'm looking for a way to store tax documents encrypted in the cloud. I
access this data once a year, but don't want to store it on site in case
of disk failure etc etc.

Does anyone do this now, and if so, what kind of services/encryption
software do you use? I'd like something with version control, if
possible, so I can add new year's data without the risk of corrupting
old ones. I am looking for something a little more user-friendly than
gpging a file and dumping it on s3.


I'm likely sort of a dinosaur, but personally I'ld create a truecrypt file of about 500 Mb, open it and save my data. Then save a copy locally and in the cloud. The good thing about using something like truecrypt is that it's almost OS independent (Android implementations either fail or are so clunky as to be not worth the effort) and that so far nobody has indicated a backdoor. At the same time its origins are being questioned and there is an effort to audit the software very carefully.

I mention cross OS, because I've more than once only had access to some OS I normally don't use or avoid using but still needed access to something that I normally access only in Linux.

There are some downsides like the need to send the entire file to the cloud when you make a change to the data, but I've experienced other update schemes that nominally and normally work but fail at the last instance. One more comment, I would never actually want to store my only copy of something remotely, I've had services disappear entirely that I thought would be around forever.


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