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Comment by mattmaroon | Hacker News Reader

I just use Truecrypt volumes within Dropbox for anything I'd really care about losing. I guess it's an extra step, but I find I just like Dropbox better than the competition. And things I really care about (tax returns, for instance) I find I access rarely and always on a PC.

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This solution has 2 issues though that kind of drive me crazy.

1) It won't sync the truecrypt volume while it's open (cause the file is in use), so if you want to encrypt stuff you work on regularly, you have to close the truecrypt volume regularly to sync it, which is a PITA.

2) Since it's one big volume, it takes forever to sync up even if you only modified a single file inside it. Say, for example, I have a 5 GB truecrypt volume containing some project I'm working on. If I open it, update the readme, then close it, it has to resync 5 GB...

So overall, this is far from an optimal solution...

EncFS keeps files separate (with encrypted filenames), avoiding this problem.

For #2 I keep the truecrypt file size more like 500MB. Fortunately my projects don't have big files. For old tax returns and the like I have archived truecrypt files that no longer change.

#1 is indeed a PITA. I don't know of a better alternative I trust though. In practice the files I'm changing daily are small and aren't top secret, so I zip them and put the zip file in the DropBox. Then I don't have to unmount the truecrypt volume so often.

Um, you should be regularly dismounting volumes every time you are done using them anyway. Your enemy can quite likely read out your passphrase from cryopreserved ram or its hibernated equivalent.

I guess the resynchronisation time is taken up mostly by Dropbox reading and hashing all 5 GB to detect changes? Just that it considers each file as a series of contiguous chunks and should only transfer those chunks that have changed. A bit like how BitTorrent works.

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