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I have a partition that contains all my personal stuff, which is mounted at boot under /home/myuser/foo. I would like to synchronize it on the cloud via Dropbox or Copy.com, but I don't trust them, so I have to encrypt the data in some way.

I'm a Truecrypt newbie, but, as I understood, it creates a "volume" when opened, and the data is clear only in ram, which is great. The problem is that this volume is seen as a single file by the Dropbox/Copy.com client, so when I change something, as little as a text file, it will attempt to upload again the whole encrypted "volume".

There is some way to encrypt my data and upload it in security?

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2 Answers

up vote 3 down vote accepted

Instead of encrypting a whole volume, which is the TrueCrypt, LUKS and loopback approach, you can also encrypt the individual files you store in the cloud. Doing that manually with pgp before copying the file to your cloud synchronized directory is one way, but a bit cumbersome.

EncFS may be a solution for you instead. It transparently encrypts files, using an arbitrary directory as storage for the encrypted files.

Two directories are involved in mounting an EncFS filesystem: the source directory, and the mountpoint. Each file in the mountpoint has a specific file in the source directory that corresponds to it. The file in the mountpoint provides the unencrypted view of the one in the source directory. Filenames are encrypted in the source directory.

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I really like EncFS, but I have one issue with the encrypted files: when I try, for example to use one iso file from the "plain" directory, virtualbox says Permission denied. Same stuff when I try to use vpnc with a conf file stored there. Of course the permission are 777. Any hints? –  ludiegu Dec 3 '13 at 17:40
 
No idea without more details. –  HBruijn Dec 3 '13 at 20:20
 
I figured out myself. I had to use the --public flag. –  ludiegu Dec 4 '13 at 8:45
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up vote 0 down vote

The best tool I have found for this scenario (won't solve 100% your problem), is to use:

duplicity- Encrypted incremental backup to local or remote storage.

Via 'cron' you can periodically make backup of your data / partitions based on a configuration or even some databases dumps, problem is that if you change one single file you need to recreate the full package to upload.

Other approach/alternative could be to use something like https://mega.co.nz/ in where encryption is made on the browser client side and stored encrypted.

At the end, just be sure the data is encrypt from your side, before uploading it, otherwise, it is compromised.

If you want to make your own code you can get an idea with this: py-backup

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