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I’ve tested the really neat Dropbox project for some days now (www.getdropbox.com). It offers really fast synchronization of data between multiple computers running Windows, Mac and even Linux! The only drawback, it does not support encryption of your precious data.

Recently I stumbled across EncFS (http://www.arg0.net/encfs). EncFS offers an encrypted user-space file system. The only drawback is that it only runs on Linux, but hey as good as recent Linux distributions are who needs Windows?

Mini how-to:

Set up Dropbox as instructed on getdropbox.com (really easy). When you’ve done that create two new folders, one new directory inside your dropbox folder (for example /home/kimble/Dropbox/Encrypted) and another to mount the encrypted filesystem in (for example /home/kimble/EncryptedDropbox).

When those are in place install EncFS. If you’re running Debian or Ubuntu it’s as easy as:

sudo apt-get install encfs

Then it’s time to mount your encrypted file system. The first time you run this command EncFS will ask you a few simple questions where one of them is the password you want to protect your files with.

encfs /home/kimble/Dropbox/Encrypted/ /home/kimble/EncryptedDropbox/

That’s it! Now you do the same on your other Linux computers and enjoy both fast and secure file synchronization! The next time you run that command it will just prompt you for the password before mounting the file system into the chosen folder.

Cons: These files will not be accessible through the web interface, not will they be accessible from Windows or Mac (suckers!). ;D