Dropbox-like Encryption Folder for Mac (request for HN beta-testers)

[trevelyan]

Hi everyone,

Encryption Folder is an experimental application I've hacked together that works as a Dropbox-for-file-encryption of sorts. When you start the application it creates a special folder on your Desktop that encrypts any files dragged into it. Drag files back out onto the desktop and they should decrypt automatically. Close the application and the folder disappears until the application is started again.

http://encryptionfolder.com

I wrote this out of a personal need to store business information on my laptop but avoid having all of my bank accounts easily compromised in the event my laptop was stolen. I've got a lot from this community over the past five years, so am posting here as I'm interested in cleaning this up for a wider public release and would appreciate any thoughts or feedback on what is essentially an MVP.

So please -- if you have a Mac and are looking for an easy drag-and-drop utility for protecting important documents try it out and let me know what you think. I've tested this on a few machines but it is beta software, so please test on your machine before committing anything unrecoverable to it.

Feedback is welcome by email at service@encryptionfolder.com and of course we can have a discussion here. And thanks. :)

[minimaxir]

Isn't this essentially TrueCrypt?

[trevelyan → minimaxir]

Thanks for the comment.

TrueCrypt is far superior when it comes to security in the sense that everything is encrypted and decrypted on the fly in RAM. But it is also pretty complex to setup. And maybe I've just missed it, but I don't know how to do things like email myself a copy of an actual encrypted file, or copy and paste an encrypted file into Dropbox without decrypting it.

So people who use TrueCrypt probably won't want to use this. But for people who don't know what "Create Volume" and "Mount all Devices" mean, this is hopefully a lot simpler. It really is just a folder that encrypts files when they are copied into it, and decrypts them when they're copied out of it. There are no hidden disk images and we don't even encrypt the filenames so anyone up to anything particularly devious will probably not want to use it. But it is absolutely trivial to get running. And my mother can use it. :)