If you need to safely backup some of your confidential files (email, financial info, marketing info, source code,…), you can use 7-Zip (aka 7z) to compress and encrypt your archive with AES-256 as well as hide the name of the files. This should give you the level of security used by the (in-)famous insurance file (insurance.aes256) released by Wikileaks last year (if it indeed has been encrypted with AES-256). 7-Zip is available for Windows, Linux (multiple architectures) and Mac OS. Since 7-Zip source code is open, it can theoretically be ported to any platform. The first thing I did was to use a Password Generator to get a 256-bit key such as DFF61FFB56B26158718457E5E47F3511080130C855C8E6F689A3A7664EBE2C9A. In this example, I backup “My Documents” directory in Windows, but the same command line (just different paths) could be used in Linux as well:
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C:\>"c:\Program Files\7-Zip\7z" a -t7z mydoc_backup_22022011.7z "C:\Documents and Settings\Jean-Luc\My Documents" -xr!*BitTorrent*\ -xr!*Cache*\ -pDFF61FFB56B26158718457E5E47F3511080130C855C8E6F689A3A7664EBE2C9A -mhe -v4480m -mx9 |
Here’s the description of the parameters in the command line: a […]