Recently I have landed on copy.com, while looking for cloud storage for linux.
After registering and getting the linux native client, I started experimanting with the potentials such a service can have, giving me the best out of what it can give me.
The next thing I had to do, was to have my data totaly and completely encrypted on the cloud, so that even in the event of hacking, theft of identity or any other matter, it would be secure.
Using linux, of cource gives you the best and most up to date tools to do whatever you need, even when you don't know any programming language.
An idea came to mind, and after a very short search I came to the very well folder encryption tool, "encfs". The tool was the best thing to have for a service like copy.com.
A little shell messing around and a manual page gave me all I needed to have a complete solution for what I needed.
The outcome of both (copy.com and encfs) is that I have a folder in my PC, which is synchronized automatically on the cloud, while being encrypted.
What I did was in two steps. First step is to have a local folder encrypted and synchronized on the cloud.
The second step took me a little further, having an encrypted folder directly on the cloud.
This means that I have a folder ~/mnt/cloud, which is a direct mount of the encrypted data on the cloud.
How is all done.
First of all you need to create an account on copy.com, which gives you 15 gig for free!
Get you username and password and download the linux application for your distro.
Unzip and run the application (lets say in bin folder in your home folder).
Run the application and register your account and select a synchronization folder (e.g. ~/mnt/copy)
Secondly you have to create the encryption folder (eg ~/mnt/cloud)
Then you have to run the encfs utility, in order to create the appropriate configuration for the encryption. Following the defaults is a safe choice, and finally you have to enter an encryption password for your encrypted folder.
Thats it, you now have a folder (e.g. ~/mnt/cloud) that whatever you create in there will be encrypted and transfered to the cloud. (Also if you already have done the procedure, you will find all your data in threre, unencrypted).
To reconnect your mount points (cloud and encryption) you have to run (or autorun) the copy.com appliation and run the encfs tool (the rest of the times, it only asks for the encryption password.)
On the second approach, you can use a pthon utility to directly mount the cloud storage to a folder on your linux box. The utility is called copy-fuse and it can be downloaded from the git clone https://github.com/copy-app/copy-fuse.
Then the only thing that changes is that you do not need to run the application from copy.com, but mount the drive directly with the utility (copyfuse.py [-h] [-d] [-s] [-f] [-o OPTIONS] EMAIL PASS MNTDIR)
Then you run the encfs utility on the mounted folder and voila, you have an online cloud encrypted folder!
After registering and getting the linux native client, I started experimanting with the potentials such a service can have, giving me the best out of what it can give me.
The next thing I had to do, was to have my data totaly and completely encrypted on the cloud, so that even in the event of hacking, theft of identity or any other matter, it would be secure.
Using linux, of cource gives you the best and most up to date tools to do whatever you need, even when you don't know any programming language.
An idea came to mind, and after a very short search I came to the very well folder encryption tool, "encfs". The tool was the best thing to have for a service like copy.com.
A little shell messing around and a manual page gave me all I needed to have a complete solution for what I needed.
The outcome of both (copy.com and encfs) is that I have a folder in my PC, which is synchronized automatically on the cloud, while being encrypted.
What I did was in two steps. First step is to have a local folder encrypted and synchronized on the cloud.
The second step took me a little further, having an encrypted folder directly on the cloud.
This means that I have a folder ~/mnt/cloud, which is a direct mount of the encrypted data on the cloud.
How is all done.
First of all you need to create an account on copy.com, which gives you 15 gig for free!
Get you username and password and download the linux application for your distro.
Unzip and run the application (lets say in bin folder in your home folder).
Run the application and register your account and select a synchronization folder (e.g. ~/mnt/copy)
Secondly you have to create the encryption folder (eg ~/mnt/cloud)
Then you have to run the encfs utility, in order to create the appropriate configuration for the encryption. Following the defaults is a safe choice, and finally you have to enter an encryption password for your encrypted folder.
Thats it, you now have a folder (e.g. ~/mnt/cloud) that whatever you create in there will be encrypted and transfered to the cloud. (Also if you already have done the procedure, you will find all your data in threre, unencrypted).
To reconnect your mount points (cloud and encryption) you have to run (or autorun) the copy.com appliation and run the encfs tool (the rest of the times, it only asks for the encryption password.)
On the second approach, you can use a pthon utility to directly mount the cloud storage to a folder on your linux box. The utility is called copy-fuse and it can be downloaded from the git clone https://github.com/copy-app/copy-fuse.
Then the only thing that changes is that you do not need to run the application from copy.com, but mount the drive directly with the utility (copyfuse.py [-h] [-d] [-s] [-f] [-o OPTIONS] EMAIL PASS MNTDIR)
Then you run the encfs utility on the mounted folder and voila, you have an online cloud encrypted folder!
