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Ask HN: Startup remote file sharing encryption

4 points by havoc2005 ↗ HN
As a startup that works essentially via a cellphone and laptop online with 3 employees, we are looking for the best method to sharing files among each other. Dropbox is my first thought, but say you have company sensitive files which need to be encrypted and protected from dissemination, what would HN recommend?

7 comments

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samdk
One option is Tarsnap (http://www.tarsnap.com/), which is developed by HN's cperciva (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cperciva). It's specifically written to be secure online backup.

Another option is using Dropbox, but with some kind of encryption. I know that some people use Dropbox to store TrueCrypt volumes, and I think it does an okay job with them.

Downsides to both are that you're not likely to be able to access them from a phone. Tarsnap also has no GUI (and requires Cygwin to work on Windows), which may be a consideration.

cperciva
[Tarsnap is] specifically written to be secure online backup.

Indeed -- which isn't quite the same thing as file sharing. Tarsnap is not designed to have archives uploaded from multiple sources.

you're not likely to be able to access them from a phone

FWIW, I was told recently that Tarsnap works on Maemo 5 + ARMv7... so it's very likely that Tarsnap can run on at least some phones.

havoc2005
I was thinking of using dropbox with a combination of TrueCrypt however, it wouldn't suit the way I was hoping to do this. I'm actually looking into both tarsnap and spideroak right now.
_b8r0
It makes me feel a bit sick to recommend a Symantec product but PGP Desktop is pretty much the standard crypto product. You can integrate it into your mail, use it to share on a local network or encrypt files and share them any way you like (dropbox, email, carrier pigeon).

The Free alternative, GPG4Win is pretty good for Windows (or GPG for other platforms) but might be less intuitive for the less technical, and you don't get whole disk encryption thrown in.

You're not going to be able to access GPG/PGP from a phone, but if you're using something like Google Apps for domains you can ensure that everything's encrypted in transit over SSL.

codemechanic
Try tonido or tonidoplug. It is a good web based file server and has a p2p collaboration server as well.