If you're not sure, take advantage of the free trial offered by each of these products to get a feel for the different options. Which is better? It really depends on how you plan to use encryption. Encrypted data in the cloud has a much bigger attack surface than encrypted data on your own PC. This approach requires extreme care, obviously. When you lock the virtual drive, all the files you put into it are completely inaccessible.Īs with the virtual drive solution, some products store your encrypted data in the cloud. The other creates a virtual disk drive that, when open, acts like any other drive on your system. One type of product simply processes files and folders, turning them into impenetrable encrypted versions of themselves. The two main approaches in encryption utilities parallel these options. Two Main Approachesīack in the day, if you wanted to keep a document secret you could use a cipher to encrypt it and then burn the original. It does mean that if you encrypt an essential document and then forget the encryption password, you've lost it for good, however. As my colleague Max Eddy pointed out in a past article about one-time Attorney General Barr's ignorance of encryption, 'a back door is still a door and even a door with a lock on it can be opened.'Īll the products in this roundup explicitly state that they have no back door, and that's as it should be. Why wouldn't Apple help? Because the moment a back door or similar hack exists, it becomes a target, a prize for the bad guys. The FBI had to hire hackers to get into the phone. But no such back door existed, and Apple refused to create one. When the FBI needed information from the San Bernardino shooter's iPhone, they asked Apple for a back door to get past the encryption. Using a VPN is a great way to protect your internet traffic when you're traveling, but it's not a solution for encrypting your local files. Of course, the VPN's encryption doesn't just magically rub off on files you share.

However, unless you're connected to a secure HTTPS website, your traffic is not encrypted between the VPN server and the site. From your PC to the VPN company's server, all your data is encrypted, and that's a great thing.

You can use a Virtual Private Network, or VPN, to encrypt your own internet traffic. Whole-disk encryption is an effective line of defense for a single device, but it doesn't help when you need to share encrypted data. In this roundup, we're specifically looking at products that encrypt files, not at whole-disk solutions like Microsoft's Bitlocker.

File Encryption, Whole-Disk Encryption, and For an in-depth explanation of how encryption software works to keep you safe and how to choose the app that's right for you, scroll down beyond the product descriptions below.

Best pgp encryption software for mac