It’s very tempting to use the free storage space offered by Dropbox, Ubuntu One, and many others to upload personal archives. However it would not be wise to not encrypt them first. In this post I show how it’s easy to achieve.
We will try with Dropbox, assuming the directory ~/Dropbox already exists and is configured correctly in your home directory. By the way, the procedure to install Dropbox on Linux is perfectly documented on this site.
Encrypt
To create an AES256 encrypted archive of your personal documents, you can run this command:
$ tar czf - -C ~ --posix -- Documents \
| openssl enc -e -aes256 -out ~/Dropbox/$(date +%F).tgz.enc
enter aes-256-cbc encryption password:
Verifying - enter aes-256-cbc encryption password:
When prompted for the password, just type it, it’s a symmetric encryption, which means you’ll need it again to decrypt the archive later.
Decrypt
To decrypt the archive you can run this command, assuming it was created on December 22, 2012:
$ cd /tmp
$ openssl enc -d -aes256 -in ~/Dropbox/2012-12-22.tgz.enc \
| tar xzf -
enter aes-256-cbc decryption password:For convenience, the archive has been extracted beneath /tmp, so that you can now check your documents have not been corrupted by the encryption:
$ diff -qr /tmp/Documents ~/DocumentsIf nothing is printed, then it’s fine and you can now safely store your private data on the web 
