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Comment by illicium | Hacker News Reader

Another downside of using Truecrypt is that when you make a change in your volume, the whole volume file gets reuploaded to your storage/sync service.

A better solution is to use .sparsebundles (Mac only) or something like BoxCryptor/encfs that encrypts files in the volume individually

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Dropbox does not upload your whole Truecrypt volume every time you change it. It just uploads the blocks that are changed. It's pretty efficient.

The real problem with using a Truecrypt volume on Dropbox is concurrent changes to the same volume. It happens if you mount the Truecrypt volume on 2 machines at the same time. It will mess up badly.

Is it? I believe dropbox handles files in up to 8MB chunks. If a chunk is not modified, it's not re-uploaded.

I use encfs though, good suggestion.

Good call. I'm not sure of the Dropbox client, but API is variable all the way up to 150MB. Typical client is "4MB chunk"

https://www.dropbox.com/developers/core/api#chunked-upload

Good point, I only use TrueCrypt for sensitive documents (small in file size), and don't worry/notice the entire volume sync.

BoxCryptor does look like a great alternative; however, it's not open source and does come w/ a price (literally and figuratively - file names exposed if using free version or drop $50 USD).

Have you used BoxCryptor? Curious what your experience has been. I'll give it a try.

BoxCryptor is just a commercial implementation of encfs [1] with a nice GUI (and _a lot_ less hassle to install on Windows)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encfs

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