#cloudfogger

Ok that was a, heavily, quailified success - I now have an encrypted online drive that doesn't cost me anything but it's a wee bit flakey.

The solution comes in three parts:

A SkyDrive account (open one here)

The free version of Gladinet (get it here)

CloudFogger (get it here)

SkyDrive provides the storage space (obviously), CloudFogger deals with encryption and Gladinet glues it together.

CloudFogger is a free app that will transparently encrypt files. It creates a virtual drive which automatically encrypts any files saved to it; decrypting them on-the-fly when they are opened again. The virtual drive itself just point to a folder on the local machine so I though I could just mount the SkyDrive using WebDav and away I'd go.

This was true up to a point but SkyDrive limits its WebDav interface to Office documents, anything else and it tells you the file is too big. This is where Gladinet comes in, the software allows you to mount various cloud storage providers as virtual drives without SkyDrive's folder restriction.

So we point our Gladinet virtual drive at SkyDrive and CloudFoggers virtual drive at the Gladinet virtual drive and we have transparent encryption on the SkyDrive. If I save a file to the CloudFogger virtual drive is is automatically encrypted and stored on SkyDrive and I can open the files again just by double clicking on them. Simples.

There is however a problem. I'm not sure what it is but every so oftn CloudFogger crashes and needs to be restarted. I think CloudFogger is using the SkyDrive to perform the encryption rather than using a temporary location and then copying it across and this is causing problems. But I don't know.