Recall from a previous post that I was playing around with Filevault on Mac OSX not too long ago, which encrypts your home folder on the fly. I ultimately decided that it was not worth it, since it messed up a few programs, and most of my data is not very sensitive. However, I do have some sensitive data, like bank statements and such, that I keep on my computer. And now that I am mostly using linux, but still using Mac some, I have decided that using an encrypted .sparseimage file is not so cool anymore. Today I researched for some alternatives, and it seems like ccrypt is the solution that works best for me. It is available for Mac, most all *nix flavors, and Windows. It also uses very strong AES encryption. I like to keep a whole directory in some sort of encrypted archive, which I can then decrypt when I want to. To do this with my bank statements, I would encrypt it like so:
tar -cvz statements | ccencrypt -K password -H password > statements.tar.gz.cpt
rm -fR statements
Then when I want to decrypt it, I only have to do:
cat statements.tar.gz.cpt | ccdecrypt -K password | tar -xvz