I was building a shared work laptop the other day, something that I would primarily use on building sites for system commissioning. As part of the install I had automatically installed Dropbox along with other useful utilities and then suddenly had the thought. “I won’t be the only person using the laptop. All my stuff is on here in Dropbox. Also, what happens if the laptop gets nicked onsite?”
I needed some way to encrypt my Dropbox folder so only when it was me using the machine the contents were available.
A quick google gave me this excellent article from Lifehacker. There’s not much to add to it really, it’s all there.
I now have a TrueCrypt ‘volume’ that I’ve set as a favourite, which can then be auto mounted on start-up. This volume now contains my Dropbox folder.
The nice touch is the batch script that sits waiting for the volume to be decrypted (me typing my password for it when it attempts to automount on logon) before Dropbox is started up. This need changing slightly for Windows 8:
@echo off
rem Every second, check to see if volume is mounted
echo Waiting for volume...
:keepwaiting
ping -n 1 -w 1000 127.0.0.1 > null
if not exist E: goto keepwaiting
echo Volume found, starting Dropbox...
start "Dropbox" "C:Users[yourusername]AppDataRoamingDropboxbinDropbox.exe"Code language: PHP (php)