For some time now I’ve been thinking how best to share sensitive information with relatives who are less technical than myself. I’m thinking about things like bank accounts details, life insurance etc that would be needed if I got run over by a bus, but that I obviously don’t to be easily accessible to unscrupulous people. And I want to do this electronically so it’s easy for me to update and change.
Now there’s a number of options that provide sophisticated solutions that do encryption, Win 7 for example comes with BitLocker (if you have the right hardware) and TrueCrypt is an excellent tool, but they’re overkill for what I’m trying to do. As I mentioned the people I’m sharing this info are not particularly technical, so it needs to be relatively simple. While TrueCrpyt is good, it’s not the easiest to setup and would need lengthy instructions on how to use. And there’s not a lot of machines out there that support BitLocker.
After much musing on the subject I figured 7-Zip could fit the bill of what I was trying to do. 7-zip is like WinZip, but better (in my opinion). 7-zip is basically a compression tool that also allows password protection @ 256 AES, and is open source. It supports a number of compression formats and there’s also a couple of encryption options. The key though is that it’s easy to use. So here’s what I’ve done…
1. I installed 7-zip, it’s pretty easy, I’ll not go into details
2. Created and saved an Excel file with the data I want to keep safe (yes I know I can password protect the Excel document)
3. I selected the file in question (when it’s closed) and brought up the context menu (right-clicked)
7-zip Context Menu
4. I then selected “Add to archive…”, and you get the following list of options (or something similar)
7-zip options
5. Now there’s a few options here, I’ve chosen the ones below. I’ve chosen zip as the Archive format to hopefully make it more portable, however I’ve set compression to “Store”. It’s possibly to compress and encrypt, I’ve chosen just to compress. I then selected encryption as AES-256 and put in a password. Note, the 7-zip help system goes into detail about all this stuff.
My 7-zip Options
6. Press OK and I’m done, now I’ve got an encrypted file that’s easy to share, or save on Dropbox/SugarSync etc, but should be able to be easily opened if you’ve got the right password.
This may or may not suit you but it’s a simple solution that fits the bill for me.
Of course the really simple solution would be to just write it down and keep it somewhere safe…
