How to share confidential documents using Dropbox and Espionage for Mac

Started by dafacto, February 09, 2014, 03:49:27 AM

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dafacto

For those interested, I just posted an article to my blog detailing how to use Espionage together with Dropbox. I know there's an article about this somewhere on the Tao Effect, but I wanted to go into more detail and present the process in the context of a use case that probably will appeal to a lot of people:

http://www.dafacto.com/2014/02/09/how-to-share-confidential-documents-using-dropbox-and-espionage-for-mac/



zsolt

Dear Matt, thanks a lot for writing the detailed article.
I would add just a few remarks:
- you are adding the empty folders to Espionage and then copy the data into them. In most cases this will be fine, but to be clear, Espionage calculates the initial capacity of the sparse disk image from the size of the folder you are adding. If you add an empty folder to it, the default capacity will be 10GB, so if you would try to copy after creation more then 10GB into it, it would fail. I know, there is a little chance you will be doing this, especially in case of Dropbox, but just for the sake of clarity, normally you are adding to Espionage folders which already contain the data.

- you say "with a random password derived from your list password", this "list password" we normally call "master password"

- you mention relocating the disk images, but you did not specify how you do this, so again just to be clear, you are doing this by using the disk image drop down menu which is shown in your screenshot, the one you can get access to by clicking onto small "i" near the folder name in the Espionage folder set window.

- you refer to folder lists, but we call them folder sets....again, not so relevant, just to be clear, as we advertise that with Espionage 3 you can create "multiple folder sets"

Thanks again for sharing this info with us.

Rgds
Zsolt
Follow @espionageapp on twitter for news! | For general Mac support, please visit Mac Me Support

dafacto

Thanks Zsolt,

It's a good point about adding the folders _with_ content. If I recall, when I did that (added a folder with content), somehow a copy of that folder ended up in my Trash — including the original content. I wasn't sure if I did something wrong, or if it's the intended behavior of Espionage — but it was slightly concerning that the content I thought had been secured was still unsecured somewhere (or a copy of it, at least.)

Are you aware about that behavior?

zsolt

Hello, yes, this is a known and expected behavior, you even get notified when you encrypt a folder for the first time.
The reason for this is because we do not want to delete any data. With computers you never know, there are million of different scenarios and you cannot predict all of them. So what we do, we place the original data into the trash, once you check your encrypted folder and see all is there and it works as expected, you simply empty your trash and this completes the process.

Let me know if you have any further questions.

Rgds
Zsolt
Follow @espionageapp on twitter for news! | For general Mac support, please visit Mac Me Support

dafacto

Ok, thanks.

FYI, I updated the blog article in accordance with your earlier comments.

zsolt

Thanks a lot.

If you would like to write about some further tips and tricks and run across some questions, feel free to mail me at taoeffect@macmesupport.com

Rgds
Zsolt
Follow @espionageapp on twitter for news! | For general Mac support, please visit Mac Me Support