Тhere have been 888 incidents and 246 Million records breached just in the first half of 2015 according to TechWorld.

That is 246 with six zeros after it. As you can imagine, it’s a pretty big number. People’s photos, video and some very important private data has been seen and/or stolen. This includes Social Security Numbers, Credit Card Numbers, addresses, phone numbers, emails and much, much more.

As you can see from the infographic, the first 4 reasons for data breaches have the “human factor” included in it. Mistakes have happened and will continue to happen. The good thing is that most people can learn from their mistakes. And are actually interested in doing that.

Another good thing is that we are living in the 21st century and technology has matured enough to make file encryption much easier that has ever been before.

Don’t panic I’m going to show you how to encrypt your sensitive data in 1 minute or less so read below.

Let’s just start with the basics.

What is encryption?

According to Webopedia, Encryption is the most effective way to achieve data security. To read an encrypted file, you must have access to a secret key or password that enables you to decrypt it. Unencrypted data is called plain text; encrypted data is referred to as cipher text.

Now let’s get to the point.

Step 1:

Under 1 minute file encryption is done with a cloud storage provider named pCloud.

pCloud was ranked number 6 for Best Cloud Storage Services for 2015/2016 by PC Advisor.

In 2 years the software has 3,000,000+ active users and counting (pretty fast).

So you go to THIS LINK and this is what you should see

Step 2:

Click on “Try for Free”.

When you do that you must see this.

Type in your email and password and click “Get started”.

Step 3:

Now you will be redirected to the screen where you create the actual “Crypto Folder”.

Now this is VERY important.

Client side encryption is an optional second layer of encryption with one important difference, the encryption is performed locally, within your browser or computer and the private key (which is basically just another password) is never transmitted to the server.

Your note is converted to an encrypted string within your browser and sent up to the server after which the string is encrypted all over again using the regular AES256 encryption functionality.

What this basically means is that pCloud never knows what you encrypt.

Remember this because on this step you must set up your “Crypto Folder” with a password that ONLY YOU will know. Which means ONLY YOU will be able to access this folder and view the files in it.

Choose your password very wisely because if you forget your password it can’t be restored and all the files in the “Crypto Folder” will be locked forever.

If you decide to reset the folder, all the files in it will be Deleted.

So I repeat, choose your password very carefully.

Enter a hint if you need to.

Once you do all this, just click on “Create a Crypto Folder”.

Step 4:

Now that you created it, you must wait a few seconds for pCloud to generate your Unique Encryption Key.

Once that’s done.

You are in your own “Crypto Folder”

It should look like this

So now you can upload your private data which can be passwords, videos, photos, music or any kind of file from the big blue button in the upper right corner of the screen that says “Upload”.

Here are some files uploaded

Once you are done with all that, just click “Lock Crypto” in the upper left corner of your screen

You are done!

If you want to Unlock the folder, you just type in your password and it will be unlocked.

So far client-side and zero-knowledge encryption is the best way to store files.

Bonus

pCloud and its Crypto Feature can be used on every device.

You can download pCloud for your desktop PC either Windows, OSX or Linux.

That’s a pretty good option since they DO NOT take space of you computer like Dropbox does. All your files are in the cloud but you can still work on them as if they are on your PC.

For instance I have a 128GB MacBook but I have 1TB of pCloud cloud storage. That basically makes my MacBook 1.1 TB. This is so awesome.

Here is how it looks like on my Windows PC.

This is the interface

And this is Crypto

You can download this from https://www.pcloud.com

There are also apps for Android and iOS which are also fully functional and easy to use.

You can download them from here.

You get up to 10GB Free but you can increase them up to 20GB by

Inviting Frieneds. 1GB per friend. Doing the tutorial 1GB + 1GB If you create a download, upload links and share a folder with a friend Newsletter subscription which is 512MB Connect to Facebook which is 512MB Facebook share 512MB Import photos from Picasa 512MB

You can share files, folders, you can create download links, upload links.

You can also listen to music, stream video, sync folders and basically everything a cloud storage can do.

The pCloud Crypto is paid but it’s at a price of 1 coffee so it’s a great deal if you want to keep your files from any kind of intrusion.

Hope you found this interesting and helpful.

If you did, please share with friends so they can also protect their files.