Encrypting A Google Drive
 

My Gmail account now as a 5GB Google drive attached to it.

While I like the idea of using the cloud for backup, I do not like the idea of my personal data being mined for advertising or other uses.

So I've been playing around with encrypting the contents of my Google Drive using TrueCrypt.

Getting off to a good start, I was able to create and mount a TrueCrypt Volume on the Google Drive. However it does not seem to recognize when I make updates to the files in the volume. I assume that's because the size and date of the TrueCrypt volume don't change after it is created.

What does seem to work is creating the TrueCrypt volume on my local drive, and then copying the file over to the Google Drive as needed. While this does seem to work, one drawback is that I have to move the entire backup over my Internet Pipe every time I make any change at all.

I'll keep playing with this to see if I can find a better alternative.

Now this is curious. I did a search for Google Drive and Encrypt and here is what I found.....



Google gave me essentially no results at all.

Google doesn't use the "+" operator. Remove that, you get results.

What? When the hell did that happen?

Oh. Last year.

VGDM

It looks like file date/time is the key to getting Google Drive to update the file.

I created a TrueCrypt volume inside the Google drive. As soon as I did that, Google copied the file up to the cloud. From there any changes I made to the volume after mounting it in TrueCrypt did not trigger an update.

However, as soon as I updated the date/time stamp on the TureCrypt file Google saw the change and updated the file.

Better, but I'm still looking for a way to encrypt individual files to/from a Google Drive.


Note: To update the date/time on the file I used the old batch file command:

copy /B filename +,,

I'll file this under "things I learned today". I had no idea. I think I used it, or tried to anyway, yesterday.

Google has gone so far down the rabbit hole of trying to decide what you meant that it has become almost impossible to simply tell it exactly what you mean.

Precision and accessibility are quite often on opposite sides of the table. I always found operators easy to use, but only after I learned them.

I now dub this the "No Instructions Necessary" Generation.