EncFS For Linux

EncFS is a multiplatform, completely free, easy to use/install and open source command-line software project that uses the FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace) and a Linux kernel module to provide an encrypted file system on GNU/Linux and UNIX-like operating systems.

Among some of the unique features of the EncFS project, we can mention the built-in reverse mode that lets users to view unencrypted folders using encryption, as well as to allow for encrypted remote backups using rsync, and support for network filesystems like CIFS (Common Internet File System) and NFS (Network File System).

Another unique feature of the EncFS software is that it’s extremely fast on hard disk drives (HDD) when compared with similar products, such as ecryptfs which reads the header of each file in order to determine the size.

This is a very good question, asked by many new GNU/Linux users. The simple answer is that you should use EncFS if you have sensitive data on your computer (especially laptops) or backups and you fear that it might be stolen. EncFS will encrypt all of your sensitive data with strong, state-of-the-art encryption algorithms that cannot be cracked.

If EncFS is not available in the Software Center of your GNU/Linux operating system, you should use the source package to install it, following the instructions provided by Softpedia below.

Download the latest stable source package using the dedicated download section above, save it on your Home directory, use an archive manager utility to extract its contents, and open the Terminal app and go to the location of the extracted archive files (e.g. cd /home/softpedia/encfs-1.7.5).

Run the ‘autoreconf -if’ command to generate the configure script, then run the ‘./configure && make’ command to configure and compile the program, followed by the ‘sudo make install’ command to install it system wide.