Keep Your Data Secured With These Encryption Tools

With the internet users growing in number day by day, all the services are now available online to provide easy access to people. As much as these facilities grow, the need to protect our data becomes a big concern and reason to shield ourselves from the data thieves sits on the top priority.

Thinking about how to do that? Here are some of the best file encryption tools in the market which you can use to encrypt files and some important media as compiled by the lifehacker with some inputs from the Wikipedia as well.

# AxCrypt

AxCrypt is one of the best open source file encryption software for Windows. This software flawlessly integrates with Windows to compress, encrypt, decrypt, store, send and work with individual files.

One of the best parts of the file system is that it can be translated into your preferred languages like Dutch, Finnish, French and many others allowing you to use them easily in every part of the world.

The usage on the software is pretty easy where you can right-click a file to encrypt it, or even configure "timed," executable encryptions. After this the file is locked down for a specific period of time and will self-decrypt later or the when the file is received by the person.

The AxCrypt files can be decrypted when possible or continue to be decrypted when in use and then automatically re-encrypted when they're modified or closed.

# Bit Locker

BitLocker is a full disk encryption feature which is included with the wide range Windows operating system. This feature is designed to protect data by providing encryption for entire volumes.

When the support for the feature comes into the picture, the AES (Advanced Encryption standard) with a 128 bit or 256 bit memory is used for whole-disk encryption supporting encryptions on other volumes or a virtual drive that can be opened and accessed like any other drive on your computer.

# GNU Privacy Guard

GNU Privacy Guard is a GPL (General Public License) Licensed substitute to the PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) suite of cryptographic software.  The GnuPG is a part of the Free Software Foundation's GNU software project, and has received major funding from the German government.

These tools support many encryption types and ciphers, and are capable of encrypting individual files one at a time or external drives and connected media.

# 7-Zip

7-Zip is an open source file collector or an application used to compress files. It works with the 7z archive format but can read and write several other archive formats too. This application can be used from a command line interface, graphical user interface or with window-based shell integration.

7-Zip is completely free for commercial use also supporting 256-bit AES encryption providing the official download on Windows only and there are no specialized unauthorized applications for Linux and OS X systems.

# VeraCrypt

The VeraCrypt is a freeware used for On-The-Fly encryption (also known as Real time encryption and transparent encryption) which can create a virtual encrypted disk within a file or encrypt a partition or the entire storage device.

Actually the VeraCrypt is supposed to be the successor of the TrueCrypt, which was discontinued due to no proper maintenance according to the website.

The VeraCrypt supports AES, TwoFish, and Serpent encryption ciphers with the creation of hidden, encrypted volumes within other volumes. This tool is new with constant new updates and is under regular development too.