Hi! Robert J. Hansen schrieb: > GnuPG conforms to the OpenPGP standard for cryptography. That means > there are ... what ... 14 or so compatible implementations. You don't > have to rely on GnuPG; there are a lot of other options out there. This > is very good for purposes of long-term storage. It is probably one of the best choices for the purpose, however, in general, long-term archival and encryption don't go together nicely. Neither does compression or similar. Many algorithms or encryption modes are rather 'sensitive' to single bit-errors, lost bits and the like. Imagine the session-key part of an OpenPGP message be destroyed. Commonly, this will be far less than 1% of the actual data, but even with 99% intact, you won't have a chance of recovering *anything* from it. When using encrypted backups, 100% data integrity plays a much greater role than when just storing unencrypted data.
With a directory full of .bmp files, you have a fair chance not to notice a bit flip at all or you might notice a single out-of-color pixel. With a directory of .jpgs, you might notice a corrupted 8x8 pixels block or, worst case, have one unusable image. With a single images.zip.gpg file, a bit flip may mean that the whole archive is unreadable (which is the worst case... no idea what an average case might look like). cu, Sven _______________________________________________ Gnupg-users mailing list Gnupg-users@gnupg.org http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users
