BestCrypt is an advanced system with many functions. This guide section provides a simple guided tour of basic BestCrypt functionality to give you a gentle introduction into encrypted data storage.
The information provided below is useful if you have BestCrypt Control Panel installed. Click here for viewing a quick start guide for console version.
Launch BestCrypt Control Panel to get started, and BestCrypt will greet you with its welcome screen
To create a container, click either 'Create new container' in the centre of the main window or 'Create' on the toolbar. Both of these will greet you with the dialog to create new container:
All the options are explained in related guide section. Default values should work for now. Click Create, choose where to store your new container file and supply a password for it.
Creation process having completed, you will see your new container displayed in Control Panel. If you already have a BestCrypt container on your system (maybe created by BestCrypt for Windows), the container may be displayed in BestCrypt Control Panel with help of Locate and then mounted.
Select one of the containers in Control Panel and click 'Mount' on the toolbar. BestCrypt will offer you to choose mount point for your container. Choose a mount point and enter your container password in the password manager and click 'Ok'. BestCrypt will verify your password and create a new removable device mounted from the container file you have just created.
Your secret virtual drive is now accessible just like a usual disk drive. Everything you write to the disk will be automatically encrypted and then decrypted when you read the data from the disk. You can create or copy files on this new disk and they will be safely stored encrypted in the container file.
The encrypted disk can be ejected in absolutely the same way as any other drive would be ejected: use the eject button in Launcher's disk panel or Eject on the toolbar of BestCrypt Control Panel. BestCrypt provides additional ways to eject mounted containers that complement standard ways described above:
BestCrypt has console tool for managing containers. You can launch it by executing bctool command in terminal. Executed with no parameters, the tool shows a list of available commands. More information about command parameters can be found in man-page by executing man bctool in console.
The first thing you should do after installing BestCrypt is to create a new container. You can do it by executing the following command in terminal:
$ bctool new my-secret-container.jbc -a rijndael -M XTS -s 100M -t msdos
The command provided creates a new container file with name my-secret-container.jbc, 100 megabytes of size, formatted to FAT filesystem, using Rijndael cipher with XTS mode for encrypting a data inside it.
To be able to access the data inside a container you must mount it to some folder you are the owner of. The command below mounts a container named my-secret-data.jbc, to a folder named /home/user/secret-data:
$ bctool mount my-secret-data.jbc /home/user/secret-data
Please note, that after mounting any person who has an access (for example, read-only access) to the mount point will also have the similar access to all the data inside your container.
To close an access to a container data, you need to unmount your container. After the previous example your container is mounted to /home/user/secret-data. To unmount it, you can use the command below:
$ bctool umount /home/user/secret-data
To list all containers that are used by any BestCrypt device, please run the following command in terminal:
$ bctool list