Folks, for several weeks now I have been stuffing backups into cloud storage. Simply because it's convenient in batch files, I have been using PKZIPC V6 with switch like these -cryptalg=AES,256 -pass=MyL0ngSafePassw0rd to prepare the files for backup. I mentioned this to my cat and he asked me some interesting overlapping questions:
1. Can you restore your backups in managed code? 2. Can you create backups in managed code that are PKZIPC V6 compatible. 3. How is the AES 256-bit key generated from the PKZIPC V6 password string? 4. Is the PKZIPC V6 encryption compatible with other convenient utilities? Worryingly, the answer to most of these is "dunno", but I'm looking for answers. In any case, I must be sure that my cloud backups are secure and usable in the long term. Imagine having backups you can't read or decrypt sometime in the future. I'm going to run a few tests to see if I can create or read PKZIPC V6 compatible files in managed code. I've been using SharpZip for many years, but it only supports the original weak encryption. I'll probably have to use DotNetZip <http://dotnetzip.codeplex.com/> in my tests, but it's a new library for me and I'll have to get the hang of it. Then question 3 comes into play. Yoiiks! Greg P.S. There are no real questions in this post, just some mental notes and warnings to others doing this sort of thing.
