At a Glance
Expert’s Rating
Pros
- Comprehensive security
- No-nonsense and classy interface
Cons
- Pricey
Our Verdict
The best is expensive, but your money buys you a classy complete security solution in BestCrypt. Most end-users, however, will do fine with freebies such as TrueCrypt.
When you name your program BestCrypt, it had better be the best, or something closely approximating it. Well, if BestCrypt isn’t the most versatile or best encryption software out there, both the U.S. government and I are barking up the wrong tree. It’s full-featured, super stable, fast…and expensive. $120 bundled for container and volume encryption, and the BCWipe disk erase utility. That’s quite a bit of money when there are TrueCrypt or DiskCryptor—both effective encryption utilities and free.
But if you want the best, with a guarantee, you pay for it. In my hands-on with all the BestCrypt modules, they worked intuitively and well. The container and volume encryption both run as services and are transparent to the user except for a control panel. You access containers mounting them as virtual drives, i.e. you double-click on the container file, supply the required password, and BestCrypt the creates a virtual drive and assigns it a drive letter. You then browse it and perform file operations as you would with any drive.
BestCrypt offers a ton of encryption methods, including AES Rijndael, Blowfish-448, CAST, GOST, IDEA, RC6, Serpent, Triple DES, and Twofish. And depending on the algorithm, you can choose the mode such as CBC, LRW, etc. If your company is set on a particular algorithm, or you just want to switch it up across containers or volumes, BestCrypt is unusually capable in that regard.
BestCrypt’s interface is extremely well thought out, stays out of the way and doesn’t bother with useless bling. The BCWipe data wiper is available with you right-click on a drive, but it otherwise neatly tucked away in the utilities menu of the BestCrypt control panel along with a public key manager, algorithm benchmark, archiver, swap file encryption, plug-in manager and others. There’s nary an encryption security task that’s not available within the program.
It’s expensive, and not for the average user, but for businesses that want the best and the consequent peace of mind, BestCrypt is as good as it gets.
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