I’ve been using PGP 6.5.8 for several years, (currently on Windows XP), and finally decided to give Gpg4Win a try and downloaded and installed gpg4win-2.1.0-rc2.exe.
First time I tried to decrypt a file I got a blue screen crash.
After rebooting I tried decrypting a 200mb file I had encrypted using PGP and conventional encryption called “test.zip”. It prompted me for the password and i entered it and it created a directory called test_1 and after it was finished, the directory of test_1 was empty! I have no idea where the decrypted file went.
Next I created a small text file and tried to encrypt it using Gpg4win and could not figure out how to do conventional encryption. (For files I just want to keep secure on my computer, I dont need a key pair, do I? I can set the bit strength by the complexity of my password/phrase. It seems Gpg4win does not support conventional encryption?
I encrypted this text file with PGP and then tried to decrypt it with Gpg4win and it worked - but it seemd to cache the passprase because when I erased the result and tried to decrypt it again, it did so wihtout prompting me. This is problematic because I dont want my passprhases cached - wny was I not promted for set up options?
During the time I have been typing this, I just went back to decrypt it again and it appears the password is still cached somewhere - not very safe if you ask me.
Lastly, when I rename an encrypted file with PGP, when I decrypt it, the orignal file name comes out. When I decrpt it with Gpg4win, the renamed filename comes out - its not getting the original file name like PGP does.
Im not an expert an any of this, sort of a intrmediate I guess - but it seems to me Gpg4win is not ready for primetime:
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Decrypted a file to I-dont-know-where creating an empty directory.
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Appears to support decrypting files encrypted with conventional encryption but does not support conventional encryption itself.
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Caches passwords with no setup options…
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The whole bluescreen thing…
I think I’ll stick with Pgp for now.