Review: BestCrypt lives up to its name with excellent features

Jon L. Jacobi has worked with computers since you flipped switches and punched cards to program them. He studied music at Julliard, and now he power mods his car for kicks.
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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. Add the $60 container, $100 volume encryption, and $40 for the DiskWipe utility, and you're talking $200. That's $200 more than the free TrueCrypt or DiskCryptor—both effective encryption utilities.

There's no bling, just the necessary controls in the BestCrypt control panel window.

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.

Encrypted containers are just one of BestCrypt's many tricks.

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.

Note: The Download button on the Product Information page takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.

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