Another very nice feature is a password/passphrase creation dialog with a spellchecker to prevent you from accidentally entering a misspelled phrase that will take you forever to recreate. The company's sales hook is that more data has been lost due to forgotten passwords than damaged media. I can't vouch for that; however, I have seen it happen enough to tell you that you shouldn't dismiss the possibility.
The company offers a free utility that simply decrypts Silver Key parcels--so if you choose to use Silver Key, recipients of your files don't need to buy it. Silver Key does a nice job of squashing files, and it worked perfectly in my tests. This program has enough going for it that it merits consideration as a super-secure alternative to the more popular archiving utilities like and .