Luckily, however, you can take cloud security into your own hands.

A few different tools can help safeguard the privacy of your data when you store it on a remote server. One of our favorites is , an easy-to-use encryption program that works with all the popular cloud services, is free to use (though you can pay for upgrades), and can help keep your data safe.

BoxCryptor is basically a virtual hard disk that encrypts files on the fly using 256-bit AES encryption. Unlike , another popular on-the-fly encryption tool, BoxCryptor encrypts individual files, not an entire volume or container. That means that your BoxCryptor-encrypted files sync with your cloud storage service immediately after you save them, whereas with TrueCrypt syncing occurs only after you finish encrypting an entire volume.

BoxCryptor works by encrypting and decrypting your files locally, and doesn't transmit your password to any third parties. In other words, your files will remain unreadable to outsiders even if hackers manage to steal your password, or otherwise breach the defenses of your cloud storage provider.

Setting up BoxCryptor is fairly painless, but the service does have a few nuances that could throw you for a loop. I'll get into those after discussing the differences between the various BoxCryptor offerings and showing how to get the encryption software up and running.