Steganos Safe 22 Review

Installing Steganos Safe

The installer for Safe can be downloaded directly from the Steganos website, simply hit the “30-Day Free Trial” button to start downloading the installer and take advantage of the free trial.

At only 44MB the installer can be downloaded very quickly and once running will begin installing Steganos Safe 22 straight away with little user intervention required. In fact, this installation process was pretty much 100% automated and within just a few seconds the software was installed, at its welcome screen and ready to use!

From this splash screen we can either log in to our Steganos account (if we already have a licence for the software) or begin a 30 day free trial of the software. Whichever choice you make, once past this welcome screen we will be greeted by the main dashboard and a “what’s new” window highlighting the new features of Safe version 22.

At this point the software will be fully installed and ready to go!

Creating and using Safes

Steganos Safe allows the creation of secure and encrypted containers called “safes”, these safes are files in their own right and contain, in an encrypted state, all of the files and folders you might wish to have secured using Steganos Safe.

Once a safe is created it can be opened using the Steganos software itself and the use of a password to decrypt the data, once decrypted the container will be added to the Windows PC as a virtual drive with a drive letter assigned to it for easy access of any files within.

To create a safe we can start by opening up the Steganos Safe software and clicking on the new safe button as is shown below.

After clicking the above button we will be met by another screen asking us which type of safe we want to create, in this section of the review I will be looking at the locally stored safes which is the first option and is highlighted in the image below (I will look at the other options later on).

On the next screen we will be asked to describe the safe (important so we know what it is being used for) and also assign a free Windows drive letter for accessing the safe later on.

Next, we will be asked where we want to save the safe on our PC, this will be a single file which holds all of our encrypted information and can be saved anywhere on the PC. It is important not to save this container on a synchronised cloud drive (such as Dropbox) just yet as Steganos Safe has a special container type optimized for cloud drives, we will look at this optimized version later on.

After selecting a file location we will then be asked to set the size of the container, this can be a fixed value (which will never change) or a dynamic value which starts small and only takes up as much space as is needed.

Whilst fixed sized drives usually perform better the dynamically sized drives make much more efficient use of disk space, if you only plan on using the container lightly then this is probably the better option (and what I will be choosing here myself).

After we have selected the size of the vault we get to set the password and security options for the newly created container. At the most basic level we should, as a minimum, set a secure password for the container which cannot be easily guessed.

This password screen also provides us with some other options relating to securing our new container, these include the use of multi-factor authentication and the ability to store the password on a special USB flash drive for secure keeping.

Steganos have also included into this above screen a very handy password generator which can help in creating a secure password as well as a picture based login option which allows a series of pictures to be selected in place of a password.

After the security settings have been configured the new safe will be created, this can potentially take up to several minutes depending on the speed of your PC and once finished we will get a confirmation screen.

Once the safe has been built it will now be accessible in Windows by the drive letter we selected earlier, it will also show up on the Steganos Safe software dashboard. When looking at the safe in the Safe software dashboard we can right click on this safe and see a list of options to further configuring our safe, this menu can be seen below:

As can be seen above, we have several options for re-configuring our encrypted container (providing it is unlocked and showing in the Safe software). The Settings screen allows us to change the password, change how the device is seen by Windows (as a local hard drive or a USB flash drive), change the location of the file and even securely delete the container should we so wish.

Another two options available in the settings menu are the “safe-in-a-safe” option and the “Hide” option, both of these provide support for hiding our container and making it even harder to locate and access.

The “Safe-in-a-Safe” option simply creates a new safe within an existing storage container, the “outer” container will of course still be visible on the PCs filesystem but this internal safe will only be accessible (and visible) once the outer container has been unlocked.

The “Hide” option allows us to hide the safe within another file such as a “.mp4” file or Windows executable file (.exe). As can be seen below, this is very easy to configure and only really involves pointing the Steganos software to the file we wish to be used.

Naturally, this method will increase the size of the original file which might (in some circumstances) make said file look out of place in itself, but it is a nice feature either way which works well and will no doubt be of use to some people I’m sure.

Finally, once finished, we can close our safe by simply double clicking onto it within the Steganos desktop software, the safe will remain visible in the desktop software but will be greyed-out to indicate it is currently locked.

Using Cloud Storage

One of the biggest draws of such software is the ability to easily encrypt any cloud storage which might be mapped you your PC via desktop to cloud synchronisation software. Steganos Safe 22 makes this possible thanks to its specially designed mode allowing for creation of encrypted containers specially designed to work with major cloud storage providers.

To create an encrypted container optimised for cloud storage we must start in the same way as we did when creating a local container. This time around in creating our container, however, on the screen asking what type of Safe to create we should choose the option for optimising for cloud storage as can be seen below.

On the next screen we will be asked to select the cloud provider we wish to use, currently only Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive and MagentaCloud are supported, for this review I will be using the Dropbox integration.

Once we have chosen our cloud provider the setup will continue as it did before when I created the local container earlier on. This process involves choosing a drive letter, setting a master password and optionally multi-factor authentication (2FA) before the new vault is created and ready to use (NB the software works out where your synchronised folder is by itself).

Once the setup is complete we can begin using the assigned drive letter as we would with any other drive attached to our Windows PC. The big difference here, of course, is now any files added to this drive will eventually take advantage of synchronisation via our cloud drive provider and of course be encrypted the whole time they are not residing on our own PC.

Using Portable Safes

Another very useful feature built into Steganos Safe is the ability to make “portable” safes, these are safes which are based on USB flash drives and external hard drives and will disconnect and automatically be secured as soon as the external device is removed from the PC

Set-up is similar as to the other safes I have looked at in this review and the external drive or USB flash drive must be attached to the PC during the setup process.

Steganos File Shredder

Finally on of the other main components of Steganos Safe 22 is the file shredding tool, this enables privacy conscious users to securely erase any traces of a file or folder ever existing in its original location (after it has been added to the encrypted container).

Whilst there are many other tools which perform similar file erasing functions (including the excellent Ashampoo WinOptimizer) it is still nice to see this tool included and easily available.