Security News > 2020 > May > Encrypt compressed files the easy way from Windows, macOS, or Linux
Learn to secure multiple documents by encrypting compressed files on various OSes using a password.
When considering how to share data efficiently, cloud storage has a leg up on hardware by making it easy to share files and folders with users across the globe with a few clicks.
By using compressed file types, such as ZIP, a sender can place multiple documents, including entire directories, together and compress them as a single file making it easy to share, while using strong algorithms to encrypt the contents based on a password that only the recipients will know.
Enter the following command using the -e switch to encrypt the resulting compressed file and -r to recurse subdirectories:zip -er Filename.
Windows supports creating compressed files via PowerShell from v5.0+ while it natively supports ZIP creation it does not support encryption and has a file limit of just 2GB. In the interest of simplicity and for the purposes of this article, I recommend leveraging the 7-zip module for PowerShell to get around these limitations.