The locations dialog for Pryvit Professional invites up to five types of input from you, or you
can simply skip by any item that is already filled out to your satisfaction.
Dispersion count: The program disperses data, that is, it sends fragments of data to
different places, and may even send separate piles of mixed fragments to separate hiding places. The higher you set
the dispersion count, the more widely the fragments are dispersed and the more difficult it would be for a
malevolent person to access all the parts of your privacy protected archive and to decipher its content.
Values for the dispersion count may range from 2 to 16; the program starts with a setting of 3 because that is
often appropriate. The dispersion count is used in two ways. Fragments are dispersed across a minimum of two
and a maximum of 16 fragment heaps; hence the expression "dispersion count". These fragment heaps are written
to files. If you have Pryvit Professional, these files may in turn may be optionally dispersed in unique sets
to from 2 to 16 ("dispersion count") Internet locations.
You are asked to specify a working directory, a location on the hard drive or on a
local area network to which a copy of all output files may be written. It is always the case that one copy of each
output file is placed together in one directory on your computer. The rationale of a single working directory is
that it permits backup prior to optional erasure of the hard disk copy. In addition, it provides essential
working storage for interim outputs that may be used as inputs in successive cascades, should you desire the
ultra-high security benefits of cascading.
If you have Pryvit Personal, skip to the paragraph on Prefix for names
Redundancy count: If you have Pryvit Professional and if you have used the
procedure to add Internet locations, the redundancy count option is open for
entries. Set this value to zero, unless you want output files sent automatically to hidden places on the
Internet. However, you may specify that one, two, or three copies of each composite file are to be
automatically dispersed to Internet locations. Redundancy is measured in addition to the single
copy of each output placed in the working directory of your hard disk. Why have redundancy? Occasionally,
Internet servers are temporarily out of service. If a privacy protected archive is hidden on an out-of-service
server, it is not retrievable from that location. Using redundancy, each file comprising the privacy protected
archive is sent to multiple hidden dispersion locations to minimize the risk of encountering a down
server.
The moment you select a redundancy count greater than zero, the bottom half of this
dialog changes. See the next page.
Prefix for names: You may if you wish set the first one, two, or three characters of the
name of each output file in a privacy protected archive. By doing this, you may distinguish
among files from different archives. The advantage of such an override is that the probability of two files
from different archives having exactly the same name (and one overwriting the other) is reduced from one chance in
341,172 to zero chance. The first character in a prefix must be a letter. The second and third may be a letter or a numeric
digit in the range 2 to 7.
Suggestion: Each time you run the option to privatize a set of files, input a different three
letter set here. Example: One time it might be "CVB", the next time "CVC", the next time "CVD", etc. Here is why.
Each time you run the option to privatize files, a privacy protected archive is created, plus one or more
reconstitution files that you need to retrieve your original data. All output but the first reconstitution
file have meaningless names. That is deliberate. Coming up with meaningful names takes time, gives no benefit,
and might give clues to people trying to break into your data.
