IOS software
Swipe away your touchscreen troubles and rekindle your love of Apple’s mobile devices Working with sensitive documents
If you don’t need to store docs locally, there are encrypted cloud services
Q
How can I work with encrypted documents on my devices? On my Mac I keep sensitive files in an encrypted sparse bundle. Will that work in iOS, or should I do something else?
A
Encrypted sparse bundles are an excellent way to protect sensitive documents in macOS, but currently aren’t supported in iOS/iPadOS, although they move fine in iCloud. To access these documents on your devices you need a system which works across them all.
If you don’t need to store these documents locally, there are several encrypted cloud services you could use. Cryptomator is free for macOS and cheap on iOS, and supports local storage as well as third-party cloud services. Boxcryptor requires a subscription, as does Tresorit. You could still keep local copies in a sparse bundle for backup.
If you need to keep local copies on your devices, the best solution at present is to use an encryption system which is supported on both macOS and iOS. One simple option is an encrypted ZIP archive, but you must ensure that it uses a modern type of encryption such as AES 256-bit as its legacy methods are no longer secure. Several other encryption apps are available, including the popular PGP.
The biggest problem with using them, or ZIP archives, is transparent access from iOS apps. For example, access to ZIP archives using WinZip for iOS is clumsy, but simpler using an alternative such as iZip Pro.
Although this should improve in future versions of iPadOS, it looks unlikely that iOS will support encrypted sparse bundles for the time being.