Areca Backup and AES-256 encryption

Areca Backup is a cool open source backup software application that runs on Windows and Linux. I did find one issue that I finally found a fix for but it wasn't obvious so I thought I'd post it here.

When you first run Areca Backup, click on the "Log" tab. You may see these entries highlighted in orange:

WARNING - AES256_HASH (AES 256 - Password) encryption configuration is not supported by your system (Illegal key size or default parameters). It will be removed from the available encryption configurations.

WARNING - AES256_RAW (AES 256 - Original) encryption configuration is not supported by your system (Illegal key size or default parameters). It will be removed from the available encryption configurations.

If you see those warnings, do the following (your file paths may be slightly different depending on your installation and OS):

1. Close Areca Backup
2. Rename "C:\Program Files\Java\jre6\lib\security\local_policy.jar" to "local_policy.jar.bak"
3. Copy "C:\Program Files\Areca\lib\local_policy.jar" into "C:\Program Files\Java\jre6\lib\security\"
4. Start Areca Backup

You should now be able to use AES-256 encryption with Areca Backup.