With the growing number of Web applications and their variety, the need to prevent unauthorised access to data and to ensure data integrity in distributed systems has led to an increasing reliance on encryption. Within a node, a typical encryption process operates at file or directory level and applies indiscriminately one algorithm to its data. In this paper, a scheme is proposed whereby secrecy is achieved through file data and file location concealment, within a client–server distributed system. This involves the division of a file into fragments, their encryption and compression, the random allocation of these fragments to the nodes, the generation and transcription of metadata for reconstructing the original file, and finally the deletion of both the original file and its metadata from the local node. A prototype of the scheme was implemented and evaluated in terms of the performance of the distribution and recovery process.