So I accidentally moved the master key file too. What are the best free/paid software to recover it from my HDD?
If the vault was in a cloud storage, you should be able to recover deleted files there. Otherweise, recovery from HDD seems to be your best bet.
Personally, I don’t have a recommendation for Windows but here are some suggestions: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/9f2epa/recommendation_for_file_recovery_software/
I would probably try TestDisk. It looks like that it can “Undelete files from FAT, exFAT, NTFS and ext2 filesystem”. Fingers crossed!
Thank you for the reply. I’m using Stellar Data Recovery for now to see how it goes, however I’ll be using different programs. Luckily I moved the folder this morning, so not a long time has been passed.
It looks like the folders are still in place inside the vault’s folder. I wonder if any of them had been moved to the inside of the vault. Does Cryptomator Windows process use all of the files inside the vault’s folder that trying to move them while the the vault is open would result in an error by Windows? I mean the error saying that the files are in use by another application.
I can run Linux if you have a special method or program in mind for data recovery on Linux.
I reproduced it on my windows 10 machine.
When I move the vault files/folders into the corresponding vaults, I receive no windows error.
The masterkey files were moved, and also the vault file itself. It may look like the vault files are only been copied as there are still vault files on your HDD, but please keep in mind that these vault files now contain the encrypted version of your encrypted vault files (the vault file in the vault).
These are not the same files.
You can reproduce that on a windows machine. Just open a vault, then copy all the vault files (folder d/m) into the vault (drive letter) and watch how the vault files on your HDD change.
So to answer your question: no, cryptomator does not block or use permanently the vault files when a vault is open. This is as designed, because we only want to have changed/modified vault files when there is change IN the vault, so that we do not need to upload the complete vault again only because one file in the vault has changed.
Disclaimer: I’m not a Cryptomator developer so I might be wrong.
I only draw conclusions from the system behavior and the application design.
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Fortunately, there was no important data in the vault. So I just gave up because no data recovery software was able to find the master key file.
I was afraid of that because the file was moved and not deleted. So I guess there is just nothing to recover or “undelete”.