Best practice - Big Vault or smaller vaults?

Hi,

I migrated my Onedrive stuff into a single vault. Its currently holding about 500 GB

Im worried that if the vault gets corrupt I can loose all my data… Should I worry?

Would you recommend breaking it down into smaller vaults thematically?

Thanks!

I would not call myself an expert, but since nobody else popped in, let me give you my take:

  1. I have tried a single vault, almost 3TB in size. Seems to work (although I user WinFSP instead of the official connection methods).

  2. Cryptomator doesn’t use a single encrypted volume, so if a header breaks, everything breaks. It uses encrypted files (each file is encrypted and then is a normal OS file, just encrypted). So I don’t see how you could loose your data (if you keep your signature safe).
    Someone should probably step in and tell us which files are critical to be safe, for the decoding of data.

Hi, Thanks fro the reply.

you´re right… there is a single volume so in theory it should be safe under the same vault… nonetheless, years of IT makes me nervous on putting everything on the same basket. :slight_smile:

I just wonder how other people manage their data in CM volumes.

From my point of view there are only three things critical for encryption (4 with 1.6.x and newer):

  1. your Masterkey file, which has to be stored in the vault root folder (App version 1.5.x)
  2. you password (or token or whatever will be possible with 1.6.x)
  3. the vault structure. Means: do not touch the d folder or the subfolders. If you rename the d folder, nothing can be decrypted anymore. If you rename/move subfolders, the files within cannot be decrypted anymore.
  4. Only for Version 1.6.x: your vault.cryptomator file, which will identify your vault. Without that file, the app will not recognize your encrypted files as a vault.

But, as @NLS already said: each file is treated separately. If a file or a bunch of files get corrupted for whatever reason, all other files will be fine.

PS: if you are afraid of data loss (everyone should be), do your backups :grinning:

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