Can I Duplicate a Vault?

Hi,

I want to automatically maintain a copy of a vault stored in Dropbox on my Android phone so I can read the vault on the laptop using Cryptomator. I intend to use the Android Dropsync app which lets me schedule automatic copy operations on the phone from Dropbox storage to local phone storage. Unfortunately I can’t copy the encrypted files stored in one vault to the other because Dropsync can’t directly access Cryptomator files that are encrypted in a vault.

However I expect I should be able to automatically copy (actually mirror) the contents of the Dropbox vault folder to the local vault folder so the local vault is a duplicate of the Dropbox vault. However if I do this I get the message “vault.cryptomator does not match with the masterkey.cryptomator” when I try to access the local vault.

Is there a way to make this work? If so how do I do it?

Thanks,
Mike

Hi.
Seems like something messed up the vault files in your copy.
Vault files are just files.
If you make a copy of a vault it should be possible to open that copy just like the original vault.
Please make sure that you copy the complete vault. Means everything including the folder that is named after your vault.

Hi Mike,

I tried again taking more care to ensure that the copies were correct and got a different result. When I tried to add the copied vault folder and identified masterkey.crypyomator in the folder as the masterkey file I got “Vault is root folder of the cloud connection”, and it said I needed to create a cloud connection. That’s not helpful: I want the copy to be a local vault, not a cloud vault. From that point I can’t continue.

Am I still doing something wrong? Or am I now doing everything right but it’s not going to be happy if it’s not cloud based?

Thanks,
Mike

That sounds like an Android problem. Maybe @SailReal got an answer?

1 Like

@MikeA01730 Here you can find a solution for the problem: "Vault is root folder of the cloud connection" dialog shown, what to do?

Hi guys,

Thanks for the help! That fix made it work.

One question just for my understanding: Why does Cryptomator care what medium the vault data is stored on? I’d expect that as long as the vault data was correct and up to date Cryptomator wouldn’t care and wouldn’t need to know.

Thanks again,
Mike

It doesn’t. But in former times there was no android function for a vault stored on the device. This was added later. That’s why all connections, no matter if cloud based or local are treated the same and receive the same error message. I assume that’s why you read „cloud connection“ despite your vault is local.