I’ve been testing Cryptomator with Google Drive and I’m near ready to deploy. One concern/risk I want to address is how fault-tolerant is Cryptomator if someone’s connection drops out in the middle of an update to a vault. We have a number of users that are in very remote locations and regularly lose connection/power where they are located. What are the potential risks that the vault could be corrupted and to what extent? What can be done to recover data if something goes wrong?
Hi.
As Cryptomator desktop does not the sync to the online Storage, it will work independently from your Internet Connection. And it does not monitor your internet connection, because it does not use it.
The sync is done by the sync client from google.
If more than one person is working with the files, this post about conflict management might be interesting.
If you plan to use Cryptomator in a business environment, this might be interesting as well: https://server.cryptomator.org/en/
I want to add, that the question depends wether you want to roll out desktop application or the mobile apps.
In the first case, @Michael answer is correct. In the latter, the following post might be of interest:
This is not exactly true.
When using Google Drive File Stream to access a remote vault, open files do not necessarily land on the local file system. Under those conditions it is possible to encounter both read and write failures within Cryptomator (if the link is unreliable).
From my observations, the Cryptomator vault deals with each file individually, so a write failure may affect the current file (as with any file system) but would not itself have an impact on the rest of the vault.
I am not sure, though, if Cryptomator also has to maintain its own directory structure (as in a cross reference list with the encrypted file names) so a failure while updating directory references might be more severe - but still not affect the entire vault.
In the past, Cryptomator has had some difficulties with read/write errors that leave the vault in an unusable state on the local machine. The recovery is fairly simple though… lock, then unlock the vault again.
Also, there is a current bug that Cryptomator sometimes leaves a Dokany custom mount point in a partially mounted state after locking the vault. In such a state, you can not remount without first deleting then recreating the folder.
Other than that, it seems fairly sturdy. Our company uses it extensively with Google Drive File Stream and have users simultaneously accessing vaults - which seems to work properly.
Cheers.