we are a works council (=Betriebsrat) in germany and by now using BoxCryptor and OneDrive as a solution to store our documents securely.
The solution worked fine for us.
As all know, BoxCryptor technology was sold to Dropbox and we have the need to find another solution.
So we came to Cryptomator Hub and tested it with our use cases with Cryptomator Hub installed on a private docker server.
We are a big team (>= 17 people) and it happens very often, that people work on the same office document at the same time.
Of course this leads to write and syncing conflicts.
BoxCryptor / OneDrive solved this in duplicating the files adding the computername in the filename. Additionally a message with the sync conflict was given to the user.
Our tests with Cryptomator Hub / OneDrive with 5 persons editing the same office document lead to:
Files with “(1)”, “(2)” and “(3)”
Totally unclear who created which of the copies
No messages to the users
Some changes were totally gone
==> unpredictable results!
It is not the issue, that we want to work real live in parallel on the documents. It’s clear, that this is not possible with end-2-end encryption.
But it will happen when 17+ persons have the task to review a word document.
We want that changes, a user made and saves without an error, are persistent. Either in the original file, or in a copy only made for the user. And the user should get a message/error, if it’s not the original file, where his changes are saved to.
Has the cryptomator team the plan to replace BoxCryptor in the business world? Then handling sync issues due to massive parallel saved documents should be prio 1.
We would like to give cryptomator hub a chance and buy licenses.
But this is currently not possible.
We are actually working currently on a way to notify the user about events inside the vault (e.g. failed decryption) and sync conflicts will be a part of it. For more info and progress, see Ticket 1386.
The notification feature is also a necessary building block for the file-is-in-use-notification feature: If a file is currently edited by a different user, Cryptomator will notify you with the options to ignore it or open it anyway. This feature is also on our roadmap.
Thank you for sharing your detailed experience. We’ve encountered similar syncing issues with multiple users editing the same document simultaneously. As you mentioned, Cryptomator’s end-to-end encryption poses challenges for real-time collaboration, but we agree that handling sync conflicts and providing clearer user feedback is essential for business use.
It sounds like improving conflict resolution, such as giving users clear messages about file versions or conflicts, would make Cryptomator Hub a more viable solution for teams like yours. Hopefully, this is something the team will prioritize as they continue to develop the product.
It would be great to see these improvements implemented so that businesses can confidently rely on Cryptomator in collaborative environments!
Short update on the aforementioned issue 3707: This suggestion will most likely make it into the next release.
The (1), (2), … suffixes will then be replaced by the original conflict suffix from the cloud sync client, hopefully providing more helpful information on the conflicting edit.
