I am a brand new user of pCloud and Cryptomator so perhaps this is total newb ignorance.
Here’s what I did:
I mounted a pCloud drive on my Windows desktop
Created a Cryptomator vault in the pCloud drive and moved various files into the vault folder
Used pCloud to designate the Cryptomator vault folder for Offline Access Sync to a folder on my data D: drive
After the sync was complete, from Cryptomator I used “+ Add Vault” to add the offline pCloud Cryptomator vault folder on D: drive via the “Open Existing Vault” option
The problem:
Even though the offline (local) pCloud folder with the encrypted Cryptomator folder exists on the D: drive, when I look at the properties of the unlocked vault it is using the storage of my C: drive! I found this out when I attempt to put a bunch of picture and video files into the vault and I got an error message informing me I don’t have enough room. I have plenty of room on my D: drive which is where the pCloud offline folder resides, so why is Cryptomator associating the vault with C: drive?
Any ideas what is going on? I have been at this for a better part of today and can’t figure it out. Any help is greatly appreciated.
Before adding a vault, I went to Settings and changed the Virtual Drive Volume Type to FUSE. Now the Cryptomator vault folder on the offline pCloud D: data drive is actually using the D: drive for the storage!
Now a final question: Is there any disadvantage to using Fuse? If not, what is the reason Cryptomator defaults to using WebDAV for the virtual drive?
No, quite the opposite. WebDAV has disadvantages compared to FUSE. For example, the problem you mentioned, but also the fact that WebDAV can only handle files up to 4 GB.
WebDAV is available on all systems by default and does not need to be installed as it is part of the OS. For this reason, it was decided at the beginning of Cryptomator’s development that the virtual file system would be made available via WebDAV. And even today WebDav is used by default if no other virtual file system can be found (somehow Cryptomator has to mount the vaults). Later FUSE (WinSFP) and Dokany were added as options which have to be installed separately.
Maybe it would be prudent to add a disclaimer of WebDAV’s limitations in the Virtual Drive tab as well as explaining the benefits of FUSE and Dokany so newbs like me can make an educated decision and not have to find out after the fact that their C: Drive is filled up or their videos over 4 GB are unable to be backed up.
The c drive is not actually used if you are not selecting it as your vault path. It is only shown the capacity of the c drive as property of your virtual drive, regardless where you actually have chosen to store your vault.
Thanks for the replies, but if the C drive is not actually used, then why when I attempted to drag and drop 100’s of gigs of files into the CM vault did it respond there was not enough room? This did not happen when I switched over to FUSE.
Because the system „thinks“ that your virtual drive has only the capacity of c. That the bug when using WebDAV. You can just open your file explorer and go to the path where your vault files (encrypted files) are actually stored. If you have selected drive d, then the files are stored on d.