Cryptomator vs Encrypted Disk Image (Disk Utility)

[iamdannywyatt]

New to the forum and new to Cryptomator.
I installed it and it seems to work great.
My question is:
I don’t use anything “fancy” when it comes to encryption. Right now I just have 2 vaults (one backs up stuff to Dropbox and the other one create an exact copy of that content to iCloud, just for redundancy).

If I create encrypted disk images for each one of those scenarios, using Disk Utility, how does that differ from using Cryptomator?

They both create encrypted “boxes” for the content, right?
Any differences?

Thanks

[iamdannywyatt]

I think this topic helps a little bit:

Cryptomator Vault / Tresor vs. macOS encrypted Time Machine image / sparsebundle

— Englisch Translation — Hey everyone. I would really like to know what security advantage one backup variant has over the other. With a Cryptomator vault, an encrypted folder / image is created on a OneDrive server, for example. This is decrypted locally on my computer. I put files into the mounted drive locally. And these are encrypted and stored on the actual OneDrive vault. Isn’t that exactly the same as creating an encrypted sparsebundle image via macOS Disk Utility, putting it on OneDr…

So basically Cryptomator works locally, encrypts the files and uploads those files to Dropbox/iCloud, so the vault itself is not uploaded. Whereas a disk image, as pointed out by @tobihagemann, is uploaded to the cloud and any small changes, even if it’s 1KB would mean reuploading the whole disk image, which could be GBs of data just for a 1KB change.

Is this accurate? Would Dropbox/iCloud see the disk image, when changed in size and date modified, assume it was a new file and would try to re-upload the whole thing?

[iamdannywyatt]

Ok after a few tests here is what I noticed, for others with the same type of question:

1 - When you create the disk image, you have to set the size of it, which seems to be fixed and can’t be changed in the future. This limits the scalability of the whole thing. If I set it to 100MB now and then I have 200MB in the future, I would have to create a new image disk (unless this can be changed and I’m not aware?)

2 - If I set a big enough image disk size to use the cloud’s available space, for example 5GB, then it means that even if I’m only using 10MB for now, the cloud service is already using 5GB, no matter what so 1) that means that I had to initially upload 5GB of data, which is time consuming if I’m not yet using 5GB and 2) now I’m using all the cloud’s space, leaving no space for things that I don’t want encrypted

3 - I noticed that when I uploaded content to the disk image, Dropbox didn’t start syncing automatically. It only did it when I unmounted the disk, which defeats the purpose of having sync working in real time, otherwise we have to keep mounting and unmounting it to sync.

So that being said, Cryptomator seems to do the job better (in this particular scenario) than a Disk Image.

Hope it helps other users.