Does Cryptomator support online-only files?

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1

Does Cryptomator support online-only files?

I’m attempting a data migration from Boxcryptor to Cryptomator and every file I place in my new vault is being downloaded and stored locally. My Cloud provider is DropBox, I’m not making plans there.

This is causing problems, I’ve ran out of hard drive space and cannot even decrypt files from Boxcryptor for transferal to the new Cryptomator vault.

2

Hi.
Yes it does, but at some point the file has to be local for encryption.
So if all your files in our dropbox account are bigger than your free local space you have the following options:

  1. transfer some files in your vault, sync the encrypted vault files with dropbox, and then tell the sync client to free up all files so that they are not using disc space anymore. Then continue with the next batch of files.
  2. use cyberduck to create/access your vault directly on Dropbox. See here: How do I use Cryptomator without local sync?
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It doesn’t seem possible to sync encrypted files/folders in Dropbox to online-only. I’ve looked at my Dropbox sync settings within the Dropbox desktop app, I activated “Save hard drive space automatically” and my “New files default” was already set to Online-only.

These files seem to be stuck as local versions on my PC.

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re “It doesn’t seem possible to sync encrypted files/folders in Dropbox to online-only. I’ve looked at my Dropbox sync settings within the Dropbox desktop app, I activated “Save hard drive space automatically” and my “New files default” was already set to Online-only.”

If you then force the filesystem native (encrypted) files to be online only (right click folders and select this option) then the vault will not open in Cryptomator GUI with errors reported. You will have to go back and manually make ALL the vault files offline use (local storage). Then remove the vault from the Cryptomator GUI, add it back again to open the vault.

This inability to work with DropBox online only files is a glaring (negatory) difference to the now departed Boxcryptor.

This may be a DropBox thing - Confirmed.

With OneDrive there is no issue. My test was to create a vault on OneDrive, unlock it, copy from folders to it. Lock the Vault. From osx filemanager right click and mark the vault files as “save space”. Open the vault from the Cryptomator GUI. Some delay to open but it worked. I assume the delay was the relevant files downloading. How this works for a large vault - still to test.

So IMO DropBox is a lost cause for now for cloud only vaults.

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Must admit, I’m having some frustrations with Cryptomator and cloud encryption.

I’m not sure that this problem is DropBox only. I’ve just created a vault in my OneDrive, threw some files in there and I get the same problem as I got with DropBox, the files seem to default to downloaded locally stored versions and it is not clear within Cryptomator how to change that.

Using yet another third party software like Cyberduck doesn’t appeal to me one bit, something as basic as this should be native within Cryptomator’s software.

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This cannot be changed in Cryptomator. You need to access the raw - now encrypted - file store. But it is an all or nothing. You have no folder identification in the raw file store as all the folder names are gone. To mark some folders as “keep on my device” and some as “save space” is not possible - it is all or nothing.

Yes I agree it would be good to be able to do this from within the Cryptomator folder structure.

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Are there any updates on this? I’m new to Cryptomator and am still learning its ins and outs. I’ve read conflicting information on this: Can you use the online-only feature of Dropbox with Cryptomator? I’d like to keep the majority of my encrypted files online until I need them to save space on my devices. I’d read that you can make the vault folders online-only and that’ll do the trick. But in practice, I’m running into issues.

Is this possible? If so, how?

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Yes it’s possible. See my 2nd post. Without being more precise what your issues are, I doubt anyone can help you.

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The problem is that Dropbox is making the vault folders online-only, so then Cryptomator can’t load anything. The vault.cryptomator, etc. files take up zero bytes so the software gets confused and can’t mount them.

Are there specific files that need to be marked as “make available offline” for this to work?

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No. The Dropbox client should notice when cryptomator is requesting a file and download it. From a technical point of view, cryptomator is not requesting the file directly from Dropbox client. It uses the OS file handling processes, nothing specific for Dropbox access. Therefore I assume that there’s a general problem with the Dropbox online only feature. But I might be wrong as I do not use Dropbox. Maybe someone else has an idea what might be the problem here?

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Agreed. But since it doesn’t seem to be downloading the files when requested, I wonder if just making the vault.cryptomator and masterkey.cryptomator files available offline would do the trick? I’m curious as to if anyone else using Dropbox has run into this and has a solution.