Does decrypting files negatively affect my hard drive each time I unlock an view a vault?

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1

By negatively affect, I mean age my hard drive by having more write applied to the disk (I’m not tech savvy, but I hope this makes sense).

Of course, this would be unavoidable, but I was wondering what impact, if any, constantly decrypting large files (such as HDR video files from my phone) would have on my hard drive.

Thank you in advance!

2

I don’t see any reason it would put any more wear and tear on your hard drive than reading and writing ordinary (unencrypted) files – the extra “load” of encryption is handled by the computer processor (which also wouldn’t be affected, unless maybe you were pushing it to the edge of overheating with other demands).

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3

No additional I/O worth mentioning other than when accessing unencrypted files. To be 100% accurate this is the overhead:

  • The ciphertext files are insignificantly larger than the unencrypted ones (104 bytes header + 48 bytes per each 32kiB)
  • For exceptionally long file names there will be small metadata files stored inside the “m” directory of your vault (written once, read on each access)
  • During each unlock the masterkey.cryptomator will be copied to masterkey.cryptomator.bkup
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4

Thanks guys. I was worried about the constant decryption/re-encryption having a negative affect, in case it was making the files from scratch each time.

5

Oh yes, forgot to mention this: When modifying a single byte inside a huge file, Cryptomator re-writes the whole file with a new file-specific key. This might change in the future to get better random access performance during write and reduce the affected number of bytes that need to change in a file. But at least one 32kiB block needs to change, otherwise an attacker could reconstruct the differences before and after editing.

But other than the changed file, nothing gets re-written.

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6

Gotcha. So just to remove any room for doubt, unlocking and locking my vault doesn’t seriously affect my hard drive?

Thanks for all of your help and detailed info so far.

7

Correct.

Only the masterkey backup file is written, but most likely it didn’t change (if you didn’t change the password), so there is a chance your file system or ssd firmware doesn’t even execute this write.

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