For both a personal and business use case, but especially in a business setting, I believe a recycle bin is a must.
Currently data can be lost forever by a simple mistake, with no real way to reverse it in the following second when you realize what you’ve done. I don’t believe it’s reasonable to break out backup files every time an employee, home or other type of user accidentally deletes a file, and sometimes backups don’t exist. There’s a lot of reasonable reasons for backups to be absent.
In my mind a hidden folder inside the vault location, which can be access through the Cryptomator UI would be a fantastic solution. A recycle bin button in the Cryptomator Vault UI would open an otherwise hidden folder in the vault. This would remove many problems I can see existing across OS’s and virtual drive/volume types.
I hope the Cryptomator team would consider this, as it will be a life saver for many users, even if rare for power users.
The recycle bin is just a folder that your files are moved to when you hit delete. Currently Cryptomator has no trouble with dealing folders and layers of folders, so this seems to be a system integration issue. It needs to let the file managers know that the drive it emulated supports recycle bin and instruct it to move the file over when you hit delete.
How is your experience with AxCrypt so far? It seems like the only viable alternative to Boxcryptor since Cryptomator doesn’t keep up with the promise of being “the best alternative to Boxcryptor” (Free Alternative to Boxcryptor: Cryptomator)
It’s shocking that such a feature isn’t directly built-in into Cryptomator. Either you claim you’re cloud-compatible and you actually provide relevant features or you’re not cloud-compatible and shouldn’t claim that you are. Cryptomator is just a better file/drive encryption tool (compared to others like VeraCrypt).
I’ve gone with Cryptomator, after all. AxCrypt decrypts files into a temporary folder rather than a virtual drive, which messes up file history and such in tools like Word, etc. That’s worse than not having Recycle Bin support, IMO.
It’s not just R.B. support that I think makes Cryptomator less useful than Boxcryptor – I also would like an option to only encrypt files, without obfuscating the file hierarchy and names, just like Boxcryptor does.
Still, I think Cryptomator is the best that is available for cloud storage – it syncs individual files rather than entire vaults, so it’s better than VeraCrypt for that (I use VC for other things).
Agreed, we seem to share some pain points here. Thanks for the reply, it’s good to know that AxCrypt doesn’t live up to the expectations. So far, I’ve found mixed reviews and it doesn’t seem convincing as a Boxcryptor alternative. I guess I have to get used to missing important features and work around them. It’s ridiculous that this is necessary, but what other choice do we have?
P.S.: I’ve used VeryCrypt a lot in the past and it served me well, but it’s indeed not great for cloud storage.
Yeah, I use VeraCrypt for encryption of things where I either a) want/need the extra control over encryption options, or b) want it to be really fast in accessing files, or c) need full-disk encryption.
I use Cryptomator for cloud files where I want them encrypted at-rest on my local machine, and Proton Drive for things where I don’t care about local at-rest encryption (or download speed).
I would also really like to have a recycle bin feature in Cryptomator. I had issues already and could not restore properly from my cloud recycle bin. Thus, a recycle bin in Cryptomator would be a massive improvement and in my eyes also a must have!
For Cryptomator on Windows, Dokany had this support (albeit ‘at your own risk’), but later versions of Cryptomator discontinued supporting it (right?), or at least the recycle bin support got flakey. This is the reason I’m still on Cryptomator 1.6.16 in combination with Dokany 1.5.1.1000, which iirc are the last versions giving a stable Dokany + Recycle bin combination. So I’m eagerly waiting for an alternative way to enable ecycle bin support, so that I can upgrade…
Argh!
I’ve just lost a full folder of critical documents, and I’m now in the ugly process of restoring from an offline backup. Damn! That hit me now twice!
I’m really upset with Cryptomator not getting the basics right. Pointing to others like “it’s the (file) provider who needs to implement this” is just not taking the responsibility.
One has to accept it or not use it: Cryptomator is just an encryption engine. It’s NOT taking responsibility for dealing with file storage systems and completely relies on third party to deliver that crucial part.
Sorry, no longer – I’m about to leave. I was a paying supporter, but what happened in the last years on better support, UX and usability? Nothing. Really too bad …
(I’m on macOS and iOS with macFuse and FUSE/T, other platform experience might differ)
Sorry I was a bit exaggerated and impolite, because of the data loss.
My point however was not about having the responsibility for a backup. (I do have multiple backups). It’s about where Cryptomator is defining its product limit. It’s removing functionality due to the way it works but doesn’t provide a substitute.
Because Cryptomator leverages a file/directory encryption, Cryptomator makes it by factors more difficult for people to leverage the basic trashcan or restore options from the underlying file provider. It’s just not possible to use “last deleted files” or undo a delete.
And there is no fallback. Eg if there would be no file-encryption people would be in a much better situation to recover lost files individually and not having to restore a full snapshot (like I had to do).
In addition, cryptomator does also prevent the use of a provided trashcan from a provider. At least I wasn’t able to figure out how to leverage a trashcan on iOS or macOS … Again, that’s an existing feature which you LOOSE when using Cryptomator and it would be so great if there is an alternative to this loss of functionality.
My expectation therefore is: Cryptomator is great encryption engine. It works for getting this stuff right. But in case of file deletion … totally different story.
I can’t believe that you haven’t had that situation yourself.
How do you recover individually, accidentally deleted files in a vault?
How do you compare two cryptomator vaults for differences (on the unencrypted file structure) to figure out what original files actually got deleted between two points in time?
