There should be the possibility of streaming files, because the way it is, for those who have limited packet of internet data is very bad, considering that when accessing an encrypted folder, all the files inside it are downloaded in a totally unnecessary way, because sometimes we just need to look at a single file.
What should be done is something like OneDrive (from Microsoft). When accessing a folder, you should load thumnail from all files without the need to download, and so we click on a file, the download will be done for that, and for nearby files (5 files will be downloaded next to the file which was downloaded).
And it’s not just a matter of “data packet”, is that when there are many files in a folder, once the folder is opened, it absolutely crashes everything, precisely because it has many files to be processed, and because all the files are being downloaded simultaneously.
Hi. I’m not sure if I understand your suggestion correctly.
As you are pointing out to interned data I assume you are talking about the mobile apps.
I’m confused, because there is no need to download all files. This is one major benefit of Cryptomator, that is only does down and upload the single file that you want to read/write. Other than veracrypt where always the complete vault has to be transferred.
So your suggestion of single file processing (if I understand your suggestion correctly) is already a feature of Cryptomator. (In all apps, desktop and mobile)
Create a folder inside the “drive encrypted in Cryptomator”.
Add about 50/70 mb of images inside this folder.
Close the Cryptomator.
Right-click on the OneDrive icon (which is on my upper left), and it will display the "context menu.
Click the [Clear Space] option and wait.
Open the Cryptomator and enter your password to access the “encrypted drive” you used to create the “folder with images”.
Open the folder containing the images.
You will see that a OneDrive “notification” will appear (…). In the notification it shows that the “files are being downloaded”, and as you can see (at least for me), the files are being downloaded one by one.
If you did not receive this notification, you may be opening OneDrive through the OneDrive icon that is in the “notification area” so that you can manually check which files were downloaded as soon as you opened the folder containing the images, and you will see that all files in the folder have been downloaded.
Please give me feedback after doing what I mentioned, to keep me informed if the same problem occurs with you too.
Basically your cloud provider already gives such a feature (for OneDrive its called Files On-Demand). The problem starts when you want to have a look inside a file.
For the desktop applications:
Cryptomator uses different adapters to handle requests from you and other programs accessing the vault to the real encrypted data (filesystem). If these layers support such a feature, then it may be possible.
But I see a problem here: To load previews you need to read the file (completely). But the file is encrypted and the server does not have the key. And addtionally you need access to the cloud storage provider to read from the files. Since you don’t want to transmit your file encrytption key to the server and Cryptomator is cloud provider agnostic, there is no quick/simple solution for this.
For the mobile apps: Your vault is accessed over the WebDAV interface of your cloud storage provider, so only the files you actually open are downloaded. But same problem as above, to generate thumbnails, you need to decrypt the file and for this you need to read the whole file.
Your answer was very lucid about it, and you understand my doubt very well.
I fully understood the reasons for downloading all the files now. There really is not much to do about it, given the dynamics of cloud file access and encryption.