I tried setting Mount Point to a folder by selecting “Custom Path”.
Having a few Cloud storage and synching services, I created in my file system one top folder and three subfolders - one for each Cloud Storage, as below.
Issue:
When a vault is locked, the files in the associated Mount Point folder disappear as expected, however the folder itself remains visible. This is unlike the behavior of a virtual drive which disappear completely upon vault locking.
The Mount Point is not just visible after locking, it is also accessible for saving new files into it.
Saving a file into such locked folder prevents subsequent attempt to unlock it. Interestingly, deleting this file would re-enable the unlocking.
Question:
Is this behavior “by design”, or am I missing something?
Cryptomator stores files inside a directory that you the user create and name. It’s doesn’t seem logical to expect that cryptomator would change a directory name that you created.
I sense you have an objection on the basis of privacy (what might someone be able to discern by snooping in your file system). if you want to hide the names of your vaults from your file system then you can give the directories innocous names. You could for example name the directories
In which case you still have the option to give the vaults more descriptive names with the cryptomator app itself (on WIndows and Linux I can change the vault name without changing the associated directory name… unfortunately android is not as cooperative).
Of course if someone is snooping in your file system they may be snooping in your cryptomator application too. But at least to the extent your directory names are mirrored to the cloud, the directory names won’t be revealing anything on the cloud.
I apologize if I misunderstood your comments or concerns.
For various reasons, I prefer to set folders as Mount Point instead of a virtual drives.
I use a stucture based on a suggestion by tobihagemann in this thread: “Cryptomator drive, instead of a individual drive for each vault” (Dec 2022).
There is no issue with custome names of the parent folder and subfolders of the Mount Point. You can set them to anything in the General tab of settings, and they do not need to match the names of the associated vaults. It is easy to see the “mapping” of Vault to Mount Point. On the vault list of the App window, Mount Point is listed as the first row in bold type and the associated Vault is listed just below it in smaller font.
An error is raised: “Lock failed”, “Locking myVault was blocked by pending operations or open files…”
The Good:
This is great programming as it forces the user to save/close the file before locking.
The Bad:
With same above scenario, but now the Vault is set to auto lock after x minutes, no error message pops up, and the Vault remains unlocked.
The Ugly:
The scenarios above were tested with an Excel file. When a Notepad file was used, the behavior was different. With both manual and auto locking, the Vault locked while the Notepad file remained open!
Programmer alert:
Auto lock should behave like manual lock and raise an Open File error.
Notepad files (and all other file types) should behave like Excel files.
No. You are comparing apples with oranges here. The filesystem provided by Cryptomator recieves calls from your OS and answers them. For example, “give me the data from byte 100 to 512” or “shrink file size to 4KB”.
These calls come from the applications accessing files in the vault. It is purely the applications choice if a file should be locked or if a handle to a file is kept. If it does not and just load a copy of your data into its own cache, Cryptomator can’t do anything about it.