Google Drive File Stream vault update question

[Janko_Juvancic]

HI, I’m thinking of migrating from old vault format to new vault format 7. I have large vaults … some are 10tb or more with a lot of files (10.000+). All vaults are on my GSUITE google drive / currently there are more vaults with combined 70tb of data. All data is sensitive and important for our company.

The problem is i’m scared to upgrade because i cannot copy the vaults beforehand. This means that if something goes wrong … i could lose all data and this is not something i can do.

This is where the question comes in:

Google Drive Filestream has UPLOAD as well as DOWNLOAD limit as well as application operation limit (which is true in this case since the files are inside a vault and google treats all operations - primarily download as an operation inside an app, which is heavily limited). Does the update vault only rename the files or what exactly does it do? Because if it does too many operations there is a high change google won’t allow any more operations and the migration will simply fail.

Right now this happens mostly when downloading (decrypting) a lot of files at once - it stops downloading and it tells me application limit exceeded.

Does anybody have any experience in this matter? Any suggestions? Thanks. Appreciated a lot.

[infeo]

@Janko_Juvancic

Does the update vault only rename the files or what exactly does it do?

Only the internal vault structure chagnes, meaning that files may be renamed, moved or deleted. The encrypted content is not touched.

Specifically, if your vaults had previously vault version 6 (used since Cryptomator 1.3.0) and migrate now to vault version 7, the following changes will be made:

• All (unshortend) files will be renamed to have the ending .c9r
• For all directory files, they will be transformed to fit to the new vault structure
• The same applies to symlinks
• The m directory will be deleted with all its content

[Michael]

Hi and welcome

@Janko_Juvancic

All data is sensitive and important for our company.

Offtopic: I assume you have a serious backup strategie

@Janko_Juvancic

Does the update vault only rename the files or what exactly does it do

Here are the insights.

Vault Format 7: Behind the scenes

With Cryptomator 1.5.0 we introduced a new vault format. In this post i’d like to give a short explanation why it was necessary. Basics cryptoFS When I write “Cryptomator encrypts stuff”, I actually mean that its encryption library cryptoFS encrypts this stuff. No matter if its the content encryption, the file name encryption or the directory flattening, this library is doing all of it (and more) and can be seen as the core of Cryptomator. Misc To prevent confusion, I introduce some terms here…

@Janko_Juvancic

there is a high change google won’t allow any more operations and the migration will simply fail.

Absolutely. Although you can resume an already started vault migration, I have seen several reports in this board where user couldn’t perform a successful migration with on demand files. Not just because operation limitations, but also because files were not available and so on. On the other hand I think there were gdrive reports of successful migration with on demand files (cannot proof it right now). So I think there is a chance that you finish the migration of such an amount of data after a long time of resumeing the process and up-/downloading files. But I’m pretty sure you will have no fun.
From my point of view and in your case I recommend a local migration.

Disclaimer and update: this is for gdrive. iCloud users for example have to do the migration local. I stay with my general recommendation: migrate your vaults local

Unable to "Upgrade Vault" on Mac

To migrate your vault, it must be fully synced to your computer. In your case this is not given. As other cloud storage providers, Apples iCloud offers a feature to save space on the local harddrive by keep the files only in the cloud and download them on demand. To achieve it, a dummy file with the ending .icloud is saved at the location of the real file. To fully download your vault, read this post: