Hello all, I’m new to the program and the community.
I’ve been reading many threads about the particular “issue/doubt” I have, including a 6 years old thread ( Can I access a vault in a cloud with multiple systems simultaneously? ) but I would like to ask this question either way, since 6 years is a long time and I’m curious about your current experience.
Background: My mobile carrier offers a 75 GB cloud storage free of charge, but since it’s tied to my phone number, the security is quite low: there’s no passkey, no 2FA prompt, no password… it validates the account with a code sent over SMS. Because of this, I haven’t used this storage, I do not trust it.
Cryptomator would solve that, should anyone get access to the account, they would not be able to do anything with the data (other than deleting it, of course).
Setup & Tests: 2 Windows computers with the carrier’s cloud app installed, which is like any other cloud app: there’s a folder that’s synced and I created a vault inside that shared/cloud folder. So far so good. The vault was accessed as RW on both computers, but without modifying the same files/folders at the same time. For example, the files from Computer A where in a folder, the files from Computer B where in a different folder.
After some days of usage, I ran into a few issues:
- Even if synced on both computers, the app would through some notifications about issues with some nodes.
- Running the vault’s diagnostics would through errors in the Directory Check and Resource Type Check categories. All flagged events where able to be repaired/recovered.
- I lost access to some files in the vault, on both machines. Windows could not read them, it through an I/O error. The files “where there”, I could see the name, the size, everything. But I could not read them, nor copy them. At this point, the vault had no errors in any category (on either computer). I’m not sure what caused this, but I do remember the computer having issues when copying the files from the external HD to the cloud folder. I can’t say what failed, but it was not the HD since the files where deleted from the HD and created on the cloud folder, but somehow they got corrupted/broken at some point.
For the time being, I’ve moved all the files from the vault to their original place (minus those files mentioned above that were inaccesible).
I know Cryptomator encrypts the files and the syncing is the cloud’s provider tasks, that’s fine. But how does that come into play in a multi access vault nowadays?. I’m focusing from the integrity point of view, specially for the Cryptomator’s “control”/configuration/tracking files.
I can think of many workarounds:
- accessing the vault as read only on one computer
- avoid accessing the vault from multiple computers at the same time (this includes not having the vault unlocked).
- use the vault as “cold storage”, that is always locked (not mounted) and only accessing it when you want to send data over, then locking it again.
What’s your experience with this kind of shared scenario?.
Thanks in advance!.