I’m looking for a solution to encrypt my NAS data.
The NAS doesn’t support disk encryption, only folder encryption with limits to the length of files’ paths.
So I was wondering if I could host my data on the NAS in a Cryptomator vault.
I’m asking here because I’m afraid having a double digit of terrabytes of data in a single vault will impact the performance. The point is I can hardly test without moving the whole data which will last several days and I don’t want to discover it’s a mess and do the whole thing ago backwards with maybe a very poor performance and therefore not days but weeks of files migration.
So… has anyone already hosted terrabytes of data in a single vault? How was the performance?
Cheers
edit: the NAS is being accessed from a Windows device through SMB mapped drives.
edit2: also is there any file max size you would advise? Some of my files are >1TB zip files. I’m sure it’s going to take a while to encrypt but I’m ready for that. However I wouldn’t like those 1TB files to be corrupted failing during copy.
Cryptomator encrypts file based. So there should be no notable impact on performance between a small and a very big vault.
But I can not provide personal experience as my vaults are not as big as yours.
I recommend starting will a simple test vault before you go to production.
Put a few samples of some different sizes that are typical for you on the server in a vault. Add the files one at a time and track how long it takes to encrypt and move a terabyte of data or even just a gigabyte of data. Compare that to how long it takes you to do a regular file copy of the file to the server in an unencrypted format. That will give you a sample of the time differential and allow you to estimate how many hours it will take or days it will take.
Also the workstation that you’re using to do the encryption plays a role in how fast the files get encrypted.
Things to consider and monitor are processor speed total system memory and quality of the hard drive preferably a fast ssd.
Your disk will get stressed moving that much data and having lots of RAM and a fast CPU with lots of cores will go a long way too. Keep an eye on Task manager and see how much memory and CPU are being used when these large files are getting encrypted.
My computer with a 4 core I7 processor and 32 gigs of RAM and SSD drive is a lot slower than my I9 processor with 24 cores and 64 gigs of RAM.
Also, do you know how fast your data rate is over your connection to the server? Is it perhaps the common 1 GB speed for wired, or is it wireless? The faster the better. Iperf testing tool will give you an accurate sample of how fast data that moves between your workstation and the server in real terms.
Also take into consideration that with files that are one terabyte in size are going to also take a really long time to open when you need to decrypt the file. You might want to cut those terabyte files down quite a bit.