My thoughts/concerns so far

Help
,
1

I am new to Cryptomator but after a few days of use, here are a few thoughts I have. I am hoping the community can either confirm my experiences or set me straight if I am wrong in some way (or there are some tricks to improve things). Note that my previous experience is using Boxcryptor Classic and VeraCrypt. The former has been great but is no longer supported and Veracrypt has also been great but isn’t ideally suited for what Boxcryptor/Cryptomator do for cloud services.

  1. Cryptomator is painfully slow. I first noticed this when copying files to and from vaults. Then, I REALLY noticed it when I tried to use XAMPP and access my website files from a Cryptomator vault. It was pretty much useless. Previously, I kept those files in a VeraCrypt volume and didn’t suffer a similar slowness. I can even notice slowness with MS Word if using a large (100+ pages) document.

  2. The Boxcryptor app (Android at least) lets me actually edit files but the Cryptomator app requires me to do a dance by making an edited copy and using it to replace the original.

  3. This is a small thing, but every time I try to lock a vault I get a “Do you want to force locking?” warning message. With VeraCrypt I get a warning message when I try to dismount only if a program is actively locked to the vault.

Any thoughts / suggestions?

2

Your #1 is why I gave up on cryptomator. I was using it in conjunction with GoodSync, but it was way too slow and impractical for large numbers of files. I’ve tried every free and open source solution, including a few paid ones with encryption, like SyncBack and GoodSync. Overall, I decided on CrococryptMirror. It is free, fast and has sync built in. Does 256AES encryption, obfuscates file & folder names, and mounts encrypted volumes easily. The 2 downsides are there is no mobile version (not a big deal for me) and it uses Java Runtime, which has a memory leak, so after a day or two of sync activity, bloats memory usage over a gig, so you have to re-start crococryptor.

I’d like to see a better all-in-one solution that has:

  1. Cloud integration
  2. Sync built-in
  3. Encryption of files & file names
  4. Multi-destination sync (to local and cloud for same volumes
  5. Mountable backups
  6. Mobile access
  7. Open source code

Haven’t found anything that comprehensive yet.

3

Hi
After not noticing any change in performance (I am using Cryptomator to back up my documents) I did the following test:

I have created 10,000 files with the file sizes of 10,000 bytes, 100,000 bytes and 1,000,000 bytes each.
A total of 30,000 files with approximately 10 GB
I disabled my virus scan.
I copied all the files to my hard drive, which also contains the vault (without encryption).
Required time: 2 min 1 sec
Then I copied the same files to the Vault.
Required time: I stopped after 2 minutes and a forecast time of another 3 hours.

I can therefore confirm that it takes considerably longer to process very large amounts of data.
However, I can’t say if this is due to Cryptomator or the Windows WebDAV interface.

In my opinion, Crpytomator is not intended for this purpose. (Execute software from a Vault, or handle a huge amount of data at once). For this purpose, the corresponding performance must of course be given, which is obviously not the case for whatever reason.
From my point of view (just my 2 cents) it is intended to allow the secure storage of files on an online storage provider in an usual context of private use.

1 Like
4

Well, perhaps WebDAV is an important issue. I don’t pretend to be knowledgeable about it, all I know is that the way I see my Cryptomator files appear in my Windows 10 File Explorer is different than the way my Boxcryptor or Veracrypt files appear. Boxcryptor and Veracrypt vaults just seem like another hard drive but with Cryptomator I get a long, convoluted string of text before the drive letter. And, interestingly, I can ONLY view files for that vault in that instance of File Explorer. If I click to any other drive or folder outside the vault it opens a new File Explorer instance. That by itself is actually quite annoying but perhaps it indicates in some way the reason for Cryptomator being much slower as well?

5

This is not equal to my windows 10 file explorer behavior.
The WebDAV drive is like any other drive and once i have mounted WebDAV i can operate with it like with any other drive. No new instances.

6

That’s interesting. I wonder why my system behaves strangely and yours doesn’t.

7

On win7, just found out that using Google Drive you have to turn-off your internet connection (wi-fi in my case) to get up to speed. otherwise you will be stuck at minutes and minutes to encrypt and transfer each file.

initially i thought that turning off the google drive auto-sync app by simply exiting it had made the trick but, when i tried again, only when i shut down the internet access i could place thousands of files working like a normal file copy. after copying to the encryption drive you should restore internet connection and launch the google drive sync app

8

updated 20180322-185755

As with other FOSS vs commercial cases,
My solution usually is “use commercial one NOW, but try plan to move to
FOSS later”.

For cloud encryption,
I will use competitor BC 's FREE edition (at least at the moment).
It’s more usable.

  1. The files are ALWAYS in X:/google/xxxxxxx so I no need mount this and
    unmount that.

  2. I can play 5GB movie DIRECTLY, it only dnld and decrypt that small part you are viewing,
    unlike ctmt which dnld the whole 5GB, and decrypt the whole 5GB.

  3. Files can be moved here that there, even cross unencrypted folders. For ctmt, it’s tough when
    moving between vaults.

!!! What BC sucks is it’s close source, and cant 100% trustable. I visit their website,
their hot beautiful CEO went to USA with the germany government officials.
What if the germany government staff ask them for a back door? Can she refuse?
I doubt.

So at the moment, for really person things, I will use ctmt.
Which include bank account e-statments, some personal files.

*For really personal things I even encrypt with crypsync file by file 1st, then put on cloud with ctmt.
ctmt provide filename encryption, in addition.

the FOSS vs close source commercial software war happen in every field,
and the above is a temporary solution I personally suggest.

Reality as I said before,
they are close source, earn more, and keep the trade secret, they grow faster.

==================================================================

what i only suggest to change, is that ctmt uses vaults vs file encryption *.bc approach.

for other issues, its just typical close source model vs open source model.

close source commercial one keep the secret, earn more, employ more, develop faster.

the only foss success case i heard of is mysql, But later bought out by oracle?

and we are talking about encryption, so foss make us feel better.

9

with sanitizer, some issues for me are solved.

I now turn to MAINLY use cryptomator for my serious cloud storage.
(with competitor BC for minor usage like movies, yet)

20180325-113227

I wanna backup 40GB of 50000+ small files to google drive using ctmt.

But use with google file stream, it’s unstable.

What I now do is:

offline ctmt encrypt the files into a vault.

Then upload the whole vault to google drive by rclone.

i will verify the upload by beyond compare.

these are my backup files so they are quite static.

so far so good.