Photos broken on Mac with Ionos

Hi everyone,

First about my setup: I’m using a MacBook Pro Mid 2012 with MacOS Catalina and the Ionos HiDrive (a german provider).

I wanted to use Cryptomator to keep my photos safe (from data loss) in a cloud. Up until now I had my photos stored on an external HDD.

After copying my photos into the cloud and checking them a few days later I noticed, that many of my photos seem to be broken. There are huuuuuge grey fields on the photo covering about 90% of the picture. I can see a tiny little stripe of the original photo and the rest is just plain grey. Also it’s not the same with every picture. Some pictures are fine, some vary in the amount or the position of the grey… the “original” picture on my external hard disk seems to be fine, though. Copying from the cloud onto my desktop also did not solve the issue. I thought that the picture might not be fully decrypted…?

Is this any known issue? I’m kinda worried now, that my “backup safe” is not really… safe, you know?

Hi and welcome to the Community :slight_smile:

Cryptomator is not designed for any backp purpose/protection against data loss. You can prevent data theft with it, but for backup reasons I suggest a different solution. (You may browse around this forum, there are some threads using Cryptomator with backup software)

Apart from this, of course your data should not get corrupted during the encryption. Are there any message inside the log files that indicate a problem (like ERROR or WARN) ?

And how do you integrate the cloud storage into your system? With webDAV or just a simple directory watched by some sync application?

Hi! Thank you!

I know. Therefore the cloud solution. However, I do not trust any provider, so why not encrypt data beforehand? :wink:

Actually yes. There are quite a lot of them. I checked the log file from today. This is an example:

Most of them seem to be this “AsynchronousCloseException” thing.

At the end there is something about:

Just to have more info on that: What Cryptomator version are you using?

1.4.17

And I also marked the checkbox for update, which is why I assume to have the latest version…?

I just noticed, that the grey parts seem to “move”, when I restart Cryptomator and reconnect the Webdav drive.

Any ideas on the topic?

Then your data is most probably not corrupted and rather the read operation from files cannot be finished.

This is also indicated by the error message:

08:48:02.543 [webdav-029] WARN org.eclipse.jetty.server.HttpChannel - /qaI3_dWYQ1QN/Crypto_Fotos/2015/IMG_1597.JPG java.nio.channels.AsynchronousCloseException

According to the Java Documentation the AsynchronousCloseException appears, when someone else aborting the read/write operation.

My question still persists:

And does this happen only with photos? (incomplete read) Are the pictures huge in size?

Yes, webdav. I connected the HiDrive via WebDav and created a Cryptomator vault there. (I’m no expert on this matter, I hope you understand, what I mean.)

The pictures are mostly smaller than 20mb. Some pictures smaller than 1mb are also affected.

I just checked a few PDF files. It seems some of them cannot be opened, as well. :scream:

Could you try to copy the vault from HiDrive to your desktop and unlock it from there? Maybe don’t even copy it via WebDAV but download it from HiDrive’s website. Maybe the connection via WebDAV is somehow “unstable”.

Okay, I tried downloading the encrypted folder directly from the HiDrive Website (instead of webdav). The downloaded folder was then opened via Cryptomator inside my downloads-folder, and… most of the documents were missing. :frowning:

Anything in the log files in that case? And does the directory structure resemble something like this?

Yes, that’s about how the structure is.

In the log there are some of those:

Any ideas why this is happening? :frowning:

No one? :frowning:

Kinda bad the way it is.

Can you still see and access the directories in the cloud storage integrated over WebDAV?

If yes, then something must be wrong with the downloaded files. Cryptomator relies heavily on the folder/file structure of the vault. Due to the obfuscation and flattening of the unencrypted folder structure, every subdirectory in a folder needs a file in the encrypted folder. The log message says that such a file cannot be read/points to a not existing location.

Apart from this warning, the java.nio.channels.AsynchronousCloseException are gone from the log should not happen anymore. I still believe the root of this problem is, that IONOS blocks the read calls or interrupts them after a short while. Unfortunatly i don’t know the reason for that.

In your first post, you said:

and later

If you look at picture of the vault copied to your desktop and the grey fields do not move anymore, then this is another indicator that the combination of WebDAV and Cryptomator is unstable.

What you can actually try to solve is change the unlocked vault provider. You can find this setting in the general settings. Change it from FUSE to WebDAV and see if this helps in your case.

I had the same issue for many years. As each time I loaded the photo a slightly different area was greyed out, I assumed it was an issue with the encryption software. Since downloading the latest update, all photos a fixed! Very happy I didn’t delete any now.