Questions about OneDrive Cryptomator use

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Hi. I’ve read about Cryptomator for a long time, but decided recently to start using it. I want to use it on OneDrive. I set it up, and from what I’ve read, understand that, for example, if I want a Word file to be saved encrypted in the Cryptomator vault inside OneDrive, I have to save the file in the Vault folder that gets created. Can someone confirm that’s the case?

  1. That being said, when I go into that folder and drag and drop the created file in my email app to share with someone (myself here for test purposes), I can open it directly from the email app in another device. Is that how it’s supposed to work? Can I freely share files from here with others and they can open them? I ask because I do have to share files with clients often, and if I have to sit down and explain Cryptomator to them, I will lose many of them (unfortunately).

  2. If this is not how it’s supposed to run, how do I then share files with clients?

  3. If I move the existing folders in OneDrive to the Cryptomator vault, will they be automatically encrypted or not?

  4. The files that are saved in the “vault” in my computer, are they saved in the OneDrive cloud automatically, or do they take up space on my hard drive? If so, how much? I don’t know where to look for that information.

  5. I presume that when I write Word (or other Office Apps files) documents directly into the Vault, I will not be able to see the file history. Is that correct?

  6. Is there a guide I can read on best practices for moving files already in OneDrive so they can get encrypted into the vault?

Thanks for the help!

2

Hi

Yes, thats how Cryptomator works. see here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9A0zihHZ14&t=16s

Question 1:
Everything you copy/move into the vault is encrypted automatically on your device. As soon as you copy/move it outside your vault (including email attachment), it will be decrypted also automatically.
Question 3:
Yes, everything you put into your vault (the virtual drive) will be encrypted.
Question 4:
Cryptomator desktop does the encryption and generates the encrypted vault files on your local machine. It does not the sync. The sync is done by your sync-client (in your case the onedrive app). So as long as your vault (the encrypted vault files) are somewhere in your onedrive folder, then yes, they will be synced by your sync client. And yes, these encrypted vault file will take space on your local drive. The encrypted files will (nearly) have the same file size as the unencrypted version of the files. To avoid storage consumption, you can configure your onedrive client to free up space if files are not needed for a while. This works with encrypted vault files also. (Files on demand feature by onedrive)
Question 5:
If you are referring to the versioning of onedrive: no this will not work anymore because onedrive will not know the content of your files.
Question 6: There is no best practice. Just move the files you want to encrypt into your vault. Thats all.

PS: Dont forget to make your backups. No matter if you are using encrpytion software or not.

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