Questions regarding Best Practice: macOS & Google Drive

Hello, I use Cryptomator in combination with Google Drive on macOS on different devices, one is an iMac with Intel and the other a MacBook with M1. Now I often have the problem that certain files do not synchronize between these two devices. But I could not find the cause for this behavior yet. So I have several questions:

  • Can/should vaults be streamed via Google Drive or is it better to handle vaults as offline files in Google Drive?
  • With the changes in macOS, there is a “CloudStorage” area in the user directory for streamed content/file systems, so e.g. “~/Library/CloudStorage/GoogleDrive…”. This area is included in the Finder as “Google Drive/My Storage/…”. But when I create a new vault with Cryptomator and select “Google Drive” as the storage location, “/Users/username/Google Drive/…” is selected as the location on the disk. Is this location the same as “CloudStorage”?
  • Are there any best practice recommendations for dealing with streamed online storage and Cryptomator vaults?

I am grateful for any tips and hints!

I use Pcloud and had the same problem but I use windows and Linux.
But I think it’s the same under macOS.
For syncing my vault folder I used the sync engine from the Pcloud
software (connected the local and the cloud folder in the app).
Always came several sync error during the transfer to the cloud and also
I could not easy and complete download the vault on another device
(Linux Laptop).
I found in the documentation of Pcloud that the file are read only or in access.
Then I wanted compare with another crypt software I used
boxcryptor just for comparation. In this case it was working
according to the aboove mentioned setup. It does mean that
the routines of Cryptomator are different and not realy suitable for
this setup like above.
This is what I found out.

In order to use the Cryptomator I use now the Drive P:\xx - the
online drive which createt when Pcloud is starting on my PC
for the vault drive/folder. For the local unencrypted file folder
you can use the creatad folder from Cryptomator. In my case
I use the Cryptomator unencrypted file folder like as a help folder
and use a sync software to sync with my main data folder.
I hope I could help a little bit.
Regards/Grüsse Rob

I don’t have the exact answer but I can tell you that last week I had a massive data lost using Cryptomator and Google Drive in stream mode. I wasn’t aware that I should have kept it in synced and somehow files were missing in the stream drive and I couldn’t decrypt my vault anymore.

The catch? Google drive doesn’t restore your vault to a specific date (something like TM). This is a functionality that many providers offer, from dropbox to sync.com, etc. As a consequence, you need to restore by hand a million individual encrypted files if you want to do something like that, which ends up being an impossible task.

So no, I wouldn’t recommend Google Drive for Cryptomator just because of this. I would look for a cloud provider that allows restoring the entire account to a specific date in case or ransomware etc.