I have been following Cryptomator for some time, but when I last considered using it to encrypt my Google Drive, which I sync to my Ubuntu 18.04 PC and laptop using Insync, there was no option to auto-mount. There has been a major update to Insync 3, which requires a fresh install, so as part of that I am going to wipe google drive and resync everything from local storage - this would be a perfect time to start using Cryptomator, but perhaps someone could answer the following questions first please:
Should I see a system tray icon when Cryptomator is open and minimised? Because I do not. My desktop environment is Gnome 3.28.2. When I minimise I can maximise again by selecting Cryptomator from my dock, but not the system tray. It would be nice and neater to have cryptomator instead minimising to the system tray.
Once Cryptomator is configured, I would like to not have to interact with it. Can it be setup on linux so that it automatically starts at boot, unlocks vaults if necessary, and is minimised?
Do I really need to lock my vaults? Is it the case that encryption only occurs (and is therefore backed up by Insync in my case) AFTER I click lock vault OR is my data being encrypted truly on-the-fly whenever changes are made, so I never need to worry about locking the vault? My local drives are encrypted already with LUKS and Veracrypt, so I just require Cryptomator for cloud security.
Depends. The desktop environment GNOME removed tray icon support in version 3.26. (see here) Therefore you won’t get any tray icon by default. On the other hand, with the gnome shell extensions KStatusNotifierItem/AppIndicator Support you can bring tray support back.
So much for the foundation. Alas, even with this workaround the current version (1.4.15) won’t give you a tray icon. But you can try out our current beta. On my ubuntu system the app indicator icon showed up.
Currently not, but this feature is planned. Recently saving passwords on systems using the gnome-keyring was added and from there it won’t be hard to add the rest.
Yes. Even when your vault is unlocked, your actual data stays encrypted on the hard drive and you only get an encrypted view on the data.
Infeo, firstly, thank you for the very informative reply.
I extracted buildkit-linux.zip and from terminal ran ./launcher-linux.sh - please let me know if I was meant to use it some other way.
After doing this no icon is visible in the tray, even when KStatusNotifierItem/AppIndication Support is installed, when Cryptomator is open or when I press the close button - there no longer seems to be a minimise button? With Top Icons installed there was a grey square near the date in the middle of the top panel, and right clicking this confirmed it was for Cryptomator. If it helps, whatever Insync do, for me in Gnome there is an icon in the tray top right for Insync with the volume, Caffeine, etc.
I imagine it will not be very difficult to get Ubuntu to handle this, starting Cryptomator on login and minimising or closing it.
Sorry, could you rephrase that for me? Did you mean whenever the vault is locked it stays encrypted? Basically I am wondering if I can have Cryptomator autostart and not have to worry about locking it before I shut down, or suspend my computer - and trust that Insync will be able to upload any changes.
Also, I noticed with the beta version, I had to convert my small test vault to work with that version. Would that have to be done for every new version? My personal documents, college material and code etc is around 50GB, if I manage to set up a video library as per the post I linked it could be several TB and is meant to live primarily in the cloud. What is your experience converting large vaults?