Vault empty on Linux Mint

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1

Apologies if this is addressed elsewhere, I could not find a solution (though someone had a similar problem several years ago) and have run out of troubleshooting options.

I have added Google Drive to Linux Mint 22.3 (Cinnamon - 64bit) using Online accounts/GNOME. I installed Cryptomator 1.18.0 (deb-5957) via the official PPA. I am able to locate and unlock my vault, but when I navigate to it, it is empty.

I also tried flatpak install with flatseal permissions updates to find the Vault, and AppImage installations. I have tried to mount the vault with FUSE and WebDAV with no success (vault still empty).

I have tried using both the vault.cryptomator and masterkey.cryptomator files to open the existing vault.

I have updated the fuse permissions to allow other users, in case there was an access issue.

I suspect Cryptomator is attempting to read encrypted blocks that the GVFS layer has not yet fetched from the cloud. It seems like people are able to use cryptomator on linux, but I am unable to get it to work. Does anyone have a fix for this?

2

Welcome to the Cryptomator Community :slightly_smiling_face:

As far as I know, Cryptomator does not work with GVFS, see Unable to read/write files in vault on GVFS mounted storages (e.g. network shares, ubuntu google drive) · Issue #696 · cryptomator/cryptomator · GitHub. Of course the last update on the issue is quite old, so something could have changed.

3

For anyone finding this in the future, I was able to find a workaround. Here is what I did:

Since the native Mint Google Drive tool doesn’t support “Real-Time” encryption well, I used Rclone.

Install and configure Rclone

sudo apt update && sudo apt install rclone

Configure Rclone. In terminal run:

rclone config

Then following prompts, configure a new ‘remote’:

  1. n (New remote) → Name it: gdrive (or whatever you want)
  2. Select the number for Google Drive (usually 17 or 18).
  3. Leave Client ID/Secret blank (Press Enter twice).
  4. Scope: Select 1 (Full Access).
  5. Auto-Config: Select y (This opens your browser for login).
  6. Shared Drive: Select n.
  7. Confirm creation is OK: Select y
  8. Verify the Connection: Run rclone lsd gdrive: to ensure you can see your cloud folders.

Then create a local portal that “tricks” the computer into thinking the cloud is a local disk.

Create a portal folder/directory:

mkdir -p ~/GDrive_Rclone

Run the Specialized Mount Command:
rclone mount gdrive: ~/GDrive_Rclone --vfs-cache-mode full --vfs-cache-max-age 24h --vfs-cache-max-size 10G --vfs-read-chunk-size 32M --daemon

Note: The --vfs-cache-mode full is the “secret sauce” that makes Cryptomator work.

Open Cryptomator.

Go to Settings → Virtual Drive → Ensure Volume Type is set to FUSE.

Click Add Vault → Open Existing Vault.

Navigate to the portal we made: /home/[yourusername]/GDrive_Rclone. Select your masterkey.cryptomator file and unlock.

If you want to automate it, I created a system service, because running it as a startup command didn’t seem to work for me

To ensure this happens automatically every time you turn on your computer:

Run: sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/rclone-gdrive.service

Paste the following block (replace username with your username):

[Unit] 
Description=Rclone Google Drive Mount for Cryptomator 
After=network-online.target 
Wants=network-online.target  

[Service] 
Type=simple 
User=[yourusername] 
Group=[yourusername] 
ExecStart=/usr/bin/rclone mount GDrive: /home/[yourusername]/GDrive_Rclone \ 
--config /home/[yourusername]/.config/rclone/rclone.conf \ 
--vfs-cache-mode full \ 
--vfs-cache-max-age 24h \ 
--vfs-cache-max-size 10G \ 
--vfs-read-chunk-size 32M ExecStop=/bin/fusermount -u /home/[yourusername]/GoogleDrive_Rclone 
Restart=on-failure 
RestartSec=10 

[Install] 
WantedBy=multi-user.target

So far it has been working without issue.