the following happened. I tried to open a second (different) vault, while one was open. This caused cryptomator somehow to set up a complete new vault. I remarked it becaus I was asked to setup a new password at the point I expecetd to log in wit my password.
The files were on Dropbox. After moving the complete remaining Dropbox content (mostly new files) I selected in Dropbox to restore the files that were deleted.
But when I try to login now, I get the message that my password is wrong.
What could have happened? The password is stored in the masterkey.cryptomator file? If it is defective does it cause the same error message?
Yes, the password used during unlock needs to match the information stored in masterkey.cryptomator. If it is defective, you get completely different errors (either parsing errors or checksum errors).
You can not simply create a new masterkey.cryptomator and place it into an existing vault. Even if you use the same password, this will not allow you to decrypt anything, as the cryptographic keys are re-generated.
To access your old files, restore the old version of masterkey.cryptomator from your Dropbox interface. Or you can rename masterkey.cryptomator.bkup to masterkey.cryptomator and unlock the vault with the password used during your last successful unlock attempt (only then is the .bkup file created).
Hi overheadhunter,
Thanks for the information. So this means I only need the masterkey.cryptomator file to check the password and if it does not open then, it is an old version of it with an old password stored in it? The wrong masterkey.cryptomator / vault (files) combination only causes that the fault is not opened, but no “wrong password” message?
My masterkey.cryptomator.bkup is from 2017. Should the file date of the.bkup change with each successful login? Or only after changing the password?
The point is that I was pretty sure about my password that I used for months, but even with an restored masterkey.cryptomator I can not open the vault. Yesterday one attempt worked while trying some variations of my password, thought I got it, I locked out and did not get in again. Very strange and I’m beginning to doubt myself. I now asked Dropbox to restore the complete account into an previous state.
Replacing the masterkey.cryptomator in a vault directory originally created with different keys will not show you any error message during unlock but you will not be able to see any decrypted files. If you restore the original masterkey, you are able to access your files again.
The bkup is created after each successful unlock. However the contents of this file stay the same, therefore Dropbox may decide not to sync it, unless you change your password (which apparently didn’t happen since 2017).