Cryptomator – a little foil on your head is quite fashionable

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ISSUE 19.35 • 2022-08-29 FREEWARE SPOTLIGHT By Deanna McElveen You can say you don’t trust the cloud with your files, but you do store files in the cl
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ibe98765, db98445, Lars220, SupremeLaW, Norio

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Cryptomator sounds like a great idea to me, but it doesn’t go far enough. I’d very much prefer to have the encryption key stored locally (so only I know it) and encrypt my data BEFORE I upload it to my cloud account. I just want the process to be transparent, so I don’t have to do anything differently from what I do now in day-to-day use.

Note (for context): I’m a retiree in my 70’s, and a bit of a computer geek. I spend much of my day in front of my screen, reading email, managing my checking account (I check it at least once a day), listening/watching blog posts, and playing a few games I enjoy (solitaire, jigsaw puzzles, a couple of merge games, etc.), and learning (currently) the Kotlin programming language. Before retiring, I had a side business building and troubleshooting/repairing PCs. When I built someone a new PC, I took their old machine, wiped the drive(s) clean and installed Linux Mint as the new OS to give away to low-income families because repurposing an older machine was the best solution I could find for our digital waste, and I recycled any hardware that could not be reused.

I take security very seriously, so my box is already locked down enough that if it’s stolen, the thief won’t be able to access anything. My UEFI (the new BIOS) is password protected. I use Bitlocker to encrypt all my drives so a thief won’t be able to see what’s on them without a LOT of computing power. I have a PIN and I use a fingerprint scanner to log in. I suppose the thief could hack my PIN, but (s)he would have to know its length (and whether it contains alpha characters) to get anywhere. My primary ‘production’ machine is a desktop PC, so it MUST be unplugged to be stolen, therefore without my PIN or fingerprint, access is VERY unlikely.

If you find an encryption solution that works in the background between my box and OneDrive, I’d very much like to learn about it.

Ernie

 

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ernie wrote:

I’d very much prefer to have the encryption key stored locally (so only I know it) and encrypt my data BEFORE I upload it

That’s the proper way to do it.
Spread the word.

* _ the metaverse is poisonous _ *

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ernie wrote:

I’d very much prefer to have the encryption key stored locally (so only I know it) and encrypt my data BEFORE I upload it

That’s the proper way to do it.
I use (Symantec) PGP-desktop the same way for years.

* _ the metaverse is poisonous _ *

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..and iCloud (we all make mistakes).

What mistake is it ?

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Been a VeraCrypt user for years and TrueCrypt before it disappeared. This would be an easier solution for people to use.

1. Do you know if Cryptomator can read VeraCrypt files if they use the same encryption technology and password? Vice versa?
2. VeraCrypt is a container oriented solution. This doesn’t have that restriction as it encrypts on the fly. Simpler to get started but is there a hidden downside?

Thanks Deanna!

Ernie: Have you looked into VeraCrypt? I use it with KeePass and a couple plugins to ease the open/close file issues. All stored in Dropbox along with local copies.

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ernie

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After a bit of searching on the Internet, I decided to give Cryptomator a try. It may well do what I want it to do after all. For most of what I keep on OneDrive, I don’t care if it can be seen, but I keep a few files that contain data I want to be secure (A banking document I use to keep track of my bank account, and a few medical files, etc.). It doesn’t seem to transparently encrypt my entire OneDrive folder, but I CAN create an encrypted folder within my OneDrive folder (which appears in File Explorer as a new partition/drive) and keep my important stuff there.

Perhaps this will serve my purpose after all. When I originally read the article, it did not sound as if Cryptomator would do what I want but I seem to have misunderstood.

Thank you for your reply,

Ernie

 

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Lars220

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Deanna,

You make our world a better place!

KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK  🙂

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Lars220

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I just love your writing style, Deanna. Tahnk you.

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Lars220

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ernie wrote:

If you find an encryption solution that works in the background between my box and OneDrive, I’d very much like to learn about it.

Interesting idea .. I want to think about that.

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This is a follow-up to my post on August 29, 2022, at 3:46 pm.

I gave Cryptomator a try for a few days. After a reboot, Cryptomator failed to re-establish my ‘vault’. I had to go through the steps myself, manually. I suppose I could take the time to write a script to do the steps and run it on system start-up, but I shouldn’t need to do that. The program should have intuitively named settings to perform such tasks, so I can enable the behavior I want. Since I can’t count on my financial management and medical documents being automatically available to me in my Cryptomator vault, I moved them out to another OneDrive folder, removed the Cryptomator vault, and removed Cryptomator from my computer. I understand that Cryptomator’s current default behavior may be a security feature, but in order to be more universally suitable, it should be much more configurable. Perhaps thie will improve in a future release.

My2Cents,

Ernie

 

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Can I use Cryptomotor to encrypt files for local storage, say on a thumb drive?

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