How to keep the data you have in your Cloud drive private

[Member PPC]

I’ve been using, for a long time a very nice piece of software that I don’t recall ever mentioning here: cryptomator

What this app does: cryptomator creates a virtual encrypted “volume” that on your local hard drive (for example to protect sensitive data – or your porn stash – in a shared computer) or on a cloud drive.
No one will be able to access your data (not even your file/folder names), unless something like a quantum computer is used to crack your password- if anyone spends those resources on you, you probably are doing some very nasty stuff (or live on a very opressive regime)

This tool is free and opensource, so, go nuts and use their appimage over at https://cryptomator.org/downloads/
(or live dangerously and try to install de .deb file from their PPA: https://launchpad.net/~sebastian-stenzel/+archive/ubuntu/cryptomator/+packages )

The appimage is about 50Mb in size, and even in a a single computer it takes some seconds to load on, but, after that, you do not even notice its running… And your data stays yours alone…
I use this in conjunction with my script to mount cloud drives, but it should work if you use rclone from the cli or rclone-gui to mount your cloud drive.

P.

[Forum Admin Dave]

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Asking for better understanding.
What is the difference between this and making a file containing an encrypted file system.
I am thinking similar to the live usb persistence file or a swap file.

Computers are like air conditioners. They work fine until you start opening Windows. ~Author Unknown

[Member PPC]

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@Dave – I guess it’s about the same as an encrypted usb persistence file… It’s convenient to use…

[Anonymous]

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Prior to replying, I waited to hear what features/benefits PPC would highlight as being unique.

Although I’ve never used cryptomator, I do follow developments “within this space”. Across the past several years, the demarcation between software categories ~~ backup, sync, self-hosting | share | collaboration ~~ has blurred.§

§ https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted
A looooong list, fine-grained taxonomy, with 4,000+ forks

We can recognize cryptomater as being similar to “syncany” http://syncany.org and git-annex-assistant https://git-annex.branchable.com/assistant/. Their featureset also ovelaps that of OwnCloud “Files” (or “hub” as a suite) as well as NextCloud (with selected components).

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> What is the difference between this and [just] making a file containing an encrypted file system.

For many users, the most noticeable difference would be the automated “sync” aspect.

Set(up) and forget ~~ dropping a file into a watched directory will for just the affected file transparently encrypt, will push changes to pre-specified remote server and/or peers. The transactions operate on individual files, precluding the need to transmit “entire monolithic encryped datastores”. As a feature of some of the softwares in this “space”, versioning (version control) is applied to edited files residing within a watched directory.

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