TR Forums

There are lots of smart people here at TR so I'm going to throw this question out on these forums.

What I'd like to be able to do is keep a blob of encrypted personal documents out on a cloud drive. Be it Google drive, One drive, it shouldn't matter I wouldn't think. However, I would like the data to be easy accessible from my computers and laptops in windows explorer with the encryption being seamlessly handled after entering a master password when the encryption program loads at startup.

Access from smartphone and tablet would be a bonus.

Have you seen or used anything like that?

Resilio Sync https://www.resilio.com/individuals/
Cross platform. The paid version (pay once, activate on as many devices as you want) lets you have encrypted shares which allow you to have a P2P cloud of encrypted data on clients you don't trust, and decrypted data on clients you trust, all with read/write permissions and network scheduling and all that. Save the secret otherwise your data is gone, though.
I run Sync across all my devices and it's great, except the phone apps don't run in the background. I'll volunteer to host for you (like Crashplan! hello again) if you tell me how much space you need. You have to install Sync on all your devices.

https://stablebit.com/CloudDrive
I'm a huge fan of Stablebit's stuff. This does encrypted storage to cloud providers very well. Licensing is per-machine. Windows only.

http://www.division-m.com/cloudxtender/
Cloudxtender is by Division-M and their code quality is generally a bit worse in my experience but still workable. Windows only.


Duplicati https://github.com/duplicati/duplicati
Encrypted chunked backups that let you save to the cloud.

All of these involve encryption that's unlocked forever per device, not by entering a password every time. For that you might need something else (or maybe you could host an encrypted container?)

If you don't need a ton of storage there's Lastpass also. You can store 45k characters per secure note (which are completely free-form), and can attach files to secure notes that are up to 10 megs each. Free users are limited to 50MB total across all notes and premium users 1GB.

I've tried setting up a Truecrypt container to sync over Google Drive and it doesn't work very well, I think because Drive doesn't support deltas and so it has to sync the entire container if you change one file within it.

https://www.boxcryptor.com/en/download/

Note: the "portable" version also has Linux support.

Also:

https://cryptomator.org

Duct Tape Dude wrote:

Resilio Sync https://www.resilio.com/individuals/
Cross platform. The paid version (pay once, activate on as many devices as you want) lets you have encrypted shares which allow you to have a P2P cloud of encrypted data on clients you don't trust, and decrypted data on clients you trust, all with read/write permissions and network scheduling and all that. Save the secret otherwise your data is gone, though.
I run Sync across all my devices and it's great, except the phone apps don't run in the background. I'll volunteer to host for you (like Crashplan! hello again) if you tell me how much space you need. You have to install Sync on all your devices.

https://stablebit.com/CloudDrive
I'm a huge fan of Stablebit's stuff. This does encrypted storage to cloud providers very well. Licensing is per-machine. Windows only.

http://www.division-m.com/cloudxtender/
Cloudxtender is by Division-M and their code quality is generally a bit worse in my experience but still workable. Windows only.


Duplicati https://github.com/duplicati/duplicati
Encrypted chunked backups that let you save to the cloud.

All of these involve encryption that's unlocked forever per device, not by entering a password every time. For that you might need something else (or maybe you could host an encrypted container?)

Hello! I got excited when I saw you mention Stablebit since I already use Drivepool on my WHS 2011. But in reading it looks like it does not support accessing the encrypted drive from more than one computer because of the way it uses local caches. Bummer. That and the lack of a mobile option.


I'll have to do a little more research and reading on Resilio though. The "private-cloud" idea is cool but I wish it allowed you to use more traditional cloud resources if you want to. Do you access your Resilio cloud from more than one PC?

CScottG wrote:

https://www.boxcryptor.com/en/download/

Note: the "portable" version also has Linux support.

Also:

https://cryptomator.org

This looks very interesting (Boxcryptor). I'm reading more now. Do you use it?

adampk17 wrote:

This looks very interesting (Boxcryptor). I'm reading more now. Do you use it?

Boxcryptor looks kinda perfect. All except the $48/year for more than one cloud provider and more than two devices. Not bad though.

Now to read about Cryptomator.

It's not super secure but there are windows ports of encfs. This works by encrypting files in a folder so it works well with filesyncing services like good drive / dropbox etc.

adampk17 wrote:

adampk17 wrote:

This looks very interesting (Boxcryptor).  I'm reading more now.  Do you use it?

Boxcryptor looks kinda perfect. All except the $48/year for more than one cloud provider and more than two devices.  Not bad though.

Now to read about Cryptomator.

Just did a search, I don't use most cloud services - though I likely will soon.  (..and it is an interesting question that you provided).
Sorry about Boxcryptor's free limitations - I didn't read into their fremium restrictions.

Cryptomator isn't freemium, it's just "free".  (..and I tend to gravitate toward open-source software anyway.)

There is also this (but no Linux apparently):
https://viivo.com/

adampk17 wrote:

Hello! I got excited when I saw you mention Stablebit since I already use Drivepool on my WHS 2011. But in reading it looks like it does not support accessing the encrypted drive from more than one computer because of the way it uses local caches. Bummer. That and the lack of a mobile option.

I'll have to do a little more research and reading on Resilio though. The "private-cloud" idea is cool but I wish it allowed you to use more traditional cloud resources if you want to. Do you access your Resilio cloud from more than one PC?

Haha, you too huh? Drivepool is fantastic. Seems you're right about that single mount issue. Didn't think about multi-user complications, but of course that makes sense now. And the fact that it's not cross-platform really is a non-starter.

For my "cloud" I basically have 1-2 writers and 2-3 readers for each of my shares (Windows desktop, local Windows server, remote Linux server, iOS phone, OSX laptop... holy crap I have a lot of devices now). I access select parts of my "cloud" drive from select devices.

CScottG wrote:

Cryptomator ... There is also this (but no Linux apparently):https://viivo.com/

These look closest to what you'd want to do.

I ended up encrypting folders and then uploading them to Google Drive as large files. It's a terrible solution, but the only one I could find that was cross-platform and multi-device.

Of course, those are archival documents and I don't change them often, thank goodness.

CScottG wrote:

There is also this (but no Linux apparently):
https://viivo.com/

Checked out Viivo a little bit. Looks like it might do most of what I need too. I like that it compresses files, even though I'm in no danger of maxing out any of the free cloud services. It's made by PKware too. If my early 90's memory serves me, isn't that one of the early-ish companies to make a zip compression utility (PKZip). It was the first one I used anyway. Their iOS mobile app hasn't been updated in almost a year and half which is a bad sign.

Time to check out Cryptomator some more I think.

Duct Tape Dude wrote:

Windows only.

Fail. Sh1t needs to be cross platform.