this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2025
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Privacy
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Also: encrypt everything you upload to the cloud with Cryptomator or something like that. I amazes me I used to put stuff directly in my pCloud folder.
Cryptomator is good but it's important also to keep backups of the unencrypted content of the Cryptomator vault that are not encrypted by Cryptomator. (You could encrypt the backups with another system.) Cryptomator vaults are more fragile than the underlying file system, and it's easier for a glitch in the sync process to corrupt them so they're unrecoverable. I have lost data due to this in the past. So it's best to make sure all the contents of your vaults also exist somewhere else, encrypted in another way.
I used borg for my backups, but why do you say Cryptomator vaults are fragile?
It's not that they're especially fragile. It's really only when you combine them with a sync process. I once had a sync go wrong and it resulted in the contents of a vault being unreadable. Because all you have are a bunch of encrypted files with meaningless names and a flattish structure, which Cryptomator interprets and mounts as a different directory structure, when something goes wrong it's not easy to know where in the vault files the problem lies. You can't say "ah, I'm missing the documents folder so I'll restore that one from backup" like you could with an unencrypted directory. And if you've made changes since the last vault backup you can't just restore the whole vault either. You could mount a backup of the vault from a time when it was intact, and then copy files across into your live copy, but I feel safer having a copy in another format somewhere else. Not necessary, I guess, but it can make recovery easier.
Ok, I understand. In my particular use case that shouldn't be an issue. My Cryptomator folder is local and I use it only locally. Then there's a sync process to copy stuff to pCloud automatically, but that copy is never touched directly by my.
But in any case as you said, backups.
Because he experienced data loss, as he says?
easy to use gui backup utilities (like pika and déjà dup) can also encrypt its backups
Facts. I put everything on cloud (mega only) compressed with AES-256
I guess you mean encrypted.
No I meant compressed, it comes with the encryption.
AES-256 is just an encryption algorithm, it doesn’t do any compression on it’s own, so it’s not quite right to say its compressed with it. Really it was compressed, then afterwards encrypted with AES-256.
Sigh. I said i compress with AES-256. I compress my files with the compression that encrypts it. Just as the screenshot shows. (Compression+AES-256) I'm the OP of this post. Give me more credit. I know they are two different things. I think you just didn't get what I was trying to say
To avoid confusion you could say, "along with", or fully say, "I encrypt with AES-256 as I compress, in one step".
It's not necessarily about what you know, but about what readers will understand. (For example, someone who doesn't know better might read what you wrote and think there is some way to compress using AES-256 and go down a rabbit hole.)
I understood what you meant, I was just pointing out that what you said was incorrect. Even in your reply you said
Which is still not entirely correct. The compression is not doing any encrypting. They are two separate processes that the tool you are using is presenting as a single step for convenience. You seem to know what you are talking about, and I happen to know about cryptography, but as someone else in the thread mentioned not everyone knows how these things work. If we are trying to spread knowledge and tips in this community (like your post is doing) then I just saw this as an opportunity to clarify something that was incorrect. Not for your benefit, but for others.