Is one recommended over the other?
The guides only mentions cryptomator, which had me concerned that I should avoid Rclone crypt?
Any and all relevant info and discussions are welcomed. I’d enjoy reading people’s insights. Also, do you have a recommended workflow for using these programs? For example, do you work off the encrypted volumes or work off local copies, manually syncing changes? If you use Rclone, which commands and flags do you use?
My use case is wanting to store large amounts of files and data on a cloud service (hundreds of GBs). I’m using Linux and GrapheneOS. I do not have a native client for the cloud service on Linux.
Looking at Crypt, I saw the following, which was not something I was aware of:
The obscured password is created using AES-CTR with a static key. The IV (nonce) is stored verbatim at the beginning of the obscured password. This static key is shared between all versions of rclone.
As for your question, there are options like borg and restic as well (Deja Dup a.k.a. Gnome Backups uses restic on the backend). It depends what is more comfortable for you between crypto and rclone. I haven’t heard of too many people using rclone crypto, so I would nudge a bit towards cryptomator here. I assume for rclone your cloud provider would have to listed on their provider list for it to be able to connect to it and push your files there.
Personally, I jump between borg and DejaDup (Gnome Backups). Now, to provide a heads up about borg and Dejadup (which uses restic), they both work off of “versioning” meaning that you will have older versions of your files there as well. This will mean a bigger backup. In the case your backup is too big down the line, I would recommend deleting the output from borg or Deja and just doing a clean new backup, just to cover the files you currently have without any previous versions. With that being said, my command for borg has been: borg create --verbose --filter AME --list --stats --files-cache=mtime,size --show-rc --compression=lz4 --exclude-caches /home/user/Downloads/borg_backup::Cloud ~/Documents. I would definitely use the man-pages to understand what it does. To not take up so much text, I have the commands surrounding it in my cheat cheatsheet: Codeberg - cheatsheets/borg.
As for Deja Dup, it is simple in its GUI. I point it towards another folder somewhere on my system (hypothetically ~/Desktop/backups/) and then have it do its sync. The first time takes the longest and then the rest are much quicker as they work off of delta syncs.
For both, I just upload the folders as-is to the cloud once I am done.
I hope that answers your question a bit.
Also, 100s of GBs is a lot of data. I would recommend ranking your data and uploading the most valuable data to the cloud. This would save on time and network bandwidth. A backup locally (before you upload) would take up about 95% space of the full data (depending on compression method), meaning you will need that disk space locally as well.
I would also nudge a bit towards Cryptomator too. Since it has a GUI, and is a bit easier to use than Rclone crypt. I do think you need the official provider sync tool to use with Cryptomator. You also need to download/sync your files locally before you can decrypt. With Rclone, encryption/decryption is done on the fly.
You also don’t need the official sync tool from your provider with Rclone. While it’s better if a provider supports Rclone directly ( Documentation ), you can still use Rclone with SFTP (for Hetzner and rsync), and S3.
For me, I use Rclone mount with Rclone crypt for my Linux machine to backup some media with my custom bash script. I use Rclone more for automated backups. I have Rclone mounted as a folder in KDE Dolphin, under /mnt/rclone-folder. Kinda like if I mounted a hard drive to my Linux machine
The following is a command i have in a bash script to mount rclone:
rclone mount--volnamerclone-box rclone-box-encrypt: /mnt/rclone-folder/
I used this guide to setup Rclone crypt with my provider. Setup end-to-end encrypted cloud drive using rclone · Szymon Krajewski
There is RoundSync for android too. You can also try Rclone with Termux
Thank you. That was helpful.
I think I’m going to use a combination of cryptomator and rclone crypt for now:
Cryptomator for my most sensitive files that don’t take up much space and are easy enough to keep in sync on my devices and I’ll use rclone crypt to keep a cloud copy of my larger files like photos and media.
Cryptomator seems to be a smidge more secure. But, with rclone crypt, I’ll at least be able to view my large files through rclone mount or command line pretty easily whereas cryptomator has crashed on me in the past if I try to work directly off a mounted rclone drive.
Rclone crypt will also let me be more selective about downloading/uploading individual files without having to first download the whole vault.
The information about OneDrive was also pretty useful. I remember trying to experiment with rclone crypt and it gave me warnings that many of my files weren’t able to sync properly, which I now realize was likely due to the file path being too long for OneDrive due to encrypting file and folder names.
I’m going to have to look more into how to do it so I don’t run into similar issues.
I think I remember reading that Cryptomator purposely encodes its file path lengths to be below a certain limit for maximum compatibility, which would explain why I never experienced any issues.
You’re welcome. Glad to be of help
I think your best bet is either keeping your folders flattened, so don’t have too many nested folders, or disable folder and/or filename encryption. Not sure if you can limit the folder name encryption length with Rclone crypt