How I encrypt my data in the cloud (opens in new tab)

I never heard of pixz... cool! For anyone else like me, this comparison is worth a read: https://www.rootusers.com/gzip-vs-bzip2-vs-xz-performance-co...

Wasabi does have some not-entirely-true advertising on their web site though. If you don't download (which you typically don't if you're doing backups), all cloud providers are cheaper than Wasabi on per-TB-mo basis. Google Coldline or Amazon Glacier, for example, are $4 TB-mo (and Google is about to roll out $1.23 TB-mo "archive" option). Azure seems to have "archive" option for $1 TB-mo (LRS Archive option, advertises the same "11 nines", tho the price is so low, there's got to be a catch)

The Wasabi offering seems to be equivalent to the "hot" storage options, which, I agree, is crazy expensive in the cloud if you do a lot of egress.

Isn't this basically what Duplicity does? It uses GPG to encrypt files before sending them to the remote server.

https://www.nongnu.org/duplicity/

I used to do it this way too, but recently switched to `encfs` and simply sync the encrypted directories. So only modified files (with encrypted filenames and content) are sync'ed.

I use Cryptomator but it does "phone home" for version checks so I keep an old version of the installer just in case.

i guess a main point for Boxcryptor is easy access through mobile apps, does your solution provide that?

I love Arq. I use Arq to backup to a local server via sftp and remotely to B2 (which has very affordable storage). I have used Arq for many years, and regularly restore files through Arq.

On Linux, I use restic, which can also backup to B2 (and via sftp, obviously). restic has this nice feature where you can mount the backups at some destination as a FUSE filesystem. Makes it very easy to go through backups and recovering the bits you need.

I have been using Arq for years and it has saved me numerous times. I backup to Amazon Drive, which is about $60/year, but it supports most of the major object store providers.

Arq backup is fantastic and will work with any SFTP endpoint - not just name-brand (proprietary) cloud services.

I’ve been using Arq for years and also find it to be excellent.

You can also use sshfs in combination with borg to eliminate the need for the server to support borg.

I just tried boxcryptor in my Ubuntu Workstation. It was burning through 40%+ CPU on all 4 cores while it is not being actively used! Don't know if it is a simple bug or just designed without an eye for resource usage.

On the other hand, I ended up learning about scrypt(written by Collin Percival, who works on FreeBSD a lot and runs Tarsnap), and restic which in layman's view appears to be a better borg.

Veracrypt is a great piece of software, but it isn't as easy to integrate across various platforms. Boxcryptor is great because they have iOS/Android/etc. apps.

Try Cryptomator instead! It's free and open source and does essentially the same thing (no account required)

You must sign up for an account to use Boxcryptor because it is paid software. That is the only reason as far as I can tell. As far as I know their servers do nothing for you once you have installed the software on your devices.

Boxcryptor[1] started out as an EncFS[2] implementation. At the time, EncFS was the only real good solution for file-based encryption. Solutions like TrueCrypt are disk-based, which means for cloud syncing solutions like Dropbox, one file -- the entire disk volume -- gets synced, and every time a file changes, the entire disk gets synced again. EncFS encrypts individual files, which works great for file-based syncing services.

Boxcryptor offered a client for macOS, Windows, Android, and iOS that worked really well, and if you needed Linux support, one could install EncFS and use it transparently on that platform. Boxcryptor charged for a creating volumes with more advanced EncFS settings, but if you created the EncFS volume with those advanced settings using EncFS itself (e.g. on a Linux machine), the free version of Boxcryptor could read and write those volumes with those settings.

In 2013, the people who ran Boxcryptor wrote a second version that implemented a proprietary, unpublished encryption and/or file management scheme. They relegated the previous version to an unmaintained Boxcryptor Classic product and eventually removed it.[3] The proprietary version is what is offered today.

IF you want Boxcryptor-like functionality today, the EncFS4win project[4] is a good solution for Windows. EncFS can be installed via Homebrew[5] on macOS and its volumes mounted via a shell script or some FUSE GUI managers. You can install EncFS on Linux and use gencfsm[6] for a GUI manager. The Windows, macOS, and Linux implementations all use FUSE for exposing the encrypted files via a native filesystem interface. For Android, Encdroid provides an application browser for volumes. I am unaware of an iOS solution. I use the FUSE systems to keep certain sensitive cloud documents synced between my Windows, macOS and Linux machines while still being able to edit and use them like normal files on those systems.

EncFS does have a few attack vectors they have been slowly addressing. It also suffers from the same problem that all cloud-synced file-based encryption systems suffer; someone could restore your cloud files to a previous known version without your knowledge. The file-based encryption does not prevent what is in effect a replay attack. A research paper proposed a solution -- CryFS[7] -- with some solutions for this problem, but the implementation is immature.

(edited for formatting)

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

2. https://vgough.github.io/encfs/

3. https://www.boxcryptor.com/en/blog/post/6-years-of-boxcrypto...

4. https://encfs.win/

5. https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/encfs

6. https://moritzmolch.com/apps/gencfsm/

7. https://www.cryfs.org/

"I found it extraordinary difficult to build your own encrypted cloud."

I am happy to report that this has been (recently) solved:

https://www.stavros.io/posts/holy-grail-backups/

"(the) holy grail of backups"

That is why I like ZFS: Its send/recv function can do block level syncing, so while the first upload will take a while, subsequent syncs will be much smaller.

Of course, unless you stand up your own VM with a ZFS partition, there are few cloud options for ZFS.

> 4. CryptFS. Great Idea but slow as

"CryFS solves all of these issues, but because of the increased security it is a bit slower. It is also a very new project and currently only available for Linux and Mac, but has experimental Windows support in the newest version. So if you don't need Windows support today, you can give it a try." https://www.cryfs.org/comparison/

Did you consider rclone [1]?

[1] https://rclone.org/crypt/

I bought a synology, and used their solution.

Haven’t tried a full restore, but I occasionally browse old backups and download something as a spot check.

I would much prefer a turn key open source solution that’s commercially developed/supported by one firm (but not tied to that company’s hosting).

Maybe someone will release something under the BSL, and build a healthy company out of it.

Of course any kind of encryption does make a dent in Dropbox's margins, since Dropbox's model is to dedupe data across all its customers but yet charging everyone as if the space used is strictly by their data alone. But the follow up question would be how much of personal (non-public and non-shared) data do people store vs. how much publicly available or shared data (not necessarily free) data they store in their Dropbox accounts for this to make enough of a dent.

I doubt Dropbox gains much from deduping between customers, but I'd love to see some data to the contrary. Last I knew they weren't sharing that, but most of my data is unique to me and anything I'd want to encrypt is unique to me.

I think they do gain a lot from selling 2TB to people using 30GB and selling additional users of the same <3TB of data to enterprises. (That's gotta be pretty sweet profit if they have takers - $12.50 more a month for zero additional storage and a little more data transfer.)

4TB is a lot of personal data - $192/y for that isn't cheap, but I wouldn't call it expensive either for a first world country. And I suppose syncing masses of personal data to an archive across the world is kind of a 1st world problem.

Note that AWS offers archival storage for $1/TB-month and Google has promised $1.23/TB-month later this year. These prices are competitive with raw storage, so the alternative is to go without backup.

That's a fairly normal price. I pay $60/year for Amazon Drive, which has a 1TB limit (no charge for data transfer), that I don't even come close to approaching.

> But by that way we lost dedup capability

This depends on how secret do you want your data to be. You could use block-based encryption/compression and backup. That way you can still dedup encrypted result.

If anyone can inject data into your system and monitor the backup, they could learn when they hit collisions, but for most personal backup cases that's irrelevant.

I think this is a really compelling approach!

What sorts of applications have started to adopt this?

I also thought a different layer to start at would be sqlite databases since I understand that many mobile application use that.

How do applications handle conflicts? It looks like there is a version on files but when is a new version created? On close?

Do you see GDPR or any other compelling event that will cause applications to consider this sort of cloud storage?

It uses content-dependent splitting of blocks (for deduplication), and I'm too paranoid to accept that block-sizes will not reveal anything about my stored data.

https://www.tarsnap.com/download/EuroBSDCon13.pdf

Veracrypt [0] is open source and has passed a security audit in the past (when it was forked from (Truecrypt). I use it for encrypted volumes and it has extra features for the truly “paranoid”. Combine this with Backblaze and you’ve got yourself a good secure backup for sensitive/personal data. [0] https://www.veracrypt.fr/code/

FYI, to restore your files with Backblaze, you'll have to give them your key. They then decrypt your files and leave them in an unencrypted zip file on their servers for you to download.

It really is the only missing feature. It gets frustrating trying to show a specific photo from an event to a friend when I have to guess which number in a series a photo was.

Boxcryptor solves that problem for the most part... That being said, rsync works really well. I use it to copy files to and from the Synology.

I sync to a homeserver and back that up with Borg using a time4vps storage server.

I also use Resilio Sync for distributing backups with encrypted peers, but I use Borg to backup into the folder for compression, de-duplication, and really easy PIT recovery. I've also added rdiff-backup on one of the encrypted peers in case the write host gets hit with ransomware and the backup overwritten.

I'm not sure if it runs on Synology, but duplicity handles most of this OOTB, and handles incrementals as well.

They have an app "Cloud Sync" which replicates the entire NAS onto a cloud provider. I do a backup to Azure, as mentioned in the post, which makes it easy to recover in the event of something going haywire.

That's true with any hardware level raid. Do raid in software or better yet, use btrfs.

Have you? Can you share some stories about this?

It would be more informative if you actually explained your position.

I hear you, but I don't rely on security through obscurity for /all/ of my data. ;)