Tech Notes:-Using Cryptomator to encrypt you personal data in cloud

One confusion most of us always had from the early years of cloud adoption is whether to upload confidential data to the cloud or not and how safe is the data.

Now, we have a free solution which we can use to encrypt the data uploaded to the cloud. This is using a tool called Cryptomator.

 https://cryptomator.org/ 

Cryptomator is a free, opensource client-side tool for encrypting your cloud files.T he tool is available for Linux, Windows, Mac, Android and Apple.

Cryptomator encrypts the data with either a key or a password as per your choice before its uploaded from your device.This means that the data stored in the cloud will be in encrypted form. All that someone who gets access to your cloud account sees is like below which  doesn't make any sense

It will make sense only once we decrypt it with the same password or key after we download it back to our device. 

Now we will see how we can setup cryptomator to encrypt files and then sync it to google drive.

Setting up Google drive 

First, we have to download and install Google Backup and Sync from below URL

https://www.google.com/drive/download/backup-and-sync/

1. On launching Google  Backup and Sync, you will be asked to sign in with your Google credentials.
2. If you have enabled 2-step verification, you will be asked to complete the formalities for 2-step verification.
3. ClickAllow for trust verification message

Once you sign-in, follow below youtube video to add the folder that you want to sync. I have chosen the folder E:\Google Drive to sync. We will be creating a folder named MyDocs under the Google Drive folder and this folder will contain our data which will be encrypted using cryptomator.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4kJ9-j_FUY

Setting up Cryptomator

1. Download and install cryptomator form below link
1. https://cryptomator.org/downloads/#winDownload
2. Launch cryptomator and click on the + and then select create a new vault
3. Browse to your Google drive path. In my case, it is E:\Google Drive
4. Name the vault and supply a password and then click on Create Vault
5. That's it, you have created the vault
6. Now click on the drop-down near Lock Vault and then select Reveal Drive
7. This will open the drive in Windows Explorer.
8. By default, the drive will be mounted in Windows Explorer as Z drive
9. Now whatever files you copy to this drive will be encrypted and since this folder is already part of Google Drive folder, this will be synced to Google drive.
10. But to access the contents, you need to have theCryptomator software as well as the password that you set for the vault.
11. Once your work is done, you can close this drive by selecting the drop-down near to the Lock Vault and then selecting eject drive

You can access your encrypted files from even your Android phone or iPhone As of this writing, the Cryptomator client for Android is not free.