Advice for sharing BC folder with Dropbox or SugarSync

Judith

Dear group
and dear Robert,

first of all I want to thank you for this great soft! Paid instantly for it. At least my husband did :p

We use at the moment SugarSync. Though after reading Ralvy's post above about Dropbox I am going to rething this. Since I am not sure if SS has this block upload technique or what some call delta syncing.

Everything works fine with BC.
We got one folder
D:\Dropbox that is synced with SS or in the past DropBox.
subfoler is D:\Dropbox\BoxCryptor ---> Z:

In there sits our folder with our pictures:
D:\Dropbox\BoxCryptor\ourPictures

I we work at home with our PC or on the way with our Laptop we have our pictures
with us if D:\Dropbox\BoxCryptor\ourPictures is fully synced.
When we are looking at pics we have to go into Z:\ourPictures with our picturebrowser :)

So far so good!!

But issues arise at the point where we want to 'invite' other family members to see our pics or at least a subfolder of \ourPictures\2011 ...

Of course this would only work if we share our BoxCryptop password with family members. That is no problem with us. Though we'd appreciate if BC could offer differend pw's. E.g. one master pw for Z: and some 'sub-folder'-pw's ....for sharing.

However,
the question is:
How would you solve the outlined problem?
Can you that with Dropbox?
SugarSync can to things like that easily but, however, not with BC folders. At least I do not get how to solve it. We can send to grandpa and aunt an email with a folder invite for e.g. D:\Dropbox\BoxCryptor\ourPictures\2011 but then SugarSync
puts all encrypted pics into a folder under \documents\invitegby-blabla-@-gmail.com

Well, if pics would not go there but into a choosen folder, here their boxcryptor folder, then things might work. But I do not know at the moment.

All in all, a bit complicated. How do you share folders crypted by BC?

Thank you
Judith

Boris

Hi Judith

to share encrypted data you have to share your complete BoxCryptor folder (e.g. D:\Dropbox\BoxCryptor).

Because BoxCryptor is compatible to EncFS the .encfs6.xml file which is needed to decrypt data is located only in the root BoxCryptor directory and so its officially not possible to share subfolders.

But there is a workaround! You have to do the following step in your explorer not in the BoxCryptor partition: You just copy (don't cut or delete!) the .encfs6.xml file from your root BoxCryptor directory to any subfolder which you want to share (e.g. \ourPictures\2011). Now you can share this folder like any other non encrypted folder (but you have to share it in explorer or web interface not in BoxCryptor partition).
Because you probably encrypted also your folder- and filenames you have to run BoxCryptor in translate mode. Just close BoxCryptor and then type "boxcryptor.exe /translate" (without "") in your start menu in Windows 7/Vista. Now you can see the decrypted and encrypted folder- and filenames in your BoxCryptor partition. (To do this in Windows XP you have to download BoxCryptor Portable from our blog).

To decrypt shared folders you first have to sync the folder to your computer. This can be done in the sugar sync web interface by clicking "Sync to Computer" in the shared folder view (Make sure your .encfs6.xml file gets synced). Then you have to change your BoxCryptor directory in BoxCryptor preferences on your computer. You can find the shared folder at \Documents\SugarSync Shared Folders\*email-of-owner*\*SharedBoxCryptorDirectory* (*..* depending on your email address and share folder). BoxCryptor will automatically detect the .encfs6.xml file and the shared folder will be decrypted by entering the owner's BoxCryptor password. If you want your main BoxCryptor folder to be decrypted again simply change the BoxCryptor directory in BoxCryptor preferences again.

There is at the moment no other way to share and decrypt folders also because you can't change the shared folder directory in sugar sync (see sugar sync discussion here: http://sugarsync.hivelive.com/posts/10d9223a74) but we are working on better support for shared folders!

Hope I could help
Boris