Boxcryptor mechanism forcing me to save in its drive

mattbenss

Hello everyone,

since I'm new to Boxcryptor in these days I wanted to get familiary with these remarkable software and I noticed something odd.
Why does Boxcryptor, in order to automatically encrypt a file (like a MS Word doc), need the file to be necessarily saved in his virtual drive (Boxcryptor Drive "X:")?

I'm asking this because I set B. to encrypt my Google Drive folder, the one which is in continuous sync with my Google Cloud, but, one saved a file in this folder, B. does not encrypt it. To do that, I need to:

Right-click on the file and encrypt it manually (inconvenient because I will probably forget to do that in a few weeks) OR
move this file to the virtual drive "X:" B. created

Is there a way to tell Boxcryptor to encrypt my Google Drive folder without adding it (and all of its files) to B. virtual drive?

Many thanks to whoever will answer

Florian

Hi mattbenss,

First of all:
Boxcryptor is only showing you a view of your files in Google Drive, everything you save to X:\Google Drive
is instantaneously also saved in C:\Users\<YOUR USERNAME>\Google Drive and vice versa.

The only difference is that via the Boxcryptor Drive you encrypted files appear unencrypted so you can work with them normally.

If any unencrypted data comes directly into your physical Google Drive location, these files are not encrypted by Boxcryptor.

To make sure not to create any unencrypted data and sync it to Google, you have to use Boxcryptor on all your Google Drive connected computers / phones and work within Boxcryptor / the Boxcryptor drive.

If you have external programs work on the Boxcryptor drive as-well you might want to consider to turn on Encrypt by default (https://www.boxcryptor.com/help/teams/windows/#hidden-preferences).

Also, to have all your files and folders initially encrypted, you will have to do this via the context menu or by removing everything from Google Drive and then re-adding it via the Boxcryptor drive.

I hope this helps to answer some of your questions.

Best regards,
Florian

mattbenss

*this
*once

(new auto correction software...)

mattbenss

Dear Florian,

I want to thank you for your detailed answer and, reading it, I acknowledge that probably I was drowning in an inch of water.

In fact, to not get lost in the procedure, I moved all the files I wanted to encrypt into a Gdrive folder, I downloaded it and then, once saved on my computer, I deleted it from my Gdrive Cloud.

Then I moved all these files to Boxcryptor Drive X so that, as far as I understood, they are now encrypted. And, in order to keep them so, I modify them from the Boxcryptor Apps on other devices.

If I may ask one last question, regarding this:

Florian If you have external programs work on the Boxcryptor drive as-well you might want to consider to turn on Encrypt by default (https://www.boxcryptor.com/help/teams/windows/#hidden-preferences).

Are you telling me I could call Boxcryptor to make other applications (such as MSWord) to encrypt all the docs I created within these apps? I'm thinking about this sentence (found in the link you pointed out):

EncryptByDefault (default false): New files created by applications in unencrypted directories will be written encrypted by default.

Because that would be amazing!

Anyway, many thanks for the clarifications you gave me and for the link (it's quite technical for me but I will study it in depth)!

Best Regards

Matteo

Florian

Hi mattbenss

Are you telling me I could call Boxcryptor to make other applications (such as MSWord) to encrypt all the docs I created within these apps? I'm thinking about this sentence (found in the link you pointed out):

By default, Boxcryptor will only show the Do you want to encrypt? dialog when files are created via explorer.exe, since the dialog will "block" the filesystem and this should be avoided at all costs when there is no "interacting" user.

In other cases, when Word.exe or other apps create new items (potentially unattended) in the virtual drive, the this "encryption choice" is made by checking the parent directory encryption state. If there it is not encrypted, the new file / folder will not be encrypted either.

This is where the EncryptByDefault setting takes action: it inverts this "default behavior", all files that are created unattended will be created encrypted.

I hope this explains the setting a bit, I might also update our documentation to explain this setting a bit more detailed.

Best regards,
Florian