Linux version is atrocious

Xartrix

Hi,
I have an Ubuntu 20.04, and using Google Drive as a backend. At the moment, I only have about 300 MB of data, but the application's performance is atrocious.
Out of that, I have one directory of interest - with about 3k files, taking about 74MB of space.

I have somehow managed to upload it, but it was not a walk in the park: upload getting stuck; error messages saying that upload failed, with an option to retry. I finally managed to upload it, but not really I guess, because although the progress bar showed 100%, it didn't count as 'finished'.
To verify it, I tried to download the whole directory, but that was another painful journey - download was randomly getting stuck on files again with an option to retry and it seemed to have worked, but at this point I found it really hard to trust the program that it behaves correctly.

Now, a list of random issues I encountered:
1) UI hangs when I tried to do drag & drop, but eventually recovered
2) Sometimes I need to right-click twice, the first one is ignored
3) Constant disk activity! This one really bugs me, because the program is almost constantly doing 5MB/s writes to disk, which I don't understand (when some action is going on). Care to explain why you need to do that? To clarify, the upload/download rate is at about 50/100 kB, so I'm pretty sure it's not reading/writing data it sends/receives via network.
4) I managed to accidentally launch the application twice, but it doesn't seem to mind (I just hope someone thought of this scenario and isn't trying to access database concurrently). Why is it even allowed?
5) The program takes /forever/ to load under certain circumstances (like my problem described above, when I uploaded 3k files and canceled the upload before reaching 100%, closed the app, reopened it, only to wait for maybe a MINUTE before the app crunched away at its 5MB/s disk activity rate before even showing a window! And when it did, I had 3k messages about failed transfer - so be it, but after clicking on 'Clear', it took again maybe 10 seconds for the UI to respond. Is this really how any program in 2021 is supposed to behave? Even for Java, it's simply too much.

Is this just my experience? I just installed the program today, seeing it has a nice UI, but I'm probably going to get rid of it /if/ I ever manage to download my newly-encrypted files.

Thanks for reading.

Jonatec

Yes, totally agree with your bug list.
I have Linux Mint 20 installed and experienced a lot of problems uploading files using Boxcryptor.
Okay, Boxcryptor has an attractive UI, but if it doesn't work properly?
I've gone back to using VeraCrypt, it's reliable, and for me I need to know I haven't lost any files in a black hole somewhere.
Perhaps this is yet another case of Linux being at the bottom of the stack after Windows and Mac O/Ss.

MikeJohns

I agree with Jonatec and Xartrix.

Boxcryptor Portable needs - A LOT - of love from boxcryptor developers.

I am a long-term Boxcryptor supporter and customer. I think that I pay the yearly fee since 2014. Since the beginning, I really liked Boxcryptor and I have encrypted pretty much every file with this tool. However, my appreciation for Boxcryptor is falling rapidly, since I made the decision to transfer from Windows to Linux Mint a few days ago.

What is my issue with Boxcryptor Portable?
I do have a big interest to go out to nature in my spare time and photograph high quality pictures of our world. Therefore, I need a lot of storage for my media content. As a reference point: Currently, I am storing around 50 TB (TB! not GB!) on external harddrives. All my harddrives are encrypted with Boxcryptor. That was fine, until I changed my operating system from Windows to Linux Mint 20.1.

Boxcryptor Portable is horrible to use!
Yes, it is able to connect to my external harddrives and I can - theoretically - decrypt my media content and watch it. However, this is really just theoretical. If I open a small file (like a .txt with 50 KB), it's no problem to double click in the "File Browser" of Boxcryptor Portable. The tool will decrypt the file and show me the content. However - and this is really the big problem - if I want to open a picture or a 4K video (50 MB - 500 MB), Boxcryptor Portable takes very long to open just a single file of this size. It's not seconds - it's minutes! In between, Boxcryptor Portable is "freezing" up. Sometimes, I don't know if the tool is still decrypting the file or I should just kill the process. I also think that Portable is just single-threaded. I think that it just uses 1 of my CPUs to decrypt the files.

So basically, I am not able to use my media content - which I collected over several years - with my new operating system Linux Mint 20.1.

I am even more disappointed from Boxcryptor, because Boxcryptor is first and foremost an IT security / IT privacy company. I changed to Linux, because I wanted to have a more secure operating system compared to Windows. I thought that this would not be a problem at all, because Boxcryptor stands for Security / Privacy and Linux stands for Security / Privacy. I was already disappointed that there is no fully integrated Boxcryptor tool for Linux like for Windows and Apple. I was even more disappointed that the only way to use my encrypted file is this Portable version, which is just crap.

So now I have to go back to Windows to find a solution to decrypt all my 50 TB of data and encrypt it again with a Linux-friendly encryption tool. Thats just ridiculous.

My questions:
When will be a fully integrated Linux client available? You are a IT security company. You should provide a tool for a secure operation system like Linux.

If you don't plan a fully integerated Linux version, do you plan to upgrade Boxcryptor Portable (very hugh steps are necessary) to be a useable tool for Linux?

Thanks,
Mike

MikeJohns

A follow up to my post from yesterday (see above):

To give you all a "feeling" of how well Boxcryptor Portable is performing, I stopped the clock today:

Task for Boxcryptor Portable on Linux Mint 20.1:
Decrypt a file with a size of 1 GB (4K video).

It took 25 minutes and 12 seconds to decrypt ONE SINGLE FILE!

This was done on a DELL XPS 15 with 8 CPU-Threads and 32 GB RAM.

I closely watch the "System Monitor" in Linux Mint during the decryption time. It really looks like that Boxcryptor Portable is just single-threaded. Just one thread was - at any time - at 100 %. All other threads were on idle. Sometimes the threads were changed, but there always was just one thread really working on decryption.

I don't understand that Boxcryptor is publishing such a poor performing software at all! It must be clear that customer will complain about this tool.

portermw00box

I have used Boxcryptor personal version since 2015 on Windows. I'd have to say I'm a bit of a fan of the Windows app, having integrated all of my thirteen thousand online documents, and accessing any of them, no matter the size, as if they were on a local drive. They reside in the cloud encrypted at rest and in motion. Wunderbar, meine deutche Freunde. But, good grief, do not for a second imagine that you can do anything like this with the portable version on Linux. It is not even possible to see a document name that is not at the top of the list. After spending 30 minutes trying to scroll, I had to give up. The lesson might be: if you have only a few small files in the cloud that are encrypted with Boxcryptor, the portable version will take a bit of time to run, but you can see and access your files. If you use many online files, or if you are hoping to access large files, stick with the Windows app. It is easy, it works as advertised, and it is fast.