Boxcryptor for macOS 3.x Feedback

Hello there! Since we recently released our brand new Boxcryptor for macOS 3.x version, we're excited to hear about your feedback and what we could improve...

Florian · 2022-09-12T14:02:30+00:00

Hello there! Since we recently released our brand new Boxcryptor for macOS 3.x version, we're excited to hear about your feedback and what we could improve...

Boxcryptor for macOS 3.x Feedback

K-M

Dear Boxcryptor-Team,

I’ve had a similar experience as ThunderRoad. The new v3 on MacOS caused serious trouble on my machine, so that in the end I reverted to version 2. Issues I’ve noticed so far:

Created/Modified timestamp of files are not preserved. Instead there was a random datetime of year 2077 or something visible in the finder. Newly created files/folders seemed to be correct. Timestamps are crucial for me, that was one of the reasons I left Cryptomator.
Thats critical: At some point syncing stopped! I discovered this issue by chance, when I compared files on my iOS device with those on my Mac. That must not happen. If I had logged out of my Boxcryptor app on my Mac, all local file changes would have been lost. So I had so spend several hours comparing the file state on my Macbook with that in the cloud. (My setup: I had the OneDrive app running and pointed Boxcryptor to the local OneDrive folder since not all files in my OneDrive are encrypted.)
I had an error saying, that it’s not possible to move an encrypted file into a non-encrypted folder or something. That error won’t go away, even if the file was already deleted. I think the previous point might be a result of this error.
Encrypting and decrypting via creating copies is not nice, since timestamps are not preserved.
The only positive thing for me so far: Spotlight is working again! But it only works on downloaded files, which brings me to the next point:
There is no other way to force download all files apart from opening each single file. Even if I did that, it seemed to me that some files/folders were pushed back into the cloud again. I’d like to define which folders should permanently remain on my hard drive.

I didn’t dig deeper into those issues, because for me Boxcryptor should be a software I can rely on. Since v3 needs more time to get there, I went back to v2 and with that everything works as expected again.

[deleted]

Wann wird das Problem mit den falschen Zeit/Datumsstempel behoben?

mlaferle

I'm trying to stay all-in on v3, but without being able to see what is still sync'ing, it is getting challenging. I'm seeing cloud error icons (the cloud with the ! in it) but when I go to a different device, it looks like it sync'ed. Is there a roadmap item to show us remaining items to sync? I continue to be nervous that I'm making changes that aren't sync'ed. I think we all need confidence. Thank you for what you're doing around what Apple has done, but I agree with others that other products have found a way to get this fixed, so hopefully the team there is on their way.

Christian

mlaferle The sync status is always limited to one device, because it shows whether the client is in the same state as the provider or not. This should be displayed through a sync- or error symbol on the lower right of the Boxcryptor icon. I'm not sure if I understand you correctly, but Boxcryptor is not able to show whether another device still needs to do some syncing or not.

Christian

Fozi Grund ist hier tatsächlich ein verändertes Verhalten durch ein MacOS Update. Finder ignoriert es, wenn wir sagen, dass wir ein Datum nicht kennen (nicht jeder Anbieter liefert uns das Erstellungs- / Modifikations-Datum). Früher wurde dann ein "-" dargestellt - jetzt zeigt Finder 1667 an...
Wir arbeiten an dem Problem.

Christian

cipherneo This is actually changed behaviour from Finder. Normally, it should read "-" when we cannot provide a date (not every provider gives us one in every occasion). Finder instead since recently displays 1667... We're working on a fix.

Christian

evvliet I've noted this as a feature request for internal discussion. But it's currently not planned short-term.

mlaferle

Christian Yes, sync is limited to 1 device I understand that. I'm saying my Mac shows (!) on the cloud icon showing the file was NOT sync'ed. But when I look on my iPad, the file is there. So the (!) on the Mac seems incorrect, as the file did in fact sync properly otherwise I wouldn't be able to see it on my Mac. But I'm sure some of the time the (!) might be correct, in which case a file hasn't sync'ed. So false positive (!) indicators makes me nervous that I'll miss an actual upload failure if I start ignoring all of the (!) icons I see.

mlaferle

I just got a tip to try from another user ... use your native cloud agent to bring the encrypted files down to your PC and manage the sync process with full visibility and selective sync controls. You of course can't look at those *.bc files. Then use BC3 with the "Local Storage" setting and point it at your cloud provider folder on your PC. I'll be experimenting with that as an option until BC3 has more transparent sync information (if it is even possible).

cjemerson

mlaferle Doesn't work for me, sadly. Still having to download via BC even though the files exist in Dropbox.

European

After having used the new version for a few weeks now with heavy troubles with syncing and keeping ALL my files up to date in the cloud I have decided to actively search for an alternative.
I started to use Boxcryptor long ago for the reason of encrypting my data in my huge Dropbox and having it synced on all devices used all the time. That is not provided any more and the current approach of the software does not fit my needs any more. What a pity!

[deleted]

European is this your problem?

mlaferle

cjemerson It looks like you have to "download" via BC when using local storage. Really you're just telling BC to go look for the files, and they actually (or are supposed to) find them locally and tell you they are downloaded. But you don't really re-download them. There was another article somewhere describing how local storage encryption worked. I could be mis-remembering.

cjemerson

Sadly decided to revert to BC 2.x (thanks for making it available for Ventura). But what a great decision - everything works again - no 'downloaded' files suddenly needing to be downloaded again, no waiting for that to happen for large files, no crashes when I use my go to writing app (Scrivener). I'll put up with no Spotlight for a worry-free system. I really hope you manage to get 3.x working properly, but I'm not holding my breath.

mlaferle

Still been struggling with BC3 working with local storage which is actually another cloud provider's local storage location. BC3 still creates errors I can't fix. It still locks ups where it won't decrypt or show folders without restarting the BC3 client. So I'm somewhat relieved that I can check my cloud provider app to make sure things are safe, but still clunky with BC3. I'm nearly going back to BC2 until all this gets resolved, but I'm really going to miss spotlight search. That is the only thing keeping me fighting to stay on BC3.

mlaferle

One more question... If I'm using the iCloud provider in BC3 ... is it downloading a separate copy of files in the /Library/CloudStorage/Boxcryptor - iCloud/ folder? At one point I had told macOS to download all my iCloud data locally. So if that download happened, and I told BC3 to download all my iCloud data too .... do I have two copies now? I guess the same question could apply to any cloud provider where we use the cloud provider client. Thanks.

Christian

mlaferle Yes, Finder will cache the files that you either opened in the Boxcryptor location, or that you chose to explicitly download through the context menu.

Christian

New MacOS version 3.12.379

It took us longer than we planned for, but we've finally got the next version ready for you. It will be distributed via staged rollout, but you can already update to it manually (either though Boxcryptor -> Check for Updates, or over https://www.boxcryptor.com/en/download/macos/).

A lot of bug fixes went into this version. Give it a go - if any issues persist, make sure to sign out and in again as well (this clears all the caches and is a sure way to make sure we're not just dealing with some "stuck" issues).

Here's the changelog:

Improved: Faster encryption and decryption (in particular for large files)
Improved: Partially encrypted filenames can be decrypted as well
Improved: Make all SharePoint Document Libraries accessible
Improved: Improved warning messages
Improved: Updated list of non supported file types
Improved: Dates not available show provider addition date instead of 1677
Fixed: Several application crashes
Fixed: Ever-incrementing renames
Fixed: Encryption required policy not respected
Fixed: Dropbox "+" signs in filenames get removed
Fixed: Duplicate files when moving them into folders without permissions
Fixed: Dropbox shared encrypted filenames could not be renamed
Minor bug fixes and improvements

Gilbo

Hello team,

I've been evaluating BoxCryptor for use as a replacement for sparse bundles (encrypted disk images) which I store in iCloud Drive and access exclusively from macOS.

I'm a big fan of the new BC client with File Provider integration, but it's clear from my testing with OneDrive and iCloud Drive that Apple are imposing some quite serious technical restrictions on the way that Boxcryptor is permitted to integrate with iCloud Drive. Frankly, I'm very impressed you've got it working as well as you have.

With OneDrive, Boxcryptor is able to connect itself and act as a standalone client. However, I see that with iCloud Drive you're forced to treat it as though it's local storage that lives within -/Library/Mobile Documents/com-apple-CloudDocs, with all push and pull requests to iCloud being done by macOS instead of Boxcryptor/File Provider. This is how it appears to me at least!

If I have an encrypted file in Boxcryptor, stored in iCloud Drive but not downloaded locally, opening the file in Boxcryptor will trigger iCloud Drive into downloading the file. There are then two copies of this file, one encrypted in com-apple-CloudDocs and one unencrypted in -/Library/CloudStorage/Boxcryptor-icloud. Changes to that file via Boxcryptor are then synced, detected by macOS and re-uploaded.

However, if Boxcryptor has a cached copy within -/Library/CloudStorage but the original iCloud Drive download has been purged, making it online only, any changes made via Boxcryptor result in a sync error saying that the original file cannot be found. If I manually download that file again myself using Finder in my iCloud Drive, I am then able to retry the sync from within Boxcryptor, the file is now there, the .bc changes and then gets re-uploaded by macOS.

My question is this: Is there a way to make Boxcryptor trigger the iCloud Drive download again in the scenario that the original encrypted file has been purged so that we can avoid these sync errors?

My concern is that iCloud Drive uses storage optimisation to purge downloads over time in order to free up disk space, and if it purges a load of .bc files which Boxcryptor expects to be there, I'm going to get multiple sync errors and have to manually download them all again myself to put things back to the way they're supposed to be.

It's incredible that Apple have managed to produce a File Provider API that works better with third party cloud storage than it does its own. I do like Apple a lot but the way they've implemented iCloud Drive is horrendous.

Keep up the good work!

misiek_to_ja

So ... I decided to switch from EncFS to Boxcryptor on my MacOS, mainly due to lack of Spotlight support + no app on iOS. Did some limited testing on some small dirs/files and yeah, gave it a go - I purchased a Boxcryptor license yesterday. I was so excited, to finally be able to search through my files and use it on my iPhone and iPad. So did some cleaning on old files, configured Local Storage (on Dropbox) with filename encryption and started copying my files. And what my eyes saw cannot be described. The app is totally unusable!!!!!!! It crashes all the time, for most of my dirs that I copy. I even did comparison of copied folders and some files are actually corrupted (different size). I'm getting the error message below, typically I can close it, but now sth exploded and it cannot be closed. I need to restart my machine. Hopefully they will refund my payment, it is some joke selling this to their customers. Going back to EncFS for now ...