Secured Folders don't automatically encrypt contents.

[Witek]

Hi,

I just wanted to know if secured folders are capable of constant updates to the folder content. I’m aware of the broom icon that will encrypt any unecrypted files. However, my secured folder is a Drive File Stream folder. This means that if I save a file there and AxCrypt doesn’t instantly encrypt the new file in the folder, Google Drive will make a snapshot of that file, which defeats the purpose of encrypting these files in the first place. Here’s the screenshot:

the test file ‘dssaddssda’ will be captured by Google Drive file history in its non-encrypted form because AxCrypt is waiting for user interaction (clicking the ‘broom’ icon). Is this expected behavior?

[Jed]

Witek, unfortunately it is expected behaviour.

The only way around it is to manually sync the folder to Google Drive or to create a rule only to upload files with a .AXX extension.

[SvanteSpectator]

Hello Witek,

The problem is that although we technically can encrypt a file as soon as it appears in a folder, it won’t work and it’ll be a race between the synchronizing agent and AxCrypt. AxCrypt may win this race most of the time, but we can’t guarantee it.

The reason it won’t work at all, is because it’ll confuse applications. Let’s say you start Word, start editing a document, and then hit “Save As”. You save it is “stuff.docx”. AxCrypt sees it and immediately encrypts it as “stuff-docx.axx”, and wipes “stuff.docx”. This really confuses Word, which thought it just created the file “stuff.docx”…. There are many variants of this scenario, but in the end it just doesn’t work reliably enough.

We’re still testing out how AxCrypt interacts with Drive File Stream, and what we can do about that. With backup and sync the operation is similar to the current Drive implementation.

[Author]

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