dokany VS Cryptomator

It's not really the same though. A Projected File System copies the files from the backing store to somewhere on the local file system when requested and then performs IO normally on the local files.

For an actual implementation of userspace filesystems on Windows see dokany: https://github.com/dokan-dev/dokany

Now that you are inside the Mirror folder with cmd, let’s start the Mirror function to attach a NAS or cloud folder as a local disk in order to get recognized by the BB client and be backed up. Write something like (read the dokany documentation for more details here): mirror.exe /r x:\ /l m , where x:\ should be the letter of the folder attached with Raidrive and m:\ the letter you want to assign to the new local disk.

I lead a project that included shipping a filesystem driver and a virtual disk on Windows.

What I did to learn the lower-level APIs, and perform initial testing on the driver, was write a "mirror" drive. The user-mode code pointed to a folder on disk, the driver made a virtual disk drive, and all reads and writes in the virtual disk drive went to the mirror folder.

On Windows, you can implement something like that using Dokany, Dokan, or Winfsp. On linux, there's the Fuse API. On Mac, there's MacFUSE.

Even if you don't do a "mirror" drive, understanding the callbacks that libraries like Dokany, Dokan, Winfsp, and Fuse do helps you understand how IO happens in the driver. Many IO methods provided in popular languages provide abstractions above what the OS does. (For example, the Windows kernel has no concept of the "Stream" that's in your C# program. The "Stream"'s Position property is purely a construct within the .Net framework.)

https://dokan-dev.github.io/

https://github.com/dokan-dev/dokany

https://osxfuse.github.io/

Another place to start is the OS's documentation itself. For example, you can start with Window's CreateFileA function. This typically is what gets called "under the hood" in most programming languages when you open or create a file: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/fileapi/...

You'll need this ressource installed in 1.X version to make it work : https://github.com/dokan-dev/dokany

Potentially no need to buy any hardware https://github.com/dokan-dev/dokany/wiki/Use-Mirror-example

Yeah, I had an issue and had to downgrade the Dokan Library. I downloaded from here.

the best way to do this is with https://cryptomator.org

Before putting anything on a cloud service I would recommend 3rd party tools, like Cryptomator, to encrypt folders and such, then upload to a cloud service.

I use Cryptomator - https://cryptomator.org

I've used countless encryption "schemes" over the years, from True/Vera-Crypt to encrypted sparse bundles/images, and none have ever really felt right.

These days i tend to use Cryptomator[0] instead. It accomplishes what none of the others could do, which is transparent encryption across devices.

With Cryptomator, i simply create a vault somewhere in the cloud, stuff data in it, and i can access it from my laptop, phone or tablet, and not think much about it. It integrates into the normal file browsing APIs, and doesn't get in the way.

Because it does "per file" encryption, it also doesn't need to download a 20-100MB chunk from the cloud before decrypting, so it's rather fast (depending on file size of course).

[0]: https://cryptomator.org/

Cryptomator's arguably the most popular encryption software for cloud storage (you can give yourself zero-knowledge encryption by using them) - it's actually what they specialize & focus on (cloud encryption). It's 100% open source and Free to use on computers. On phones I believe it's just a 1-time fee of a few bucks ($13-14, then you have it forever) - note: their iOS offering is still new, so may be a bit unpolished at the moment.

This is the solution: https://cryptomator.org/

Cryptomator. It is made for uploading files securely to cloud storage, but works locally, is easy to use, and completely free for your use case.