gocryptfs VS fscrypt

I'm looking to improve my documents syncing setup. Currently I'm using owncloud, but that seems overkill for just files syncing and it requires maintenance, so I gave Syncthing a look. The "Untrusted device encryption" was not appealing to me because I'm not convinced by the security aspects yet, and also because it is in beta for now. I used gocryptfs [1] in the past and was quite happy with it, so I'm planning to use it on top of Syncthing to have files synced encrypted. As far as I have read this setup (Syncthing + gocryptfs) seems to be used by several people and has already been discussed by gocryptfs' author, who recommended a `-sharedstorage` flag for such use case [2]. Reading [3] I think gocryptfs is more suited for files syncing than cryfs. I'm aware that the metadata (file size, structure, …) of my files are not encrypted but that's a compromise I'm ready to make.

I would be happy to hear about opinions about this approach.

[1] https://nuetzlich.net/gocryptfs/

[2] https://github.com/rfjakob/gocryptfs/issues/549#issuecomment...

[3] https://www.cryfs.org/comparison

If you want selective encryption, rather than full drive encryption, to be less conspicuous: gocryptfs (Linux)/cppcryptfs (Windows).

https://github.com/rfjakob/gocryptfs might be a solution. I dont use it, tried to for some backups but ran into some issues unrelated to the solution itself but with my backup solution.

JungleDisk was backup software I used ~2008 that allowed mounting S3. They were bought by Rackspace and the product wasn't updated. Seems to be called/part of Cyberfortress now.

Later I used Panic's Transmit Disk but they removed the feature.

Recently I'd been looking at s3fs-fuse to use with gocryptfs but haven't actually installed it yet!

https://github.com/s3fs-fuse/s3fs-fuse

https://github.com/rfjakob/gocryptfs

I think the fundamental issue seem to maybe be the changing inode numbers with things like gocryptfs. Git annex needs those to be static as far as I can tell.

Veracrypt is stil a fine option but if you want to have regular backups, it's not that great imo. Say you want to automatically backup your files to some cloud without having to trust their promises of privacy, you could use something like gocryptfs. It creates a folder of your files but in encrypted form. You then copy / sync that folder using any backup program.

A comparison gocryptfs would be appreciated, since this software, at first glance, has no differentiating features from it.

https://nuetzlich.net/gocryptfs/

There is a pretty nice project gocryptfs that instead of encrypting container, it substitute on the fly virtual filesystem that encrypts content and file objects. So, if you would share to cloud that virtual filesystem, you don't sacrifice a byte on your system.

Home dir encryption was previously avaiable in ubuntu installer, it used ecryptfs. There is a better option this days: linux native filesystem encryption. ext4 is one of supported fs (I guess you're on it). It involves some manual setup though. Packages to install: fscrypt, libpam-fscrypt. Docs to read: https://github.com/google/fscrypt/blob/v0.3.3/README.md

BTW: The only issue I‘ve come across was that the pulseaudio user daemon couldn’t initialize during login (because it started before fscrypt unlocked home dir). There is an easy workaround for Ubuntu 20: https://github.com/google/fscrypt/issues/270