mkfs VS gocryptfs

What a coincidence! I've just been playing with Gokrazy a couple weeks ago, and just kept thinking "this is so cool". If you're building some sort of an appliance, and want the least amount of reliance on / hassle maintaining the base OS, it definitely is a viable choice.

It can also run programs that are not written in go, by using a little neat hack to build/embed a binary inside a Go package; this is e.g. how Gokrazy sets up persistent storage: https://github.com/gokrazy/mkfs

I don't think it's for everyone; if you're relying on your base OS / package manager for a lot of stuff, or just want to run Docker containers, I think there are simpler/better ways to set things up. But it's absolutely great at what it's made for; doubly so with the Raspberry Pi's finally being back in stock.

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.