CryFS encrypts your files, so you can safely store them anywhere. It works well together with cloud services like Dropbox, iCloud, OneDrive and others.
2. Install [Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2019](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2977003/the-latest-supported-visual-c-downloads)
CryFS 0.10 or later is stable for most use cases, but has a couple of known issues that can corrupt your file system.
They don't happen in normal day to day use, but can happen if you don't pay attention or aren't aware of them.
This is why the version number hasn't reached 1.0 yet.
- If you kill the CryFS process while it was in the middle of writing data (either intentionally or unintentionally by losing power to your PC), your file system could get corrupted.
CryFS does not do journaling. Note that in 0.10.x, read accesses into a CryFS file system can cause writes because file timestamps get updated. So if you're unlucky, your file system
could get corrupted if you lose power while you were reading files as well. Read accesses aren't an issue in CryFS 0.11.x anymore, because it mounts the filesystem with `noatime` by default.
- The same corruption mentioned above can happen when CryFS is trying to write data but your disk ran out of space, causing the write to fail.
- CryFS does not currently support concurrent access, i.e. accessing a file system from multiple devices at the same time.
CryFS works very well for storing data in a cloud and using it from multiple devices, but you need to make sure that only one CryFS process is active at any point in time, and you also need
to make sure that the cloud synchronization client (e.g. Dropbox) finishes its synchronization before you switch devices. There are some ideas on how concurrent access could be supported in
future versions, but it's a hard problem to solve. If you do happen to access the file system from multiple devices at the same time, it will likely go well most of the time, but it can corrupt your file system.
- In addition to the scenarios above that can corrupt your file system, note that there is currently no fsck-like tool for CryFS that could recover your data. Although such a tool is in theory, possible,
it hasn't been implemented yet and a corrupted file system will most likely cause a loss of your data.
3. Run CMake to generate Visual Studio 2019 project files (this may not be necessary, but it makes sure everything works as expected and you can see potential errors happening during this step)
Starting with CryFS 0.11, Conan is used for dependency management.
When you build CryFS, Conan downloads the exact version of each dependency library that was also used for development.
All dependencies are linked statically, so there should be no incompatibility with locally installed libraries.
This is the recommended way because it has the highest probability of working correctly.
However, some distributions prefer software packages to be built against dependencies dynamically and against locally installed versions of libraries.
So if you're building a package for such a distribution, you have the option of doing that, at the cost of potential incompatibilities.
If you follow this workflow, please make sure to extensively test your build of CryFS.
You're using a setup that wasn't tested by the CryFS developers.
To use local dependencies, you need to tell the CryFS build how to get these dependencies.
You can do this by writing a small CMake configuration file and passing it to the CryFS build using `-DDEPENDENCY_CONFIG=filename`.
This configuration file needs to define a cmake target for each of the dependencies.
Here's an [example config file](cmake-utils/DependenciesFromConan.cmake) that gets the dependencies from conan.
And here's another [example config file](cmake-utils/DependenciesFromLocalSystem.cmake) that works for getting dependencies that are locally installed in Ubuntu.
You can create your own configuration file to tell the build how to get its dependencies and, for example, mix and match. Get some dependencies from Conan and others from the local system.
In the event of a password leak, you are strongly advised to create a new filesystem and copy all the data over from the previous one. Then, remove all copies of the compromised filesystem and config file(e.g, from the "previous versions" feature of your cloud system) to prevent access to the key (and, as a result, your data) using the leaked password.
