This document describes the basic operations that are available in the Syncrypt CLI client.
You can login to the Syncrypt server via:
syncrypt login
This step is optional, but we recommend you to run it. Otherwise you will
need to provide your login credentials every time you run a syncrypt command.
The above command will retrieve an authentication token which will be used by any
subsequent commands.
Initialize the current directory as a vault:
syncrypt init
This will register a new vault with your Syncrypt account. A vault has a unique ID and a RSA key pair. When running the above command, a private key for this new vault will be generated and will only be stored on your computer.
Encrypt and push all files in this directory to the server:
syncrypt push
To retrieve files from Syncrypt, simply write:
syncrypt pull
Print out vault information via:
syncrypt info
You can also give your vault a name. This name will be visible to other users of the vault as well, but not to anyone else. To set a new name, use:
syncrypt set vault.name "My Library"
syncrypt push
In order to share your vault with another user, use:
syncrypt add-user mail@example.org
This command will add the user to the vault. To safely transfer the vault's key to the target user or device, the command will ask the Syncrypt server for all keys of this user. Syncrypt will ask you then to verify each fingerprint (for example by using an already trusted external communication channel).
Only if you are sure about the matching fingerprints, proceed by typing y.
Syncrypt will now create a package containing the vault keys and encrypt this
package with the public key of the target device. This encrypted package will
then be sent to the new user or device through the Syncrypt server.
If you don't see any fingerprints of the target user, make sure that the other
user has uploaded at least one public key. The public keys for a device will
get uploaded after a successful login (see above) or by typing:
syncrypt keys --upload
It is important to store your vault's keys at another place other than your computer. Otherwise, you won't be able to recover your files in case of a disk failure. We can't give you your keys back if you lose them, since we never store them on our servers. This is deliberate and to protect your data against theft and unauthorized access.
You can create a ZIP file with all the necessary information to decrypt a Vault by typing:
syncrypt export -o vault-backup.zip
We recommend to save this file on a USB stick or a similar disconnected storage and keep it in a safe place.
In order to restore a backup or download your vault to another machine, type the following on the destination:
syncrypt import vault-backup.zip /new/vault/folder
cd /new/vault/folder
syncrypt pull
Watch current directory (this is like a daemon running in the foreground as it also provides the HTTP interface):
syncrypt watch
For each command listed above, alternate directories can be specified with
-d, like:
syncrypt -d ~/myfolder watch
Debug logging can be activated via -l DEBUG.