Encrypted remote folder name decoding Issue

Help and Support
1

What is the problem you are having with rclone?

One of my VPSes went down and I am trying to recover files that were being backed up to an encrypted remove. When adding the remote on another machine the folder name is mangled and looks like it cannot be decoded (mind you, it's decoding the folder name and not decrypting as that works) so I cannot go into the folder and retrieve my archives from there.

What is your rclone version (output from rclone version)

rclone v1.57.0

Which cloud storage system are you using? (eg Google Drive)

PCloud

The command you were trying to run (eg rclone copy /tmp remote:tmp)

rclone lsd pcrypt:

The rclone config contents with secrets removed.

[pcloud]
type = pcloud
hostname = eapi.pcloud.com
token = {"access_token":"TOKEN_GOES_HERE","token_type":"bearer","expiry":"0001-01-01T00:00:00Z"}

[pcrypt]
type = crypt
remote = pcloud:FolderToDecrypt
password = 
password2 =

A log from the command with the -vv flag

rclone lsd -vv pcrypt:
2021/11/08 06:39:07 DEBUG : rclone: Version "v1.57.0" starting with parameters ["rclone" "lsd" "-vv" "pcrypt:"]
2021/11/08 06:39:07 DEBUG : Creating backend with remote "pcrypt:"
2021/11/08 06:39:07 DEBUG : Using config file from "/home/my_user/.config/rclone/rclone.conf"
2021/11/08 06:39:07 DEBUG : Creating backend with remote "pcloud:FolderToDecrypt"
          -1 2021-09-29 17:24:58        -1 y��*�˼<�,�1��
2021/11/08 06:39:07 DEBUG : 3 go routines active

The strange thing is that this looked ok when I created it and since it was created rclone has been writing backup archives to this folder since I can see the folder and it's contents on pcloud and I can see that they were being populated, the problem now is that, as you can see, the folder's encoding is all wrong and I cannot view the contents without knowing the folder name.

2

I think the easiest fix would be to make a new folder with the name you want, use the pCloud GUI and delete that new folder and rename the broken one with the name you copied.

3

The problem isn't with the folder name of the backup folder, so in my case FolderToDecrypt but rather with the contents of the folder itself. When opening up the folder, the contents are obfuscated so the folder name inside this folder is just some letters and numbers. To hopefully illustrate it a bit better:

> rclone lsd pcloud:
          -1 2021-10-06 20:30:05        -1 Documents
          -1 2021-10-08 09:05:20        -1 OtherFolder
          -1 2021-02-16 05:50:42        -1 System Volume Information
          -1 2021-10-29 18:28:41        -1 Pictures
          -1 2021-11-08 12:31:45        -1 FolderToDecrypt

The above is the view of the folders on my PCloud. The encrypted folder is called FolderToDecrypt. I setup the crypt remote with pcloud:FolderToDecrypt.

> rclone lsd pcrypt:
          -1 2021-11-08 12:34:20        -1 y��*�˼<�,�1§��

I renamed FolderToDecrypt but no luck in changing anything. I tried also different encoding options in the rclone config file, but the contents of the encrypted remote just keep showing up like in the code section above. The folder name for the encrypted remote shows up correctly, it's when it comes down to getting the contents that the problem appears.

Sorry if I'm unclear in the explanation of my problem.

Some additional info - the remote was setup on a box running Ubuntu 20.04, the folder to keep the backups was created in PCloud on their webapp and then added in rclone. The first copy to the folder was done manually and the archive was uploaded fine and was decrypted fine. I didn't check it after the first few weeks and now I tried accessing it from my Ubuntu laptop, two Windows desktops and a Debian server with the contents being mangled each time. I also tried mounting it in Ubuntu but I get encoding problem or something along those lines on the folder.

4

it might be that just the root folder of the crypt remote is corrupt.
i would try to replace y��*�˼<�,�1§�� with valid crypt name.

5

This looks like it is missing the obfuscation setting?

It should have a line like

filename_encryption = obfuscate

in it I think.

6

At this point I've given up on getting this running, I'm not sure where it got broken, but I ended up renaming the root folder (which didn't help), I created a new folder from rclone inside the remote, copied the filename and renamed the folder (it renamed the folder this time, but the contents were showing as empty) so I'm guessing I must have used a different password/salt than the one I had saved in my password manager, that's the only thing I can think off now.

It's not great that I messed it up, but it gave me a chance to review my other encrypted remotes all of which work fine, so I must've made a mistake when I had setup this remote or made a change that I forgot to save. Thank you for the help.

@ncw - it didn't have that line, but even after adding it and adding filename_encryption = standard to see what would happen, nothing changed, so I'm more and more inclined that it's user error, i.e. me.

@asdffdsa - I did that, as mentioned further up, but still couldn't see the contents.

7

if that was the case, i think, that in the logs, you would see Skipping undecryptable file name
but unfortunately, need to use a debug log to see that, at least for now......

8

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