Amazon Cloud Drive - EncFS and acd_cli
Dec 1, 2015

Amazon now offers “unlimited” storage for $60 a year. This is a really good deal since most backup providers cost at least this much and you usually end up with less control over your data. Even if it’s not for backups and just storing data it’s still a good deal.

Naturally, I wanted to be able to backup terabytes of data to it but it had to be all encrypted. acd_cli combined with EncFS isn’t the greatest solution but it is the simplest to get running. Initially I had extremely poor upload performance with EncFS combined with acd_cli. Literally less than 800 KB/s upload - at a maximum. This is due to, I believe, the way EncFS works under the hood.

Instead of creating an EncFS volume inside of your ACD (Amazon Cloud Drive) mounted folder, you mount it locally using the --reverse option. This allows you to copy the files from EncFS into ACD. You can also upload directly to the web interface (limited to < 2GB files).

  1. First you need to setup EncFS. It’s as simple as adding the --reverse option. encfs --reverse /path/to/UNencrypted/data /path/to/mount/encfs Follow the EncFS configuration steps.

  2. Now if you ls the /path/to/mount/encfs folder, you should see a bunch of encrypted files. They are not currently encrypted but they will be once you read them.

  3. Copy them from /path/to/mount/encfs to your ACD mounted folder.

You may need to use “null” as the filename encoding algorithm. Otherwise the filenames will have dashes in them and because of this I was not able to copy them over using rsync or cp.

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