Arch Linux

millus

Member

Registered: 2019-07-21

Posts: 244

[SOLVED] encFS doesn't work

I'm trying to follow
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/EncFS
to set up an encrypted 'Documents' folder.
I was worried that something may go wrong, so I made a 'working copy' of my Documents folder to ~/tmp/Documents and try to encrypt that one first, just in case.
My filesystem is ext4.

The problem is that the very first encfs command already fails with "fuse: mountpoint is not empty":

$ encfs /home/millus/tmp/Documents.encfs /home/millus/tmp/Documents
EncFS Password: 
fuse: mountpoint is not empty
fuse: if you are sure this is safe, use the 'nonempty' mount option
fuse failed.  Common problems:
 - fuse kernel module not installed (modprobe fuse)
 - invalid options -- see usage message

To be sure, I did a 'modprobe fuse' which returned silently, didn't change anything.

The folder 'Documents.encfs' did not exist previously, but was created by this encfs call. I had a look what's inside and there was also a file generated from this call: .encfs6.xml.
Other than that one file, the Documents.encfs folder is empty.
I have installed the following fuse packages:

$ pacman -Ss fuse |grep installed
core/fuse2fs 1.47.0-1 [installed]
extra/confuse 3.3-3 [installed]
extra/fuse-common 3.14.1-1 [installed]
extra/fuse-overlayfs 1.12-1 [installed]
extra/fuse-zip 0.7.2-3 [installed]
extra/fuse2 2.9.9-4 [installed]
extra/fuse3 3.14.1-1 [installed]
extra/fuseiso 20070708-8 [installed]
extra/lxcfs 5.0.3-2 [installed]
extra/mtpfs 1.1-4 [installed]
extra/squashfuse 0.1.105-1 [installed]
extra/sshfs 3.7.3-1 [installed]

Last edited by millus (2023-06-22 14:41:59)

stanczew

Member

Registered: 2021-03-02

Posts: 114

Re: [SOLVED] encFS doesn't work

I made a 'working copy' of my Documents folder to ~/tmp/Documents and try to encrypt that one first

That's not how it works. You need to first mount ~/tmp/Documents.encfs into an empty ~/tmp/Documents, and only then copy your files into ~/tmp/Documents.
The encrypted versions of the files will get written into ~/tmp/Documents.encfs, and unencrypted files (in ~/tmp/Documents) will be available only when the filesystem is mounted.

millus

Member

Registered: 2019-07-21

Posts: 244

Re: [SOLVED] encFS doesn't work

Oh wow, the wiki was super misleading there, just one of those "if you already know how it's done then it seems obvious" cases , thank you for clearing that up!