Forums Bugs & issues Encountering issues when making changes to encrypted files on file server Reply To: Encountering issues when making changes to encrypted files on file server

#7711 Reply

Svante
Spectator

Hello Bryan,

Simultaneous access of a shared file on a network share is always a little tricky and not something Windows really supports.

With AxCrypt it gets even more so.

When you open an AxCrypt-encrypted file (double-click), what happens is the following:

1) The file is decrypted to a temporary location on your local hard drive.

2) Your local copy of AxCrypt marks the file as “open for editing”, and tries to keep track of when it’s time to re-encrypt it. It lights the red “Broom” (clean up) icon in order to indicate this. AxCrypt cannot successfully keep track of all situations and determine when you’re done with the file, so sometimes you may have to do this manually by clicking the broom icon.

3) AxCrypt launches whatever application Windows thinks is best for the decrypted file (Microsoft Office or Excel in your case).

So, this is the situation when someone starts editing the file, on the mac or the windows server. After making some changes, you click ‘Save’. This saves it to the temporary location on your hard drive. Since you still have Word / Excel open, AxCrypt will typically not re-encrypt the update to the shared encrypted file (this behavior depends on the individual application and the situation at startup, but for Word / Excel this is what happens).

Thus, while you’re happily editing and saving changes, these are only saved to the temporary decrypted copy. Until you fully close Word / Excel, at which point they file will be automatically re-encrypted to the shared location, and changes made visible to others – *if* they open the file after the update.

Note that AxCrypt does not stop more than one person from editing the file at the same time (we’re working on at least blocking more than one person from making updates but we don’t have that just yet).

If the situation arises that several people are editing the same file at the same time, “last one to save and exit wins”.

The part in your description I can’t explain is: “I can see, from both Macs, that the document has been modified“, unless you by this mean that while the same file is open on the Mac, and you look at the share, you see the last modification date has been updated. If the file is not open on the Mac, and has been cleaned (no red broom icon), then if you open the (modified) file, the changes should really be seen on the Mac as well.