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Messages - zsolt

#31
Hello, indeed, there is no built in way to do this, I suppose we did not think of that possibility.

Please do the following:
Quit Espionage
go to the following folder
/Users/[your username]/Library/Application Support/com.taoeffect.Espionage3

Note that your home Library folder is hidden since Lion, to enter into it from Finder, switch to Finder, click onto "Go" menu, hold down the option key and select Library from the menu list.
You will see the license file there, just move it into the trash
Launch espionage it should say that it is unlicensed
Now apply the new license file

Thanks for your purchase and in case of any further questions, please let me know,

Till then

Zsolt
#32
Espionage 3 / Re: okTurtles e-mail
March 13, 2017, 12:42:44 PM
Thanks for your purchase, in case of any further problems or questions, feel free to let me know,

Till then

Zsolt
#33
Espionage 3 / Re: okTurtles e-mail
March 09, 2017, 12:16:21 PM
Hello, yes it does, lifetime is indeed lifetime, all future versions. Your job is only to live as long as you can, or wish :-)

Enjoy it

Zsolt
#34
Espionage 3 / Re: Internal workings
February 24, 2017, 12:57:02 AM
Helo Mark
During initial Espionage setup, the wizard will generate a random number of dummy sparse bundles, you will be asked how many and which size or it will do it random for you. This breaks the one to one relation between of total number of protected folders and number of support bundles.

Let me know if you have any further questions,

Rgds
Zsolt
#35
And you made one support tech happy too :-)

In case of any further questions or troubles,

Let me know
Zsolt
#36
Hello Philip,

Yes, this folder sharing on Mac is in general a bit clumsy and this is why I do not want to rely on it.
The thing is that if you login as user which is present on that mac, then you have access to all folders which that user can see locally no matter they are shared or not. And considering this is not a server-client setup but instead just a regular user machine, just two of them, then it is normal that you will have the credentials to log on as an existing user, and then yes, you will see the Library folder too.

But there is nothing to duplicate, you directly import the disk image from the MacBook into Espionage, so Espionage will be reading the remote disk image.

To import it, do the following:

on the macbook unlock Espionage
click onto small "i" near the folder name you want to import
using the disk image drop down menu, note the name of the disk image
click copy password button
save this password into some text file you will be able to access from iMac
go to iMac,
create one empty folder you will use to read the content of the protected folder form MacBook, any name will be ok, it can be in any path, but I suggest to place it inside user folder.
unlock espionage
open the MacBook's ...taoeffect..../Data folder
drag the correct disk image onto espionage window (on iMac)
Espionage will ask you for a password
paste the one you saved in the text file
now it will ask you for a mountpoint folder
point it to the folder you created in previous step
now you should be able to unlock the folder locally on the iMac

MAKE SURE you lock the folder, before you break the network connection between the iMac and MacBook
if the network connection is not up, if you try to unlock the folder it will simply report that the disk image is missing, no harm done

let me know how it went

Zsolt
#37
Hello, the instructions you found helped many users, so I guess they are written in an form which is relatively easy to understand.
The next level of support would be assistance through are remote session but this is reserved to Espionage 3 license owners only.

If you want to continue to protect your files with Espionage 3, then this will be no problem at all, if you are a registered user of Espionage 3, please let me know and we will arrange for a remote session.

If you are not, then give me a few more details which part of the instructions is not clear to you and I will try to write you a few more words of clarifications.

Rgds
Zsolt
#38
Hello Philip,

I could not make it work reliably.
As you might know already, Espionage works by storing the data into encrypted disk images.
After you added the folder to Espionage we move the data from the folder into encypted disk image and leave the original folder empty.
When you unlock the folder, we "mount" or attach, the content of the disk image to the folder you protected, and to you it looks as if the folder contains data, but it does not, you are just looking at the content of the disk image "through" the (empty) folder.
So this mount, or attach is happening locally on your mac.

Now, when you connect to a shared folder from another mac, this mount happens too, in this case you are "mounting" the remote mac folder onto your local mac to see the content.

Now, if you would like to look at the content of an unlocked folder on a remote mac, this means you are expecting to see the content of a disk image mounted on a remote mac, through a folder which is mounted on your local mac....does not look very reliable and promising.

So let's try to do something else.

Let's connect to the folder on the remote mac which contains the espionage disk images, and then you can import them to your local Espionage installation.

####
All disk images of Espionage are by default located in the following folder

yourhomefolder/Library/Application Support/com.taoeffect.Espionage3/Data

to reach that folder, hold down the option key and select Library from the Finder's Go menu.
Once inside Library, you can navigate the other folder normally.
Make  the folder com.taoeffect.Espionage3 on your MacBook shared
Now you should be able to connect to that folder from your iMac.
If it worked so far, let me know and I will tell you how to import the disk image from the MacBook into Espionage installation on the iMac.
Then, whenever you need to sync the folders, you simply unlock the Photography folder and your Archive folder, both on your iMac and copy the content between them.

Let me know your comments,

Zsolt
#39
3. I'm reffering to "Undercover says they won't work with FV on, and recommend Espionage. But the documentation for Espionage makes it seem very complicated, including the warning about 'knowing what you are doing.'" is this Undercover documentation or Espionage documentation? Share with me the section which is unclear.

4. With Espionage you cannot protect Files, just folders, so yes, all you want to protect has to be in a folder. However, I do not recommend to protect the "Main" folder, i.e. Documents, Pictures, Music, Movies etc....the folders which are directly under your home folder, as they have special permissions and the encryption might fail, I recommend protecting one or more subfolders of those folders.

5. Yes, you have to unlock the folder before launching mail, because we cannot intercept the application launch like we could in earlier versions of OS X, you can setup a folder action though, where unlocking the folder will launch Mail, it is a bit opposite approach, but it works well. But I'm not sure if you understood what I said before. Do you know which folders do you have to protect to protect Mail?

Remote session would definitely be better then this, as we will be writing for a long time, and at one point you will get frustrated as we will not make progress :-)

I'm usually available in afternoon/evening hours of GMT+1 time zone, mail me directly at taoeffect@macmesupport.com

Cheers
Zsolt
#40
1. yes, filevault or Espionage, same thing, if something goes wrong, you loose, although, if you use Espionage you can do backups, the files will be protected on the backup disk too, so you can restore. Filevault is either all or nothing and to the best of my knowledge, the backup is unencrypted

2. protecting an application is protecting application's data. With Espionage 2 we were picking the right data for you, with Espionage 3 this is not possible any more so you have to pick it on your own. Which folders do you need to encrypt and how will that affect the application is all on you. I can give you some hints regarding Mail but again, this was not verified with every update of Mail or OS X. I will write a few more words at the end of this post

3. Can you share with me this documentation which seems to be very complicated?

4. If you want to protect your entire user folder then Espionage cannot do this, in Espionage you have to protect each folder separately, and these must be subfolders of default user folders (like Documents, Pictures, Movies etc.)

5. Regarding mail: as I said in my previous post, encrypting application data means that when you launch the application and the folder is locked, each application will handle this differently, trying to recover from this situation. If you launch Mail with folder locked, it will see that the mails are missing and will try to download them new from the defined internet accounts. The trouble is that it will succeed, because the internet account info is not stored within Mail, but within system preferences and those you cannot lock because OS X would not be able to function.
The Mail, however, has the option to move the mails locally, basically you remove them from the IMAP server and store them only locally. In this case, Mail cannot download them new, because they are not on the server any more, and locally they would be encrypted. So you can create a Mail rule, or do this by hand periodically, and move all confidential mails into local folder.

If you have further questions, I suggest that we make a remote session and I can explain you all in details.
#41
 Which folder is shared in that structure?  How do you connect,  as registered user or as guest
#42
The information put into the cloud is just an encrypted disk image, the data cannot be read in any way on the cloud server.

Give me the exact versions of the OS X on the two clients you use, and some folder structure example, so that I can try to reproduce it as you see it.

Rgds
Zsolt
#43
Hello, I just tested it and I do not even see the protected/mountpoint folder itself.
Did you upgrade one of the Macs to Sierra recently? Considering Sierra has problems with protected folders on external disk I would not be surprised that the same applies to the network shares.

I remember that we were testing a while ago Espionage handling protected folders on remote network shares and that it worked to some extent but not reliably.

By "decrypting" folders on both Mac, I suppose you mean "unlocking" the protected folder, correct?

If you have dropbox, or if you use iCloud drive (although I prefer the dropbox) you could synchronise automatically, would you be interested in that as a solution?

Rgds
Zsolt
#44
Hello, it is tough, I know...but all your questions are valid, so let me try to clarify to you...

File Vault (2) will encrypt your entire disk, including the user folder, so if all your files are already encrypted then it does not make much sense to encrypt some folder once again.

Whereas File Vault seems to be working fine and Apple continues to use it in OS X, there is always this "what if something goes wrong" and due to some bug in File Vault or error on disk, you loose it all? If the drive is encrypted then no recovery software can help you, it is either all or nothing.

The alternative is to protect only some folders and leave the rest unencrypted, yet, this assumes that you will protect your most valuable data which brings the very same question up again, "what if....", yes, you would not loose the entire disk, just your most valuable data :-)

So I guess the choice is yours, all I can say is that in several years since I support this product, there was no report on data corruption unless it was a corruption of the disk itself. If you add to it the possibility (and recommendation) to backup those disk images, then the whole thing is quite safe, in worst case we could restore an older copy of the disk image containing the data.

The data on the backup disk is saved in the encrypted form, so it is protected in the same way as on your startup disk, no worries here.

Now to the application protection, Espionage 2 offered an "no brainer" application protection, you would pick the app you want to protect and we would to it all automatically for you.
Due to tightened security in OS X, we had to change the way Espionage works, and this does not allow us to intercept application launch any more, so we had to give up on application protection all together. However, the application protection is nothing else then protection of specific folders where application stores it's data, so "if you know what you are doing" you can still do it, but in our tests with Apple's Mail, whereas it works and does what is expected, due to the way IMAP and Apple Mail work, if you lock the folders, Mail will simply download the messages from the server again, we cannot prevent this, as we cannot prevent it from accessing your mail account info. What would be protected are the local folders: if you move some mails from server into a local folder, then the local copy is the only one, and this could not be fetched again, and this would not show up if the Mail folders are locked.
So if you have a specific Mail workflow, then it is worth the trouble.

I hope I made it clear(er) to you, if you have any further questions, let me know

Zsolt
#45
Espionage 3 / Re: Critical Error - Failed to Unlock!
February 05, 2017, 12:50:39 PM
With espionage we rely on apple's disk utility mechanism, which you can access through Disk utility application but also through the command line using the diskutil command.

If you try to mount a disk image with a specified mountpoint folder (so that it does not mount in the default /Volumes folder), and you specify a mountpoint folder which is not on the internal disk, then the mount fails.

This worked before, and it is clearly a bug because all the options are still there, it is just that they do not work properly.

So this is what we are waiting to be fixed.

If you have any further questions, just let me know,

Rgds
Zsolt