Newbie confused by the Encryption Options

I want to use Devonthink 3 to manage my documents across personal Mac devices. The most economical option for me is to use the iCloud service.

And I have trouble understanding the encryption options provided by Devonthink 3. I’d much appreciate some clarification.

In my understanding,

  1. With Encrypted Database, the data gets stored as an encrypted image at the local disk.

  2. For iCloud Sync with Encryption, the data which gets uploaded to, stored at and downloaded from the cloud is encrypted.

  3. Each time you open and then work on an Encrypted Database, the data is decrypted for use.

  4. When you synchronize a database, it is the decrypted data that gets synchronized. So, syncing without encryption will expose the decrypted data from an Encrypted Database.

My questions:

  1. What is the User & Password option in the Database Properties for? It reads “only protects databases before importing them from sync locations”. But what’s its difference from Sync with Encryption? Dose the option perform some form of encryption on the database itself?

  2. How do I achieve the workflow: the data is decrypted only when I am currently working on it, while it’s encrypted at local disk and at the cloud.

Many thanks in advance!

Why not bonjour? That would alleviate a lot of your concerns because the data never leaves your network. Also: encrypted databases are sparse images that requires you to define a size when you create them. When that size is reached, you have to do something – as opposed to a non encrypted database that simply grows.

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