What is the best cloud storage that gives a nice balance between features and privacy? I know you can manually encrypt files to use any provider, but I would prefer an open source E2EE for the sake of convenience.
Currently I have heard about the following:
- proton
- filen
- sync
- icedrive
- pcloud
(Not including GDrive, Onedrive etc…)
When it comes to privacy and security, I think you should treat all cloud providers equally. Use a client with client-side encryption so that the only thing that touches the provider is encrypted data.
Rclone is an example of a good client that can do this, and can even mount your cloud storage as a filesystem with its encryption layer in between.
yep. I use backblaze B2 with rclone, and just don’t worry since it’s encrypted (including the file names) before it leaves my server.
Yeah that’s what I do. I use filen because it’s nice and easy to use and I got in early and got a good deal on a lifetime plan (actually two because you could stack them at the time, I dunno if you still can), but yeah I encrypt everything locally first before I upload it so it doesn’t really matter if it gets stolen or whatever.
If you do that then I don’t think it really matters especially where you put it.
You also shouldn’t use them as a safe way to store things. They routinely delete shit or bake your data and point to their EULA like sorry buddy, no guarantees. Your stuff is not safe there at all.
Far better to store locally and just create a way to share it or access it from your home network.
I’ve been thinking about a ‘RAID5’ of free storage providers as a way to overcome this, shouldn’t be too hard to implement, but I’m busy atm. I wonder if their TOS are already onto this, but conversely, how could they tell?
Building a NAS in this day and age is trivial. Hard drive space is cheaper and far more economical than paying $20 a month for a service. The way prices are going it’s going to soon hit parity with car payments.
I had an old PC from 2012 with an i3 dual core in it. Ran a headless Linux server. Raided the 2 3TB drives. Done. It was replaced by a 4 TB SSD and since those have nowhere near the failure rates of HDDs, one and one. It servers files off my main computer which is a beefy Mac.
Enabled file sharing. Opened the port on my firewall. Done. It’s one of the easiest services to offload to a homebuilt rig.
Quite true, as I do myself, but “RAID is not a backup”. Use case here would be for offsite backup of encrypted, critical, low size documents (think docs, scans of important documents, source code, personal art) by aggregating e.g. 10Gb free accounts in such a way that if a provider goes tits up, or locks you out, you replace them as you would a dead drive in a RAID array. It’s mission critical secure backup for the poors…