So I need some kind of cloud storage for work, however I want to move away from Google Drive (obviously). While I started my deGoogling journey by switching to Proton Unlimited, I am now looking to decentralize services from Proton, especially Proton Drive.
I have already tried the “put it on a hard drive and carry it around” route and unfortunately, it is just not working.
So the two Drive alternatives I have found are NextCloud and Filen. I would love to hear people’s opinions on each (good and bad), and I am also open to any other suggestions.
Filen I want to like but they have had questionable encryption methods in the past, and they have not yet been independently audited.
Proton is pretty great. Solid free plan too at 5 GB.
Nextcloud is also great and has a lot of options and integrations with other FOSS software. Self hosted only though of course.
The two I use are Nextcloud and Mega. Nextcloud is my primary location and I have a script that runs daily to replicate the Nextcloud with Mega. I chose Mega because it has end to end encryption and Mega cannot see your data. They also cannot recover your account if you forget your password. They have had issues/controversy in the past but these days they are, in my eyes a solid choice. I also make use of their S3 bucket so that my Proxmox Backup Server can save offsite so technically Nextcloud is included in that as well!
How do you know that mega fulfills its promise?
Since they publish their client-side source code (https://mega.io/developers), anyone can verify that the encryption actually happens locally on your device before a single byte is uploaded.
Unlike Google or Microsoft where you just have to hope they aren’t scanning your files for ads or AI training (which they are!) Mega’s transparency means if there was a backdoor in the client code, the FOSS community would have flagged it years ago, it gives independent researchers a chance to check the behaviour. As an offsite backup is crucial, for me Mega is one of the better providers, not saying they are perfect but good enough for now.
To protect your privacy, always encrypt your sensitive uploads with rclone or something similar. The backend is almost irrelevant then. Still, there are often some unforeseen bugs or artifical limits set by the providers. The only way to find out if a service really works for you is stresstesting it with your workflow. Most services offer a few GB for free to do that. Some examples of what may go wrong: A few years ago I’ve run into some problems with Proton and Zotero and quickly decided against it. My KeePass app stopped syncing with a seadrive server at some point. One nextcloud provider didn’t like my seedvault backups and always dropped them halfway through.
I’ve been mostly using Koofr because it’s european and there is a lifetime 1TB purchase available on stacksocial. Some view lifetime subscriptions as a controversial business model, but I like it better than a monthly subscription. Koofr also encourages rclone usage and I haven’t run into any problems yet, but, as stated above, your mileage may vary.
koofr doesn’t seem to offer lifetime purchases anymore :(
They don’t sell them on their own website anymore. You can buy them only on stacksocial. Site looks a bit shady, but it is actually legit and in partnership with koofr. VAT is excluded from their payment screen, so do take that in mind. Later on you can upgrade your account to 2.5TB for an additional 300€ directly on koofrs website.
That’s quite an attractive price for a lifetime subscription, profitable from 15 months of use on.
I’m using Internxt at the moment, but Koofr seems pretty neat.
I use nextcloud and pay for online storage, not self hosted
I use Android and Linux though and Nextclod is excellent on Linux (LMDE) on the desktop and laptop. I plan on going to Graphene on Motorola eventually as well and assume Nextcloid works well there ?
Did the same thing. Degoogled to Proton, felt like they don’t put effort into their Linux versions. No drive still. And started giving me bad vibes over the past few years.
Moved to mailbox.org, back to bitwarden etc.
The cloud storage has been my biggest hurdle. Filen seems decent.
Cryptomator + KDrive has been on my mind due to such a low price and it has WebDAV allegedly
I use KDrive with webdav and a Linux client. It works great, no problems at all. The speed is noticeably better than Google Drive ever was.
Thanks, I might give them a serious try. For the price I can’t find anything cheaper than $5 for 3T a month.
Do you use any encryption?
There is no encryption (as in the case of Proton, for example), but Swiss law is a sufficient guarantee for me.
I have Nextcloud, and it was running as a snap in a laptop, then a desktop, then a VM. It’s 12 years old now, no loss of files, about 2 TB stored.
Moving it from a snap to an AiO install is always, like, the fourth thing on my to-do list. The snap always decides to update at the least convenient times and takes hours!
Still, 12 years… Says something.
I moved from GDrive to a hosted Nextcloud solution. It works fine for everything but video files for me. I don’t know if it’s a bug from my host (disroot dot org) and if this ran better were I to host my own server. I could find references to a bug but no solution last year and just stopped using it to move videos around. They would download but be unplayable.
For me, Nextcloud is good for notes, calendars, and contacts as well. Syncs well everywhere. Less good if you’re into to-do’s.
Proton, the company, is just a slightly less evil and smaller Google in a Swiss trenchcoat if you ask me.
Yeah, that’s the vibe I’ve been getting from Proton lately too. Again, worked great as a springboard for me, but now I’m ready to look at longer-term solutions
Tuta is getting close to releasing their own cloud drive feature for file storage, if you can wait a while and already use Tuta for email.
Self host at this point. The cloud, whether it’s hosted by Google or Proton, is always someone else’s computer.
Sometimes that’s the point.
Depending on your need, you could also make do with Syncthing and multiple devices. It’s mostly set up and forget. But that’s if only having multiple copies is the point. If you have two way sync setup, it will of course delete if you delete in either place. If you don’t want that to happen, you can just do one way sync. It offers quite a bit of control in what happens.
If you can host, nextcloud for sure. Comes with so many other things that it becomes a pretty cool thing. Don’t have to pay more and more to get “features”. Nextcloud has way more features than any one person will ever need.
