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.
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.
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.
I like Backblaze mostly for their business practices. The Backblaze devs answer questions on forums sometimes (Reddit link btw). The costs are pretty good, but there are cheaper options. $6/TB plus some API transactions. I paid almost a dollar last month for a couple hundred GB of data and transactions.
The troposphere?
Take a lap
This is worth mentioning :
BitWarden provides some encrypted storage on their paid tiers. I think it’s very small, like 1GB, but it’s E2E.
Apple iCloud storage is actually E2E too if you turn on Advanced Data Protection. (Note that not all iCloud features are E2E, like email, for example.) And the price is pretty comparable too. Naturally this works a lot better if you’re on a Mac, but just FYI.
The cheapest one + rclone crypt and or cryptomator / veracrypt
I’m using BorgBase with Vorta (desktop client for Borg Backup) and I’m pretty happy with it.
I started with this setup and added borgmatic to my home server. Borg and borgbase are awesome.
I think storj is worth mentioning. You could also look at the list of supported providers for rclone.
Filen.io is really good, but lacking features in their apps. But they’re about to release a new desktop client with webdav and rclone support.
I’ve enjoyed Proton for several years, except there ia no Linux desktop client. I intend to test installing the client in a virtual machine running windows, and then use shared folders.
Self-host
Unless you’re hosting that off site, it’s not really fulfilling the same complete purpose of cloud storage.
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You can self host and make it accessible only to you from anywhere in the world.
You might be thinking about it not fulfilling the 3-2-1 backup strategy, but as long as you have a remote copy of the data through some means then you have the remote copy fulfilled.
I’m aware.
I do.
All data is replicated 3x locally, with one cloud. backup.
Having all data in one physical location makes for a single failure point.





