What is the best cloud storage provider right now?
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.
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.
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?
i'm gonna play devils advocate and say you could rent cloud space on say a vps and host your own solution there instead of locally. it'd probably be better if you have the know how to do it properly.
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.
If the client (which encrypts the data in for an E2EE service) is open source and has also been audited by third parties than there's little reason to do so
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.
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.