What are Lemmy’s feelings about the best cloud storage options these days, if you really want to break into the 1-2TB range? I’m not there yet, probably not even halfway there, but I like the peace of mind of potentially having the space if I need it. And I think subscribing to something in the Netflix price range is maybe something I’m ready for.
My thoughts so far:
pcloud - Intriguing because you can pay for a “lifetime” plan of 2TB of storage. But it’s $350, which is a lot, and I don’t know that I love the interface or usability, and I don’t know if I trust them.
iDrive - Super affordable. 5tb for “just” $80/year. It might be the best deal, but nothing about their identity suggests to me that they are “good guys.” By which I mean, I’m not sure I trust them to make long-term promises for any specific plan.
Mega - I like its very anti-google, very encrypted attitude. Born from the ashes of megaupload, they built encryption and zero knowledge into it. I LOVE that you can connect to it through the android app Solid Explorer and therefore don’t even need the mega app if you don’t want it. I hear bad things about it though? And it’s pretty expensive at $115 per year for 2TB.
My personal thoughts/reasoning/caveats:
Homebrew stuff: I don’t quite trust myself to use a homebrew setup like Nextcloud or Syncthing correctly. There’s too much in terms of labor, upkeep, catastrophic single points of failure where you could lose everything. I feel like I’m 70% of the way to being smart enough to do this.
Avoiding the Bad Guys and the Free Stuff: I’ve tried the free version of just about everything, from Google to Onedrive to Dropbox to Mediafire to Mega. There’s even an android app that offers 1 free terrabyte?? But I don’t want something from the bad guys where I’m going to be integrated into their closed source death drap: Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and I don’t want a too-good-to-be-true free service where I’m the product.
I also would prefer to avoid something from the upstarts who kinda-sorta imitate the bad guys: Dropbox, Mediafire, Box. Because I’m not sure how much I can trust any specific long term promise from them.
It sounds like you’re saying nothing is good enough! What exactly do you want!? Something from good guys, not bad guys. Something like Standardnotes, but for file storage. They emphasize privacy, good governance principles and longevity of their service. Or Linode, with their independence, sense of mission, love of Linux & free software, all of which tells me they are good guys.
Probably the correct answer is (1) here’s this magical perfect source I never thought of, or (2) I’m thinking this much about it, I should probably do Nextcloud or syncthing given all the constraints that I’m putting out there.
Anyway, that’s my thoughts on cloud storage. What are yours?
I mean, you kind of just ran the gambit on the current state of consumer facing cloud storage. I’m not sure there are any options that aren’t from “bad guys”.
I think I just mentioned the 6-12 most well known, and I bet there are a hundred options if not more. On a community like Lemmy where people talk about Activitypub, Nextcloud, Pinephone, Simple Mobile Tools, Linux distros, etc there’s a chance that people know something I don’t about the far corners of the cloud storage internet.
Among those I mentioned, there are companies like Google who actively scan and even remove some of your own files, and there are others who are completely hands off, doing things like zero knowledge encryption, so I think there’s a wide spectrum in terms of ethical principles of given companies. Just like there’s variation in commitments to privacy in the search space (DDG vs Searx vs Google) there’s variation among cloud storage providers.
Probably group-think. I am a bit shocked, too. Lazy-minded, weak-minded people dislike anything that seems like free-thought or wanting details and explanations (distinctions are so OFFENSIVE, classist, and biased- how DARE you question the status quo?!). I’ve been looking into the same topic as your post and haven’t found the best answers online - after much reading. For now, I have settled with compartmentalization: I use the more public drives such as Ynadex and Google for public things such as photos I find on public sites (decor, fashion, macro photography, etc). I explained the rest above, but left out that I send my passwords & IDs file from Protonmail to tutanota email as an extra step. If I ever manage to get keypass set up (it is hard!), i’ll try to send that file the same way as back up. I put the date in the title and update once a month or more.