I mean, not a great source… That’s just a link to a forum post and the only thing they reference for it “not being secure” was a github PR from 2021… Not saying its great they had teething issues, but that’s literally a year within starting up and they fixed all those issues right away, and had an independent audit done. So I kinda feel like using it to say they’re not secure now isn’t very useful. But if you have something showing their current deployment is insecure please share.
They did a complete infrastructure overhaul at the start of 2023 too moving to their own hardware and such so I imagine more might have changed since 2021 than just those issues.
Do not trust it to be lifetime and do not trust it to be e2e.
Always use your own OSS encryption on top of it and never trust it to be lifetime. They can not promise you to be lifetime since they can not promise they are still in business in 5 years.
This is literally client-side encryption using fully open source programs… If you “do not trust it to be e2e”, verify the code yourself. Doing your own encryption on top would be redundant.
Lifetime is implied to be the lifetime of the company as is the case with LITERALLY EVERYTHING.
From an economic view: In this case as soon as you hit 13 months without filen going bankrupt you are literally free compared to the 200GB plan with Google Drive which you would still be stuck paying $4 CAD/month for 200GB long after the lifetime plan has paid for itself (assuming they don’t increase monthly rates as time goes on, which they always do).
Go ahead and pay monthly if you want but you’ll be in exactly the same position if a company goes under, except you would have paid a hell of a lot more than 35 Euro by that point.
You can’t read can you? I literally explained my reasoning for posting it as it ties into a previous discussion I saw here. You are welcome to check my posting history if you want to see I’m just a regular dude interested in tech and privacy.
the pricing makes perfect sense when you stop defending companies massively overcharging for cloud storage given physical storage costs. Keep in mind it will likely increase since generally companies increase pricing as they age/eliminate the lifetime option once the user base has grown enough.
so pcloud shouldn’t be taken seriously? Not sure why you are simping for subscriptions so bad; they are a bane on modern society. Subscription-model is not the only viable business model (companies including online ones were profitable for decades before it became commonplace) and I would argue it is worse for the user in almost every circumstance.
We should be supporting businesses that reject the subscription-model, not avoiding them.
Ya the “lifetime of the service” is always mentioned (you’re still SOL if a service ends and you’ve been paying monthly, you just would have massively overpaid in the meantime); and I agree when its a large premium for a “lifetime”. But in this case considering it would only need to stay viable for 13 months in order to get your ROI on 35 euro invested compared to a monthly subscription (GDrive is $4 CAD/month for 200GB) that is also known for randomly deleting your data/accounts without warning (GDrive), I think its worth the risk. If in 5 years they go under you can always migrate to another service and you saved 5 years - 13 months of monthly payments. And ofc basic data storage practices still should be followed. Min 3 copies, one offsite.
Interesting about the SAF functionality and worth noting for anyone wanting it for that use; I wonder if its on their roadmap at all. As I said, I’m using this as an offsite backup so should work fine for that.
As an aside do you have a recommendation for solid SAF functionality with Keepass (esp on linux)? I currently use gdrive linked through gnome accounts in order to sync my keepass file across all my devices since I haven’t found a better option but KeepassXC constantly overwrites the file with temp files (randomly generated string file names) which causes errors when I try to open it on KeepassDX on my phone since the database file is no longer there but replaced with a temp file. Not sure if its due to Gdrive constantly revoking file manager permissions or what.
Hmm that’s disappointing for pcloud. Ya I agree with not really trusting MEGA as your only cloud backup due to the previous wipe of free accounts. I have a free account that I use here and there but you never know when they could get wiped again. With a paid plan I’d be less worried about that but still.
Well, I just migrated my kdbx from gdrive to filen and it seems to be syncing properly to the local folder on pop_OS22.04 linux appimage. Not SAF or Rclone but atleast all their apps are opensource. It won’t be usable for kdbx on android until the next android app update which they stated in their blog will add local files integration (I believe this means you will be able to pick files from filen in keepassDX like you can with GDrive) and background uploads. I guess time will tell if there’s the same issues with overwriting files with temp ones I had on GDrive since I’m not 100% sure if that’s an issue with file permissions being pulled by drive or if its an issue with KeepassXC.
Bitwarden is a great option; I keep putting off migrating to it cause I keep having to relocate around the country and have my homelab offline for extended periods. Figured I should wait to host that one till its reliably accessible.
While I don’t have much to add to the discussion of cloud storage, I was curious if either of you have tried out Syncthing to maintain your KeePass database across devices. Been doing so for years and have never had a single issue. Every modification/update is propagated to all linked machines (mobile/desktop/laptop). Has version history if that is a concern as well. Just a handy little FOSS P2P sync tool. Might be a valid way to avoid having to switch from KeePassXC to Bitwarden. I personally find it more reliable than most cloud solutions. But that last bit is 100% my opinion. Best of luck! 🍻
Been using it for half a year I really like it because they haven’t had any big controversy, they have all the features that I need and their business is located pretty close to where I live.
Been using it for over 6 months and I’ve found it’s everything I personally needed. I’ll be buying the lifetime plan next.
If you’re asking about the encryption, they publish a whitepaper on their website with the details. I can’t really comment on that since I’m no expert. But I did a quick online search back then and found good comments so decided to trust them.
Been using it for a couple of years now I think. Haven’t seen a reason not to like it.
There’s a thread in GitHub where the privacyguides.org guys discussed some flaws in the encryption but that was at the very beginning, I remember reading those have been solved apparently.
Pricing, well, it seems cheap but honestly I think it’s just because we are used to seeing outrageous prices for ridiculously small amounts of storage. Thinking about it, 30 eur for 100gb is not cheap at all, like some other comment says when compared to physical drive prices. Plus, offering lifetime is a common marketing technique to attract customers used by small or starting businesses. I don’t know if that is the case here but it certainly isn’t an automatic red flag for me. I don’t know if they are gonna be around next year or 5 years from now, but I’m willing to take the risk. They claim to have lots of users and be cash flow sustainable, plus they keep developing and are getting into business features to attract that kind of customers, certainly doesn’t look like a business on life support to me.
App and code-wise, they are much better than they were a year ago. Android app is still a bit janky sometimes but I don’t use it a lot so I got not much to say, other than I can see my files and upload something small once in a while just fine. The desktop client is amazing, the best functioning client for Linux that I have used from any service, or from the few services that have a Linux client at least. The clients are open source and since the service is e2ee you don’t really need to see the server code if the client encryption is done correctly, which apparently there is no sign that it isn’t, as mentioned before.
Overall I would say you can use it, but keep a backup somewhere else just in case, which is just the thing that anyone should be doing anyways.
At e.g. Hetzner you can get 10TB for 25 EUR so no, that is not cheap at all, even if it might include some additional services compared to the Hetzner offering (which is not end to end encrypted but for costs of disk space that should not matter).
You are the one who introduced that detail about Hetzner. Nobody discussed using their hosting service. People were discussing cloud storage options and prices.
at €300 per 2tb? that's like 10x the current cost of storage. sounds like a reasonable price to provide what is really just a modest quota, indefinitely, so long as there isn't a wave of 'fires' across southeast asia that puts every hdd and most nand facilities out of commission and storage costs skyrocket to prices never before seen.
Unlimited anything (time or space) tends to be much more common among unprofessional companies who don’t last that long or add limits after the fact anyway.
It’s fairly common to give a (sense of) a good deal to new people while raising a bit more money roght now than you would with a traditional subscription.
Then later when you start getting more users quicker you cancel that offer and nee users have to use a subscription (which will make you more money over time).
Protonmail did something similar originally, giving out Visionary for life for a (large) one-time fee. It’s a decent strategy to raise money from people who believe in your product.
there's nothing stopping the company from discontinuing the sale of new 'lifetime' plans should there ever be a concern about the 'costs' to serve those who already have it. as it is now, they have a fairly high price on a very modest amount of space, and it appears to me that they're covering their ass here wrt future servicing costs.
I’ve been using the free version for a couple years now. If the app wasn’t so janky I would have upgraded but now. Camera sync sort of works, but only if I manually open the app. It doesn’t function in the background like FolderSync or most cloud storage apps, even when I disable battery optimization. I also can’t manually upload large files easily; usually it fails halfway through.
This is on Android and has been fairly consistent since Android 11.
I’m still on the hunt for encrypted cloud storage that can sync arbitrary folders, like my camera and Signal backup folder.
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