Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/07/11/ditch-icloud-and-dropbox-with.html
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Can it so?
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Lifetime
Whose?
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If it’s anything like those “lifetime” vpn packages, it’s like, 8 months.
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Oh, please, not again. “Lifetime” subscriptions to cloud storage for " $99.99 $3,600.00 97% off" is not a sustainable business model. Instead it’s essentially a pyramid scheme where they have to keep getting new subscribers to pay for the old since $99 is not enough to pay for their costs for a subscriber’s lifetime, especially after the substantial cut they give to StackSocial (I’m guessing 30% to 50%) which has to give a cut to BoingBoing.
Companies like Degoo typically are buying their cloud storage from other vendors, such as Amazon. So they don’t have some sort of magic that lets them store your data for free. (Edit: Turns out they did have such a technology, P2P storage, where they used your computer to back up other people’s data. But that practice was discontinued a few years ago…sounds like it was a terrible idea.)
Sometimes these “lifetime” cloud backup deals are offered by shady resellers through affiliate programs that don’t actually support “lifetime” subscriptions, such as when BoingBoing store offered a $49 lifetime subscription to SkyHub Cloud. Then, when the reseller stops paying the backup company, the customer’s accounts are deleted, along with the back up data. Not saying that’s the case in this instance, but people to need to make sure they are buying direct to increase the odds of their “lifetime” subscription lasting more than a few months.
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For years we used Sync. It was working well, and cost $50 a year at the time we signed up. Now I see the price has gone up.
Recently we found out about Syncthing. It’s free, secure, open source, and the files are stored directly on the linked computers.
Syncthing replaces proprietary sync and cloud services with something open, trustworthy and decentralized. Your data is your data alone and you deserve to choose where it is stored, if it is shared with some third party and how it’s transmitted over the Internet.
After getting everything switched over, it has been working perfectly. The only downside is there isn’t – and it sounds like there never will be – an iOS version. But in our case, we don’t need to access our files on our iPhones so it’s okay. And if you have an Android phone, you’re good.
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The problem with backup systems is that most people never test restoration very much, especially not a full restore. You don’t really know that you are going to be able to reliably do that in a tolerable time frame. I have seen reviews of some services that were pretty awful when they did test it.
Personally I am using S3 for backup via a Windows client (SyncBack Pro) and that seems pretty good. I have gotten things restored from it. Some S3 clients are not multithreaded and are slow but not this one. This client does not support Mac though.
I’ve tried a ton of cloud services and pCloud is the best I’ve tried.I have a 2 tera account for about $5/month…I’m a big time music geek & love that pCloud has a great built in music player.
I purchased a lifetime 2TB cloud plan via this store a couple of years ago, only the product was called SkyHub. After 2 months I received an email that the company was shuttering its doors, and the service was being terminated. Can anyone confirm that SkyHub has now reopened its doors as Degoo?
Regardless, the fact that BoingBoing keeps supporting this kind of fraudulent practice is shameful. (I contacted them at the time to complain that they had helped market an obvious scam and never even received a reply!) [original post edited to correct inaccuracies]
I don’t think Degoo is iDrive based on the feature sets and the TOS. The legal venue for iDrive’s TOS is Los Angeles and Degoo’s are based in Sweden.
iDrive seems to still be in business. Do you have a link to the BBStore offering for the storage you bought? I did a google search for:
“idrive site:boingboing.net”
“idrive site:store.boingboing.net”
“idrive site:bbs.boingboing.net”
The searches didn’t find any cloud iDrive cloud backup offerings, though there is an idrive remote PC post.
Regardless, the StackSocial/BoingBoing Store has had issues with sketchy “lifetime” subscriptions in the past, such as the “lifetime” subscription to SkyHub Cloud, which was just a sketchy reseller selling re-branded Zoolz .
Why can’t I simply rent drive space on a NSA-run bit barn and be done with it?
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Backing up to the NSA is no problem - they probably already have your files. It’s getting them back that’s the problem 
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That’s what I’m getting at.
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Thanks for pointing that out, Skeptic. I did a search after arriving home from work, and you’re absolutely right, it was SkyHub, not iDrive (sorry, guys and gals; changing original post to fix errors).
Point remains, however, that BoingBoing helped them sell a lifetime product that wasn’t even available 2 months.
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I was just wondering about this. Isn’t it getting cheaper to just buy some storage space (in S3, Azure etc.) and, if nothing else, just manually move whatever files back and forth? Presumably someone smarter than me could write a Powershell script (or whatever) to copy everything in “Users” (for example) every so often.
S3 is not exposed by Amazon directly as a filesystem - it is only accessible through a set of Amazon APIs. You can get 3rd-party software that will make it look like a filesystem. The best performance though is through a client that is smart enough to make use of multithreaded I/O via the Amazon APIs.
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What is the most transparent cloud freeware that easily syncs between Win7 and Win10 laptops and Android devices? Huge capacity is not needed. Censorship and DRM are not wanted.
The cloud is evil, ya’ll.
