Save big on these cloud storage alternatives to Dropbox and iCloud

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/08/07/save-big-on-these-cloud-storag.html

Can anyone speak to how good/secure these services are?

I can say that if you and some friends bung in a few bucks each and get one of your computer-savvy friends to manage it (and really, once it’s set up you just run the automated updater), then you can set up Nextcloud and have however much for only the cost of hosting.

I have symmetric gigabit at home and run on an already existing server that mostly sat idle anyway. I use a certificate from Let’s Encrypt. Works great, available everywhere, costs me nothing extra.

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I just wanted to comment on that model who has obviously never worn that hipster hat or nerdy glasses in her life.
Carry on.

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It would be nice to note that some of these do not allow you to copy in a Tree structure. It converts everything to a flat structure. So in my case, each level of the tree has Folder.jpg in it, and on the server, I now have many different Folder.jpg files with no relationship back to the folder they came from. This makes it rather useless to use the service.

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If you’re just going to be using it to sync files, then I’d recommend Seafile instead. It’s far more reliable than Nextcloud, and significantly faster to sync. It’s also smarter about just syncing the changes in files, rather than resyncing the entire file if any changes are made.

I could see Seafile being an option. I don’t recall why I discounted it before apart from server load doing the delta calculations (I was/am running it on an anemic little HP Microserver currently), but I am quite happy with NextCloud apart from missing LAN sync (which I understand Seafile supports). I got used to LAN sync with Dropbox, but when I booted Dropbox… well, let’s just say if I am setting up a new box I want to sync, I prep the location a little sooner.

For what it’s worth, I haven’t had any issues with server load from Seafile. I’ve got around 50 GB of data in mine. I’m running it on a $15/month VPS from BuyVM - I already had the VPS for hosting a bunch of my sites.

You forgot / failed to mentoon www.livedrive.com. most Services give you unlimited or nearly unlimited space but charge you for metered upload and download. Live Drive gives you unmetered upload and download and charges you buy the terabyte of storage. This means if any of your content shared from your cloud storage goes viral it does not bankrupt you.

Surprised no mention of MEGA (https://mega.nz) who provide End-to-end User-Controlled Encryption and various user account options, plus a Business Account. Again, you hold the encryption keys and no one at Mega can view your files, doesn’t get more secure than that.

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