Ask HN: What encrypted Dropbox alternative do you use? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What encrypted Dropbox alternative do you use?

48 pointsnetworked45 comments

Are you happy with it?

Keybase. It's a pretty great overall service, with its encrypted virtual file system being just one of them.

+1 for Keybase, with chat, git, and public folders, it really is a great service.

Last time I used it the kbfs required an Internet connection, have things changed?

Rclone + its encryption + Google Drive business account is the best option I've seen so far. Unlimited for $10/month since they don't enforce limits on single user accounts yet.

Some alternatives I see here and the reason I don't use them:

SpiderOak: I've written extensively about this [0]. TL;DR: It's slow as hell and they're utterly unmotivated to fix it. It's slow enough that I consider it unusable. Fine for one off documents, nothing else.

Syncthing/Resilio/Nextcloud: I'd have to provide my own storage.

Dropbox/AWS/GCP/Azure/Tarsnap/Rsync.net: Too expensive.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13306353

why would you trust someone else to encrypt your files? I use dropbox and this makefile

  %.enc:%
    openssl aes-256-cbc -a -salt -in $< -out $@

  %:%.enc
    openssl aes-256-cbc -d -a -in $< -out $@

just not in the shared directory :)

What is going on here? I tried storing that in a file "Makefile" and created a file called 'foo', then did:

    $ make foo.enc

The output was:

    make: Circular Makefile.enc <- Makefile dependency dropped.
    make: Circular foo <- foo.enc dependency dropped.
    openssl aes-256-cbc -a -salt -in foo -out foo.enc
    enter aes-256-cbc encryption password:

After putting in a password it did encrypt the file, but there's a lot of noise in my output, so maybe I'm doing it wrong. Any clues?

well, thats because the rules are for both encrypting and decrypting.

  %.enc:%

  %:%.enc

In one file. So enc -> file -> enc. You can split them out, so encrypt in one makefile and decrypt in another.

  make -f Encrypt foo.enc
  make -f Decrypt foo

but thats been bugging me as well, so here is an all in one

  $E:
    openssl aes-256-cbc -a -salt -in $(patsubst %.enc,%,$@) -out $@

  $D:
    openssl aes-256-cbc -d -a -in $@.enc -out $@

  make E=foo.enc
  make D=foo

use make at your own peril :)

Cryptomator.org inside iCloud. I like it because I'm responsible for the password. There is no password reset feature.

Also a +1 for Keybase.

I've used cryptomator in the past but it still feels like it needs a bit more testing and polish before I'd be confident in using it for personal file security.

Boxcryptor has the feel of an incredibly brittle app. I'd hate to be the one who had to maintain that thing.

Tresorit is wonderful if you're rich.

I've settled on pcloud. Adding end to end encryption is an add on service but inexpensive and dependable. They also offer background backups of your social media accounts, downloading and storing all of the photos you've uploaded to fb, Instagram, Google photos, and even doing full Google drive backups.

Resilio sync. It's almost identical to Dropbox except with encryption.

https://www.resilio.com/individuals/

I also use Resilio Sync because it is one of the rare solutions here that provide an iOS client. The app is quite poor compared to the Dropbox app, you can just about use it to open, sync files both ways but that’s it. Also, you cannot share individual files or folders with others.

Dropbox uses encryption.

And also shares your keys with the NSA.

I’ve been using BoxCryptor on top of google drive. The hard decision was deciding whether to use a fringe[1] service with dedicated encryption or one of the big 3 and encrypt locally.

I switched from Dropbox to Google Drive, and store encrypted things with boxcryptor, essentially getting the best of both worlds.

[1] from spider oak to keybase, they are smaller businesses with smaller adoption, and aren’t supported by almost any mobile apps. iOS Files app might make this better.

Cryptomator on top of iCloud and Dropbox. Also Boxcryptor on Dropbox.

A mix of syncthing (for distributed secure storage, opensource, https://syncthing.net/) and mega.nz (with its CLI tools to share files securely, http://mega.nz/).

This is exactly what I do as well.

Spideroak. I've had issues with silently maxing out the storage, leaving me unable to access the account to delete files. Having to resort to the Bash command line isn't too user friendly, but I like the service otherwise. Zero knowledge encryption is an essential feature to hove nowadays.

Bdrive[1] is end to end encrypted and implemented as RAIC of different cloud storage providers. It's currently a B2B only solution provided by the Bundesdruckerei (German federal printing office).

Disclaimer: I work for a software engineering company related to the Bundesdruckerei.

[1] https://www.bundesdruckerei.de/en/About-us/Innovations/BDriv...

Spider Oak

+1 Spider Oak "Hive" for dropbox-like functionality

Same. I'm unhappy with how so slow their web interface is but really you shouldn't be using it.

Tarsnap - https://www.tarsnap.com/ Online backups for the truly paranoid

best part is the deduplication efficiency - https://www.tarsnap.com/deduplication.html

That’s not really a Dropbox alternative as it’s not made for sharing.

Nextcloud, it's great.

Yunohost makes it easy to implement (done in a few clicks). And yunohost has a really nice github clone (Gogs if you haven't heard of it). Yunohost itself is super easy to get working and even has a raspberry pi version. Debian based:)

Dropbox and encfs. There's a Windows client for it too if you need access there (http://www.getsafe.org/).

pCloud, 2TB + encryption for 250$ for a lifetime now at Christmas, hard to beat considering their speeds (200Mbit).

The only caveat is that sending many small files is slower than large (50Mbit).

Least Authority/Tahoe-LAFS

They call it S4, but it's basically a client side encryption front-end for Amazon's S3 for $25/month and unlimited storage.

I use EncFS with gsutil -m sync to backup encrypted data to the cloud

I dont't trust closed source binaries like Dropbox and others.

Google Drive, Tarsnap, SpiderOak

Google Drive has built in encryption? Or are you encrypting before uploading?

rclone supports encrypted Google Drive folders.

Resilio Sync + encfs, works fine on macos and linux, not sure about windows though.

Boxcryptor

borgbackup + rsync.net. I'm very happy.

An encrypted sparsebundle in a Dropbox.

ownCloud and never looked back

tresorit

Mega.co.nz

Dropbox + encfs

why no one talks about veracrypt and TrueCrypt?

Sync.com

Transparent File Cryptography with EasyPG

https://www.masteringemacs.org/article/keeping-secrets-in-em...

Restic to cold Google Cloud Storage, 5€ per Tb.

Google Drive with BitLocker VHDs

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