Filen or Mega or Proton Drive

Privacy Questions
1

Hi,

I’m planning on getting the 100GB plan with ente (€49.99) for my photos/videos backup. That leaves room for another 300-400GB of cloud storage that i need to get for other files.

The annual plans for all the services below seem to be decent options:

Filen (500GB) - €39.99
Mega (400GB) - €49.99
Proton Drive (500GB) - €119.88

Now, I’d have gone ahead with Mega, seeing as they’re fairly old, and are quite full-featured. But their past security concerns are pushing me to consider alternatives.

Filen are fairly cheap but also fairly new, and have also had e2ee implementation issues.
Proton are relatively quite expensive, and not so full-featured yet with their backups and sync, but somehow seem more trustworthy w.r.t their e2ee implementation.

I use pwd managers with long, high-entropy passowrds. And, i’m looking for cloud solutions without Cryptomator/Veracrypt/self-hosting.

It’d be great to hear from some folks who have some up-to-date technical insight w.r.t these services and their e2ee implementation, since a lot of concerns/discussions online seem to be a year or two old, if not more. Much gratitude.

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Personally I use the combo of ente and proton drive. This works well for me as photos is what I need to share the most. I still hope proton drive will allow to share documents with other users but for me that’s not blocking right now.

The sync of proton drive on macOS is still slow but is getting better.

I guess the nest deal is when you use the entire proton suite so also mail, vpn, (and pass). The last one I do not as of yet, until it launches passkey support.

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Personally I was also using ente + Proton Drive. Now that the Android app of Proton Drive can backup my photos, I will probably stop using ente soon (even though they’re very good!).

As for saving some money by going with Filen or Mega, you can do so if you do not use any other Proton services or don’t use them to the extent that you need the extra features you get with the 500GB plan. Both of these companies fix known security issues. That’s not to say that their overall approach to security is immaculate. I tend to agree with the comments here: I just got an email regarding proton drive, is it just me or the prices a little high compared to the current market place for encrypted storage?. - r/ProtonMail And with Proton Drive slowly actually getting more and more useful features, personally it’s a no-brainer.

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So are you only using the backup feature of ente? Proton does not give you the option to search, sort, share, etc… for me this not even close to a replacement. Just wondering your usage?

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I use ente and proton drive as well, I never look at files on proton drive and just use it as a backup. I don’t think proton drive will ever be able to replace ente.

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I’m not quite sure I’d trust Mega, none of their code is open source to my knowledge and a while ago there was this rather serious issue: https://mega-awry.io/

Filen has not produced a public audit yet. Out of those three options Proton Drive is the only one that has a letter of attestation.

That would be what I would also do.

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So are you only using the backup feature of ente?

Basically, yes. Well, sometimes I share something but Proton can do that also for the photos. The rest with the album management etc. I don’t need, just have never done that. I agree that ente has more features overall and would still recommend it to people that need them. Just personally, I think I can transition over soon without issues.

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All of their code is publicly available here: Developers - MEGA

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9

Tresorit is €120/144 per year for 1TB, and it can be used for photo backup from the phone. It’s not opensource, but it’s good and tested solution.

But if you need cloud only for backup and don’t plan to share files or access them from other devices, you can use backup programs like Vorta, Duplicati, Kopia and suitable storage. E.g. borgbase is $80/year for 1TB. And with some (e.g. Kopia) you can mount backup snapshot as a network drive, so you can access files from other device if needed

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10

Hello eveyone, thank you for your responses.

So, @dngray yes, you’re right… However, they seem to claim that they’ve addressed this issue: MEGA Security Update - Mega Blog

How would you say things look for Mega, if they’ve indeed addressed this issue?

Also, @Catering9655 - I use IVPN, 1Password, Simplelogin, & Tuta separately for all the other services that Proton offers, and I’ve a couple of years’ subscription left on all of them :slight_smile: Perhaps after that I might look to integrate everything under Proton, but unless there’s a compelling reason to do so immediately, I’m just looking for e2ee cloud storage. So, with this information in mind, what would your preference order be, between Proton, Filen & Mega?

@crossroads - Thanks, yes, I did consider Tresorit, and tried subscribing to them during the Black Friday sale, but alas, due to some bank glitch, my payments didn’t go through. Anyway, 1TB is slght overkill for me at the moment, and at least for another 4-5 years.

Also, at the moment, I use iOS without iCloud. Would iCloud ADP also figure in your recommendations here?

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With Cryptomator the provider you choose becomes pretty irrelevant and frees you up to just choose based on price. It works well for me.

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Not totally relevant for the transparency aspect, but that license is just “source available” and not open source (as in OSI definition) and definitely not free software. Of course this is much better than being closed source, but legally it’s still proprietary. If you care about security, privacy and also about the ideology aspect of open source, i.e. the freedom that you get as a user, then MEGA unfortunately is clearly below the other solutions mentioned.

So, with this information in mind, what would your preference order be, between Proton, Filen & Mega?

Price-wise, it’s hard to beat MEGA. Especially in your situation, where you cannot take advantage of anything else offered by Proton, as you’re already covered for the time being. So my preference would be, if I can afford it: 1) Proton, 2) Filen, 3) MEGA. And if I would be looking at saving money, then my preference would be: 1) Filen, 2) MEGA, 3) Proton. I think that all these solutions are secure enough for general usage if you’re not in a special situation, like if you’re a politically exposed person or have close ties to someone like that etc.

Would iCloud ADP also figure in your recommendations here?

Security-wise, iCloud with ADP should be pretty good. Apple engineers are not stupid. What I personally dislike the most about iCloud is that, in my past experience, I sometimes came across weird glitches where certain services stopped working properly, only to resume working at some point in time, or just staying bugged indefinitely. And Apple Support, regardless of how many times you call them and get transferred through all kind of departments, ultimately not being very helpful (but very friendly and attentive, gotta give them that). I never lost data, but these glitches coupled with the fact that iCloud is really only usable on Apple operating systems (trust me, iOS/macOS etc. are great and all, but I just want/need to use all kinds of different OSes and machines), made it uninteresting for me.

I have also used stuff like Cryptomator, Plasma Vaults etc. and well, it works and it’s good but it isn’t seamless enough for me to put all my stuff in there. I only use it for some extra protection on the most sensitive data.

That being said, for long-time backups I do use Borg with https://www.borgbase.com and https://rsync.net – I consider the solutions that you mentioned (Filen, Proton Drive, MEGA, iCloud Drive etc.) as more of a syncing utility so that I always have my documents at my peril regardless of where I am and what device I am using. But because I’m generally actively logged into a service like that, malware could wreak havoc, or I could mistakenly delete stuff, or the service provider could have issues, so an actual append-only backup every so often is still important to me.

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13

That is good to know. Have they had any public audits on it?

If they’ve addressed that is good, would really like to see a further audit though given the seriousness of it.

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I am not sure. But I have never heard they had one. The only thing I know is they open Vulnerability reward programme - MEGA. If that’s some kind of audit.

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Reward programs aren’t the same thing. I wonder why they haven’t it’s not like they couldn’t afford it.

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16

Thank you everyone for the fantastic and detailed responses. They’ve been really helpful.

I spent the last day or so playing around with Vorta + Borgbase. I’ve not used append-only backups so far, and it seems sensible to have one now.

The two options that kinda stood out were:

  1. Vorta + Borgbase

  2. Backblaze Backup (not Backblaze B2) - They say that you could access the backed-up files via their iOS app, so it actually comes close to the convenience of traditional cloud storage too.

I’m curious to understand which of these is usually recommended… And why?

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I have been using Vorta+Borgbase as cold backup and it works fantastic for me. It saved me several times.
I also use Filen as main backup/sharing system. I tested ente a year and a half ago and it was very basic, looks like it has been improving since then so I will give it a try again.

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18

So, an update for closure :slight_smile:

I switched to Proton Ultimate for email and cloud storage. That also takes care of my SimpleLogin account.

Found ProtonVPN a bit buggy compared to IVPN, so sticking with the latter.

Proton Pass too, has limited utility for now, so sticking with 1Password.

Also, started using Ente on a monthly plan. If Proton’s photo backup turns out to be comparably good, once they launch for iOS/MacOS, will switch to that. Else, continue with Ente.

And finally, Vorta+Borgbase is such a fantastic backup option. Loving it so far.

Thank you all for your great inputs!

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19

I would consider Crypt.ee too, similar price to Proton, on the high end, but designed specially to store encrypted photos and videos, they can be streamed without having to download them and there is a free 100MB option for testing.

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Cryptee is recommended by PG as well btw