I’m looking for new a cloud storage service for files and documents and also for photos. Despite of tresorit as one of the PG recommendations, from this forum I read some drawbacks of this recommendation.
Storj looks promising, eventually in combination with Photo+. Especially forum member archerallstars is a big fan of it. But what are the opinion of others? Every system has its advantages and disadvantages. So my question is: what are advantages AND disadvantages of Storj as cloud storage?
I also saw that Ente is planning the cloud storage for files. But when will it be released? I don´t know, so my focus is on Storj at this moment.
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Storj seems to be cheaper atm but I dont know how reliable it is right now. I will also look into this in the near future for a cheaper storage alternative.
Storj say they are only offering "cloud object storage ", not cloud storage. Seems to be for website owner storing lots of data, or cloud services backend.
If the website is self-hosted in a server in my basement, it should still allow for offsite storage (though I dont know how at the moment).
Your data is stored at multiple nodes, it is good for stuff you want to be harder to censor, and awful for stuff, you want to be private. Sure they claim everything is encrypted and private, but you do not control where is your data and who scrapped it and saved for later decryption.
Currently, it’s the only reliable decentralized cloud storage option. I would say that it’s even more secure than any other centralized cloud storage options due its zero-trust (both the client and the node are running on the verifiable open sources). Data redundancy is also equally or more than other centralized cloud storage options with 11 nines availability. You can’t go wrong with Storj.
Another project that’s worth taking a look at is Sia. You get E2EE on Sia even on S3 connection. This point alone would make it more secure than your typical S3 connection on AWS that’s using server side encryption. However, until the hard fork that’s expected to arrive in Q2-Q4 this year, there’s a minimum file size limitation on the network (40 MB), so it’s not a reliable network to sync small files without padding that would increase your cost to store files on the network.
Moreover, on Sia, there’s a price market where both renters and lenders are able to quote their own prices. So, it’s more decentralized than Storj in this regard. Currently, storing data on Sia is cheaper than Storj.
There’s also Filecoin, but I think the thing doesn’t add up. It’s the largest decentralized file storage network, both in terms of the capacity of the network and the amount of data storing. It’s also the cheapest one around (~20x cheaper than Storj). But why would anyone run Filecoin node is still a mystery to me, since they would get less money and also the node requirements are a magnitude higher that both Storj’s and Sia’s Raspberry Pi level.
@Encounter5729 You can use it as your personal cloud storage just fine (with your choice of integrations) even though it’s not the aim of the project. With that said, its web UI is constantly improving, worth taking a look IMO.
@KeepItSimple If you use their uplink or CLI native API, it’s E2EE (not server-side encryption), meaning your data is encrypted locally. And they’re making GatewayMT using E2EE, so S3 access would use E2EE, or you can use everything E2EE now if you’re selfhosting GatewayST.
By using E2EE on Storj, at worse (assuming others have, somehow, cracked your locally stored encryption key), it would still be a magnitude more secure that any other centralized cloud storage. With centralized cloud storage, your data is not split and is being kept on a single point of failure. It would save a ton of time for the malicious actors to get access to your data, since they don’t have to go through all the hassle of gathering all the shards of your data that’s stored randomly on the network.
Of cause, unless you also believe that Cryptomator doesn’t help with data privacy, Storj would also unable to convince you otherwise. But again, with Cryptomator, depending on your storage choice, you might not change the fact that your data is being kept at one point of failure. It’s out of the project’s scope to protect you in this regard. Also, since it’s more like a workaround solution compared to decentralized solutions that are designed to be secure from the ground up, you lose the ability to share your file easily. So, it can only be a backup tool, not a full featured cloud storage solution that you can use securely everywhere for any scenario.
Thanks for your opinions! I indeed want to use it as a personal cloud storage, not only for me but also for my family members (three persons in total, myself included), easy to use by them (i.e. good integration in KDE on laptop and in Android on smartphone). However, I’m still a bit afraid of servers not in control of Storj: I have no clue about the maintenance quality of the servers. It is a typical human tendency to keep the data in control, hence centralized server(s) (for example Ente owns three separate servers). I need more time to get used to the idea of the decentralized cloud storage.
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