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PrivateStorage.io: A secure and privacy-focused cloud storage solution

leastauthority.com

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Re: PrivateStorage.io: A secure and privacy-focused cloud storage solution

#51

Post by newscracker »

I'm curious what the pricing will be when this is opened up to the public. Some years ago when I compared encrypted online storage, I found Least Authority to be quite expensive. It still seems to be ($25 a month). [1]

[1]: https://leastauthority.com/

Re: PrivateStorage.io: A secure and privacy-focused cloud storage solution

#52

Post by StavrosK »

andreareina wrote: post #50
StavrosK wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately that's harder than just always leaving a Raspberry Pi on at home, especially given that I want to be able to sync files to my phone, where EncFS probably doesn't work at all (or easily).

I'm unfamiliar with syncthing, but could you run two daemons, one that does encrypted sync to e.g. dropbox, and one that does plain sync to your phone and such? Or would the two instances stomp on each other or get into an infinite loop? e.g.: plain syncthing phone ^ | V encfs syncthing dropbox

That might be doable, but then I'd need an always-on trusted computer to do the decryption, and if I have that I don't need the VPS...

Re: PrivateStorage.io: A secure and privacy-focused cloud storage solution

#53

Post by dang »

StavrosK wrote: post #23
moviuro wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you share your data on untrusted machines that you bet will live long enough to hold what you want to keep. Sounds risky. Do storage providers have an incentive to provide the service reliably à la filecoin? [0] [0] https://filecoin.io/

> Do storage providers have an incentive to provide the service reliably à la filecoin? Yes, via a currency called Dollars.

"Don't be snarky."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: PrivateStorage.io: A secure and privacy-focused cloud storage solution

#55

Post by rakoo »

rsync wrote: post #45
ZeroCool2u wrote: post #27

There are a number of alternative paths in this space if you're truly focused and willing to invest a bit, but if you care about privacy enough to seek a service like this out and just want to minimize mental overhead, this seems like a good choice. Tahoe-LAFS makes some impressive claims like maintaining confidentiality while running on untrusted machines. I think a lot of folks now would assert that really any mach…

"There are a number of alternative paths in this space if you're truly focused and willing to invest a bit, but if you care about privacy enough to seek a service like this out and just want to minimize mental overhead, this seems like a good choice." It feels to me like 'borg'[1] is becoming the de facto standard for this use-case. There were a number of similar tools (like duplicity) for years but borg seems to hav…

Borg et al are specifically made for backups. Tahoe-LAFS is for general use.

Re: PrivateStorage.io: A secure and privacy-focused cloud storage solution

#56

Post by rakoo »

moviuro wrote: post #7

FWIW, I've been using syncthing [0] for some years now [1] and am very pleased. Even though my data is unavailable on the cloud from any untrusted computer (like e.g. my corporate laptop), it's synced on my "fleet". I'm not sure that PrivateStorage actually adds anything to the equation? EDIT> The Tahoe LAFS [2] model is more that you spread your data over multiple providers. NAS at home, several VPS providers, or wh…

You can configure Tahoe-LAFS to store data wherever you want but I guess PrivateStorage will have its own settings and you won't be able to select a nas at home. Just a guess though.

Re: PrivateStorage.io: A secure and privacy-focused cloud storage solution

#59

Post by meejah »

iagovar wrote: post #20
zorked wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big thing is that Tahoe LAFS can be run on untrusted computers.

Is Tahoe LAFS a viable solution for people without sysadmin skills?

Tahoe-LAFS by itself is probably not (you do have to configure and keep some Python-based daemon software running), but PrivateStorage is a managed service.

Re: PrivateStorage.io: A secure and privacy-focused cloud storage solution

#60

Post by meejah »

_bxg1 wrote: post #44

Does anyone know what kind of impact client-side encryption would have on sync speed for potentially-large files (as opposed to simple text messages)?

Tahoe-LAFS does "erasure coding" on the chunks of data. This increases the size of the data (adding redundancy) so that you can recover a file without recovering every single chunk. These parameters are decided client-side. In the smallest possible case (i.e. every chunk required) there is some slight overhead from the zfec and Tahoe headers.

If you are using redundancy of any kind, it will inflate the size of the ciphertext versus the plaintext thus affecting sync speed.

Tahoe-LAFS does split everything up into fixed-size chunks, though, so the total size of the file doesn't really matter -- it will still be uploaded in 128kb (default) chunks to the storage servers.

So, it's not the encryption that has an impact but the erasure-coding (which gives the "RAID-like" features) and you can configure it to have zero redundancy and thus only some slight increase in the total amount of data to send.

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