Tuta just launched their encrypted cloud storage in closed beta, completing a compelling zero-knowledge workspace with email, calendar, contacts, and drive. Here's my first look at what's there, what's missing, and why this is bigger than just another cloud provider.
Honestly, having just finally sorted out all my cloud BS I don’t know if I like these sorts of providers anymore. I had about a decade and a half worth of data on Google Drive, and they use a proprietary format for their files. They at least had a way to extract the files easily, via their Takeout feature. OneDrive just hijacks your files and there’s no easy way to get all your files back. I had to reinstall Windows and do it that way. Fucking bullshit.
Box and Dropbox doesn’t have a way to download your files, neither does Proton Drive as far as I can tell.
NextCloud seems to be the only good alternative. You choose the office suite, and your files are wholly yours, not wrapped up in some ambiguous cloud somewhere with some obscure file-system you can’t fully access.
I would love to hear how collaborating on docs works in nextcloud. Or really of any open source solution that does collaboration well.
They may exist, I’m just ignorant
Don’t have an answer for you there, unfortunately. I know it’s a thing that exists and works, but how well? No idea. I also know that NextCloud has federation capabilities. I’m curious how that works.
I opted to go for a managed version of NextCloud via Hetzner Storage Share, because I came to the conclusion that if it’s data I’ve kept on OneDrive and Google Drive, it’s not like it’s that private to begin with. NextCloud is supposedly (and in my brief experience) quite a lot to maintain, so the trade-off seemed worth it to me. Anything I need true privacy for I’m not going to put in the cloud like that anyway.
It required me to set up a Collabora CODE instance for “cloud” document editing capabilities. That was super easy. That should enable things like collaboration, but I really only have this for myself. I wanted to get rid of the last few ties I have with the aforementioned services and get more control over my data myself. I’ve no illusions that Google and Microsoft somehow doesn’t have copies of my stuff, and use that for whatever nefarious purposes, to me that ship has already sailed. It was more important to me that I had my files and that I don’t get some stupid vendor lock-in, which thanks to how NextCloud works, you don’t.
If I decide in the future that NextCloud (or Hetzner) isn’t worth it, I just download it all and close the account. There’s no conversion of file formats, no wonky forms to go through to be allowed to get your own data, no shady applications to download and install, no APIs to screw around with. That’s what mattered to me.