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Here's something you can do:
Yeah, I support self-hosting. Don't trust online services to always be there for you and their terms, conditions and whatnot could change and you won't know it.
Grab an external drive, VeraCrypt and set it up as you please.
ProtonDrive is the only cloud storage option with a free tier recommended by privacyguides.org.
Another option like others have said is encrypt your data first and you can use any service. You can create a veracrypt container and just upload that file. I read a comment somewhere that dropbox is capable of handling encrypted containers so you don’t have to re-upload a veracrypt file several GBs in size every time. I haven’t tried that yet though.
You're describing a paid service. With "free" and "respects privacy" you can only pick one. Free services like that are funded by violating your privacy.
Encrypt it locally, and upload it anywhere. If you are at a level where you cannot trust anyone, it's best to do it yourself. The provider will just get gibberish alongside general file size, last modified/access time, and your general login habit.
good luck on high security, privacy focused without paying.
Crazy idea:
Encrypt it locally, then make a program that encode it into a "video" (as in: using the pixels in the video to store 1s and 0s), upload to youtube.
Voila! Unlimited free and secure storage!
(may break ToS)
YouTube is notorious for lossy compression on uploads. You'd lose a lot of data
The issue is downloading it with YT constantly making it harder to do, and pretty much against ToS.
But it's your own videos on your own accounts, you are the copyright owner, just use Google Takeout to download lol.
Valid.
So you’re saying use the pixels as ones and zeros, so if I had just for example, a Microsoft Word document, I don’t use Microsoft Word but that’s beside the point, you’re thinking include the document into a video? I don’t know if that’s actually possible but damn, that would be kind of cool. Because I also have pictures and documents. But be cool if you could do that.
Steganography is one possible way to store a message "hidden in plain sight", and video does often make a seemingly innocuous manner to store a steganographic payload, but in that endeavor, the point is to have two messages: a video that raises no suspicions whatsoever, and a hidden text document with instructions for the secret agent.
Encoding only the hidden message as a video would: 1) make it really obvious that there's an encoded message, and 2) would not be compatible with modern video compression, which would destroy the hidden message anyway, if encoded directly as black and white pixels.
When video compression is being used, the available bandwidth to store steganographic messages is much lower, due to having to be "coarse" enough to survive the compression scheme. And video compression is designed around how human vision works, so shades of color are the least likely to be faithfully reproduced -- most people wouldn't notice if a light green is portrayed slightly darker than it ought to be. The good news is that with today's high resolution video streams, the raw video bandwidth is huge and so having even just one-thousandth of that available for encoding hidden data is probably sufficient.
That said, hidden messages != encrypted messages: anyone who notices that there may be a hidden message can try to analyze the suspicious video and retrieve the payload. Encoding, say, English text in a video would still leave patterns, because some English letters (and thus ASCII-encoded bit patterns) will show up more frequently. But fortunately, one can encrypt data and then hide it using steganography. Encrypted data tends to approximate random noise, making it much harder to notice when hidden within the naturally-noisy video data. But bandwidth will be cut some more due to encryption.
TL;DR: it's very real to hide messages in plain sight, in places people wouldn't even think of looking closely at. Have you thought about the Roman Empire today?
You know if somebody did this with an encrypted data but only like every 50th frame on a video like that old "smiling man" videos or they "watch Ian sleep" videos then someone saw it and posted it either here or Mastodon or one of the forbidden companies it could generate a new conspiracy.
Would be great if a bunch of people did like a full deep dive. Getting the raw videos, figuring out the frames to extract, determining the encryption method, find a method to decrypt it, combine all the fragments back together, figure out its in some obscure latex format, write a custom interpreter for that format which hasn't been used since the early 90s...people online thinking it's some state actor or like a command and control module for some bot net.. They finally crack it all and access the raw data and it's just a backup of pornographic slashfic from usenet back in the day.
Especially if breaking the encryption was like a novel and new approach. Imagine like a talk at defcon "how I found about Harry Potter's sex with Gwen from Spiderman...and broke aes256 in the process"
OP - I'm not saying this is what you are backing up but the idea of this was so funny to me.
"how I found about Harry Potter's sex with Gwen from Spiderman...and broke aes256 in the process"
Breaking open the S(ex) box lol
Also, in the spirit of the season, that would 100% be a presentation at CCC; 39c3 just concluded, after all.
CCC would also work. I think at either convention that talk would be standing room only if not shut down by the fire Marshall
Youre going to need to either come up with some kind of budget or look into self hosting. I suppose Proton give you something like 10gb of email storage with the free tier of their email, though
If something is free, then you're the product. Your data will be used for whatever the storage provider would like. For example, Google Photos was initially very generous with storage, because they were using your photos to train their recognition software. Gmail is reading your emails to build out your advertising profile. Your data is a commodity, and your privacy, if you protect it, is valuable.
The best way to do what you're asking for, to ensure privacy and security, is to self-host. There's an initial cost, and some maintenance fees over time, but you'll also be investing in learning valuable skills in your free time.
It's not free, but Proton has bern good so far.
I suggested this below and also decided on Proton Drive after considering self-hosting and realizing I was way over my head if I also wanted any kind of security/privacy. I like it so far. Folder backup is reliable and that's all I really needed. Lots of nice features come along with the upgrade
probably filen, maybe proton, but you can encrypt your data first before uploading