Every now and then the cosmos throws you a curved ball that comes so fast you don’t notice it until it is slapping you around the face or kicking you in the sensitives. In looking for a cloud alternative to OneDrive, I fell across Filen, a German company with, at the moment, just three full-time employees. Searching the Internet for reviews of Filen or a presence on YouTube, I was staggered by the lack of coverage.
The first thing that struck me when I signed up for the very generous free 10GB of storage was how fast uploading entire folders was. Lightning quick is a phrase that springs to mind, as does blisteringly rapid.
On its website, Filen states that privacy is the key driver behind the service. Files are individually encrypted with AES-GCM 256-bit using the master key while still on your device. The master key is derived from your password. Only the user can view or download their stored data. When downloading a file, it is reconstructed from the encrypted shards all on the client, never on the server. In short, end to end zero knowledge encryption.
One key aspect for users is technical support and my one query to the team was resolved in a matter of hours
Filen was started by the current trio in 2020 and being Germany-based, it adheres to some of the strictest privacy laws in the world. Files are securely transferred to Filen’s service, where they are then sharded and distributed to different servers and data centres. Filen uses erasure coding to achieve eleven nines (99.999999999%) of data durability.
The company is one of the most honest and transparent that I have discovered after being on the Internet since 1992. I strongly urge you to read the latest blog piece here for how the company is planning future developments.
The service doesn’t break new ground with its various design modules, but then why reinvent the wheel. Filen is also multi-platform and loaded easily onto my two Android devices.
Although I am still within my 30-day trial period with pCloud I have also subscribed to one of Filen’s subscriptions. The pricing plans are, in my opinion, more than generous. I have subscribed to the annual 200 GB plan at 20 Euros. Here are the other plans. I think you will agree that these are very competitive.
I recommend signing up to the free 10 GB subscription and if you want to boost that by another 10 GB click on this link.
I am still on day two of my exploration of Filen and will publish updates as I progress on my journey but I am more than interested to see how Filen’s journey pans out.
