koofr.eu

New KOOFR VAULT offers open-source, client-side encryption!

**UPDATED REVIEW, FEBRUARY 2023**I've been with Koofr now for over a year. My biggest beef with them originally was the lack of client-side encryption. But they've since addressed this by adding "Koofr Vault," an open-source encryption which gives the user control of the encryption keys. Now, you can upload sensitive files, like medical records or legal files, and once you've decrypted them with your keys, you can see the titles to choose which files to interact with. This is MUCH better than having to depend on encrypt-first-then-upload techniques which loose the titles of your files in the cloud, making it very difficult to find what you're looking for if you need to download in the future.Koofr still isn't as smoothly working as another competitor, IceDrive, and it offers a maximum of only 1TB storage on many of its lifetime offers, but at least it seems to be reliable and now offers client-controlled encryption of files.This privacy feature alone is worth adding another star to my original review. Something else Koofr could do is to publish an independent third party security audit of its product.**ORIGINAL REVIEW, MARCH 2022**Koofr functions as expected. It's not especially fast at uploading files, but this is on par with other cloud storage options. I'm happy that I can play music directly from Koofr--no need to download to my machine. Other cloud services also include a video viewer so you can watch movies from the cloud without having to download them, but this function seems lacking on Koofr. I've never tried to view a text document on Koofr so can't comment on that.One of my major gripes with Koofr, a service I've been using for about 6-months now, is the way they handle syncing. It's unnecessarily complicated--at least for my family. With other services, you download their app which is a folder you can manage easily by dragging and dropping files into the app's sync folder. No need to mess with settings. Very intuitive. Very easy. No learning curve. I've set up a sync folder on Koofr but even now I can't remember how I did it. I'd have to re-read their instructions to do it again. The biggest issue I have with Koofr is the way they've chosen to handle security and privacy. I'd just finished a subscription with another cloud storage service (Sync.com) and thought I'd try a different company b/c Sync is very slow to up-/download files. I failed to research Koofr enough and only recently learned files are NOT protected by client-side encryption. You know the saying--not your encryption keys not your property. This, of course, means files stored on Koofr's servers are NOT zero-knowledge. The company or anyone else who could access its servers can view your files. As more governments around the world fight citizens' privacy as a human right and instead opt for varying forms of mass-surveillance, even increasingly pressuring companies to add undisclosed encryption backdoors, our family has chosen not to do business with any "encryption" company that doesn't offer client-side encryption by default. This shouldn't be something you have to pay for EXTRA (pCloud!). It should be included in the subscription cost. Otherwise, you no longer own your data.To be fair, you can encrypt your files BEFORE uploading to Koofr, but this can (should!) obscure your files' names. As a result, it can be very difficult to find a particular file to download when you need it. This turns Koofr into merely a backup service. You have to trust that if you ever lose your main working copy of files, you can download ALL OF THEM encrypted from Koofr then decrypt on your machine. But there are far, far less costly ways to do that with other cloud services.All in all, I'm very disappointed with myself for choosing a NON-zero-knowledge cloud provider for our family. As soon as possible, I'll be transferring my files off Koofr's servers back onto a true zero-knowledge cloud provider's servers. Plus, with the exciting developments in redundant decentralized cloud architecture, soon there should be no reason to have to entrust non-zero-knowledge cloud companies with our most intimate family and personal data.

Date of experience: Mar 08, 2022