The Next Stop on My Cloud Journey: Seafile
I've been on a slow walk away from the big cloud services for a while now. Google Drive and OneDrive worked fine, but every upload came with that small tug - who else gets to look at this?
Proton Drive was my first stop. On paper it ticked every box, but the desktop client felt slow and half-finished, and I kept second-guessing whether things had actually uploaded. I'll probably give it another shot in a year or two, Proton ships steadily and I think they'll get there.
Filen was next. Solid encryption, generous pricing, but the day-to-day never clicked. Sometimes a tool just doesn't fit the shape of how you work, even when nothing is technically wrong with it.
So now I'm packing up again. Next stop is Seafile.
The library model - grouping files into separate encrypted libraries instead of one giant drive - matches how I already think about my data. Clinic stuff, personal stuff, photos, writing, homelab notes; they really shouldn't all live in the same bucket.
The other piece that sold me is that rclone supports Seafile, which means I can move my Nextcloud data over without my desktop being involved at all. The servers which hosted them have far better internet than I do up here in Whitehorse. Server-to-server, no desktop running overnight. I just kick off rclone, walk away, and let the two machines do their thing.
I want to see if Seafile's reputation for being fast and reliable holds up. Every cloud service looks great in week one. The real question is month four, when you've pushed real data through it and watched it sync after a power blip. That's when you find out if a tool deserves to stay.
I'll write again once I know.