this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2023
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Privacy
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It's largely preference. Bitwarden and Tuta (they renamed themselves today lol) do one job each and do it really, really well. Proton do lots of different things and I've heard mutterings that their products are slightly lacking. There's also the 'eggs in one basket' thing too. If you use proton for your VPN, email, Drive etc etc then if they're down for a few hours or the company folds, you're screwed. That's not likely to happen of course but even so.
No, it doesn't. What Filen (and Proton I think) do is monitor directories and files on your devices for changes. So if I'm working in Word for example, I save the document to a directory that I know Filen is monitoring. Every time I save the file, Filen detects that and uploads an encrypted copy to my cloud account. So, unlike OneDrive or GDrive which allow you to edit files in the cloud, with Filen/Proton etc you make all your changes locally and just let it do its thing.
So imagine all your devices (PC, lappy, mobile etc) connected to your router at home. Lets pretend instead of wifi or cable, they're connected via a transparent garden hose. Your ISP can see everything that passes through these hoses because they're transparent.
A VPN is like an opaque, protected hose within that hose. It's technically known as a tunnel. Instead of data passing through the outer hose, it now passes through the inner, encrypted hose, meaning your ISP can't see anything inside it. Your data is now invisible to them. All they can see is that your using a VPN.
Your ISP also does all your DNS resolution. DNS is the thing that when you go to somewebsite.com it turns it into the IP address of the server that the website at somewebsite.com lives on. Most good VPN's also takeover DNS resolution too meaning that not only can your ISP not see your data they also can't see what sites you're visiting.
Lastly, when you visit any website, they now can't see your ISP provided IP address, they only see the IP address of the VPN server you're connected to. Some people use this to pretend they're in the USA when they're actually in, say, the UK so they can access things like the US version of Netflix.
That vpn analogy makes sense so I mean is it necessary for home/cell data use and have it running 24/7 or would I only need it when I’m say connecting to some other network
As for filen and proton, with proton I haven’t seen the ability to watch a directory so I’m assuming that’s a filen feature
But I’m assuming it works like: I’ll have a college folder for all my classes and I want it to watch this folder, inside college are 3 more folder and so if I edit “super_cool_essay.doc” on my local desktop it will then save that as a copy to filen then filen would add the edits to “super_cool_essay” on my laptop or at the very least be able to that process manually
It was kind of a word salad but my ideal solution would be to type away on my home desktop and pick up on my laptop at college or vise versa
Your call really. I have mine running at all times on all my devices. There's no data limit and no downside to having it on. Some sites block VPN's but if that happens, or if you want to access something through your normal ISP connection, some VPN's let you do what's called Split Tunneling, which means you can temporarily let an application skip the VPN.
Exactly that. When you download the Filen application on your devices you can set as many what Filen calls 'Syncs' as you like. You tell it to constantly watch a directory on your machine and any changes that are made to the contents of that directory (such as you making a change to your Word doc or pasting in a bunch of files) get encrypted then uploaded instantly to a directory in your account on the Filen web server. It's like having a clone of the directories you choose to watch.
Then, if you want to have access to those same files on your lappy, you create a watched directory on that machine via Filen, do a one time download/sync and from that point on changes you make to those files/directories on either machine will be synced to the other one via your Filen acct.
You can also upload things in non-watched directories so they're there without being constantly overwritten - for backup purposes mainly.
Thanks
well then filen might be exactly what I’m look (besides a privacy focused 1:1 clone of OneDrive ofc lol). It’s a little confusing reading it but I’m sure it’ll be super easy once I get working on it
But TSYM for the