So, this whole thing kicked off because I hit a wall with local storage - it just doesn’t grow with you forever, you know? Plus, putting all my eggs in the basket of other companies felt a bit risky with all the changing rules and government access stuff these days.
What I ended up with is pretty cool: a personal file vault where I’m in charge. It treats any outside storage like it can’t be trusted, and all the encryption happens right on my computer. I can even use cloud storage like S3 if I need to, but I never lose control of my own data.
Honestly, it just kinda grew on its own; I never set out to build a product. I’m mainly sharing it here to see how other folks deal with these kinds of choices.
You can check it out at https://www.leyzen.com/
What’s the benifit of E2EE file storage on a self hosted server? I use FileBrowser Quantum, and it’s super nice, as I can access the same shared drives that I access at home.
Hey there! That’s a great question.
So, when you’re just using something by yourself on your own computer, E2EE doesn’t always make a huge difference. You really start to see its value when you bring in outside storage, like S3, or when you have a bunch of people using it.
Think about a company running its own app. If someone uploads sensitive files and doesn’t want the system administrator or the tech team to read them, E2EE comes to the rescue. The files get scrambled before they even leave the user’s device. So, even if the server is in-house, the admin only sees encrypted stuff.
It’s basically about separating who operates the infrastructure from who can actually read the data, which lets people use shared or external storage and knowing their stuff is private.
Defense in depth for one. It looks like this project is made for protecting your data on cloud storage. I’ve noticed right now there seems to be a lot of projects around using relatively cheap S3 storage solutions.
Ahh, that makes sense. When I think of self hosting, I think of using your own hardware.
Saying something is “self hosted” when it’s actually hosted by a cloud provider is sort of like saying something was “self coded” when it was coded by an LLM.
Self hosting can be stretched to mean you’re hosting your own services on a cloud provider.
Yeah, I have dabbled in that with streaming to multiple platforms via a VPS. It definitely is stretching the definition of self hosting.
I’ve been using a VPS for a while now. I still maintain it, so it’s very much like self hosting.
Yeah, it’s almost exactly the same in terms of software maintence, but of course you don’t actually host anything. I like the idea that, if the WWW goes down, I’ll still be able to control my smart home (locally of course) and such. Using a VPS is like semi-self hosting. I can’t really think of a good term for it, so I can see why it’s still grouped into self hosting.
Yeah, I only put specific things there. Management and monitoring things. The services are still local.