Ask Lemmy

Store your own shit on your own Linux server. Don't trust other companies. Use industry standard libraries like OpenSSH, LUKS.

I'm going to deviate a bit from your question, since you asked a bunch of questions, and aim at the implied question underneath: "is there any hope for a non-expert?"

A Synology network attached storage device (NAS) provides reasonably good answers to the question "how can I have privacy and have some backups" without being a Linux expert.

It ships with apps that replace common cloud services with local backup equivalents.

It can also be configured to do local encryption before backing up to a cloud service, for data where disaster resilience is more critical than privacy (i.e. a library of family photos).

Edit: And as others have explained - we must always remember that the cloud is just someone else's computer.

That's the funny thing about data storage: you don't.

Encryption mitigates the likelihood of somebody gaining access. But anyone with physical access to the media can potentially gain access to the data - it just may be incredibly difficult to decrypt (or to find a bug that permits decryption).

Just stop putting important stuff on the cloud...

Like. You're asking the best way to safely secure the $100 bill you taped to the sidewalk outside your house.

There's measures you can take, but at the end of the day why are you so set on taping a Benjamin to the sidewalk?

gocryptfs is what I'd use for this. It's designed with cloud storage in mind

Using strong encryption should be enough for your use case, unless you're a high profile target. Even then, it's more likely whoever is after you will try to get access to your unencrypted files instead because cracking strong encryption isn't worth it most of the time

Iirc your cloud service provider could still figure out your unencrypted directory layout and filenames. You should really do some research on this if you wanna make sure you know all the risks

Cryptomator is the most frictionless one