Unlimited Free Encrypted cloud storage trick

This is how to store files securely on free cloud storage providers and get the most of their provides services. using encrypted and file chunking when necessary.

Cloud Storage

there are many free cloud storage providers and the key is to get the most of all of them

google cloud; 15gb per gmail account.
box.com; 10gb per account
microsoft onedrive; 5gb per account.

you can create as many accounts as you would like. for every gmail you create you get 30gb of storage. there are many other services but these are the ones i use

Centralized Access

in order to have all the services in a centralized place. i recommend Transmit 5 that is a mac app. you can log into all the accounts and have access to all the files in one place.

Archiving

if your intended file if too big or if it is a directory wit a lot of files and folders. it is good to archive it. i will use `tar` command.

To archive : tar zcvf <archived-file>.tar.gz <files-to-archive>

this will archive yeah. will use gzip

To extract : tar xvf <file-to-extract>

Encryption

before uploading files to the these insecure services. you have to encrypt them. my go to way of encryption them is age command. it is a cli command and not a gui app which some people may be afraid of but it is what it is.

there are two ways of encryption with age

with a private and public key
with a passphrase

with keys

age-keygen > key.txt

to generate a key and save the private key to a file.

keep this file secure and also save the public key that will be printed on the terminal. you will use it to encrypt the file.

age -r <public-key> -o <output-file-name>.age <file-to-encrypt>

this encrypts the file-to-encrypt with the key we generated and saves it with age subfix.

the file we have created can be decrypted simply by;

age -d -i key.txt -o <decrypted-file> <encrypted-file>

this will use the private key file we created and will decrypt the encrypted-file and save it as decrypted-file.

simple as that

with passphrase

this doesn't require a key to be generated and managed. simple use a passphrase you can remember.

age -p -o <output-file-name>.age <file-to-encrypt>

after running this command it will ask for a passphrase. enter it and once again to confirm and file is encrypted.

to decrypt the file it is as simple as

age -d -o <decrypted-file> <encrypted-file>

this will ask for the passphrase and then save the decrypted version as decrypted-file

File Splitting

sometimes you might need to split very large files if you want to store them in separate cloud providers. but another reason to split files could be the file upload limit many cloud providers implement.

for separating i use the `split` command that works both on linux and macos. for windows you are on your own lol. (you can use WSL maybe)

you should split after encrypting

before splitting a file you might want to archive it. i don't why but it feels more right and safe, it's just a feeling there is no proof or reason you might want to archive it. split command is pretty simple.

split -n 5 <file-to-split> <prefix>

this will split the file-to-split into five chunks. prefix is name of the files.

split -a 500M <file-to_split> <prefix>

this will split the file-to-split into chunks with the size of 500 megabytes. (last chunk is rest of the size)

the suffix "M" is for megabytes. there are several options for it

K for kilobytes
M for megabytes
G for gigabytes
if nothing it added it will be bytes

after splitting it will create the files with the names starting with `prefix` then will add `aa` and so on (`aa`, `ab`, `ac` ...)

Conclusion

yeah thats all i got. then you can upload them and abuse the capitalist conglomerates that all the files you could ever upload won't even feel like a spec of dust in their ginormous databases.