Well there’s always Proton VPN. Although with their free version you get random servers (I believe, maybe double-check), so you might not get lucky and get one in France
Has Opera, since the early 2000s, ever been a good choice? There were times right around 2000 where they were but since then? It’s just another Chromium browser now.
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I only used it sporadically before. But this and some other issues made me reconsider.
I will not use it.
It will either be Brave or Ecosia, I guess.
Browsing the forum with Opera currently and having no issues doing so. 
It’s not my daily driver, but have been messing with it lately. I’m convinced you are some sort of a wizard, around whom technology has a tendency to malfunction! 
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I am Death, the destroyer of worlds
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Nah, you’re Reg Prescott with a Dremel. .
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Ah, my favourite woodworker! Always something useful to add.
If you wait long enough, I might have something where knowledge about powertools is needed - this particular topic here might be not for you
yeah; Skynet; “Love your reference” to all the sheep and ostrich, funny back then (
) absolutely not at all now! AI = 
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Say, what are you using for storage and stuff, like documents and photos? You probably mentioned it, but I can’t find it. I’m trying to get out of the big ecosystems (Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple) and been doing some stuff (you inspired me lol) but I have a lot of stuff on OneDrive. Many moons ago I bought into the whole Windows Phone 7 thing and got all kinds of free storage. So I have like 50 gigs on there that I’ve never paid for. Looking to clean it out and get organized elsewhere.
Why not Proton Drive? With the email + drive plan, you get ~500GB (that’s what I have anyway) for 12.49CAD/month. If you don’t care for the paid email features, you can get 200GB on the Proton Drive for 4.99CAD/months
IJWTS that you guys are basically just shifting your trust to Proton here
What if they bite it or go bad?
What’s wrong with an external hard drive. I have a couple (so I can keep one not at my house - encrypted obvs).
Is that so very old school?
Ack, I should’ve asked this yesterday. I just paid up a year of Mailfence.
I can’t plan for stuff out of my control. All I can do is try to find a company that’s been around for a while, is well regarded, and doesn’t have any shitheads in charge. (That we know of 
)
I mostly just don’t want to support Copilot’s constant creeping into my life anymore. I won’t be able to get rid of all of it, but I can get rid of some of it.
I’ve thought about setting up a little box with some terabytes and calling it a day. The downside being that administration and maintenance is on me then.
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I just set a monthly reminder in my calendar. 5 mins and I’m done
Nothing wrong with that, but I prefer to follow this approach: 3-2-1 backup strategy explained: Is it effective?| Definition from TechTarget. So one copy on my laptop, one on an external SSD that doesn’t stay at home and one on Proton Drive.
Also, @howard, you’re sbsolutely right that Proton could go bad, just like any other company, but for now, they seem more trustworthy than Google or Microsoft.
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I am migrating from OneDrive to Koofr. Just got a 1TB lifetime license for about 130€.
It’s great!
Koofr Cloud Storage and Remote Backup 1TB Lifetime Deal (now §199)
Also, as of today, I have 120TB of storage at home
Some stuff is backuped up to three times, and I have multiple levels of “security” (a server that stores everything, but is almost never on, an always on server with my daily stuff, and data that get mirrored to the cloud and across my devices)
Local encrypted stuff is done with Veracrypt.
We are shifting our trust to (hopefully) rule based entities, away from lawless cowboys and gold diggers
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120TB!!! 
How much stuff do you have? I have 2TB of lifetime storage on pCloud, and haven’t used half of it yet. But, I know video and audio files take a lot of space, and as technology progresses, they tend to become bigger with the years, so 2TB soon won’t be enough. I got the one payment lifetime of pCloud some years ago, it probably costed much less than now. I consider these lifetime deals the best choice, because annual or monthly plans for OneDrive soon would have costed a lot more, and one would have to keep paying.
I used OneDrive for one year or two, but didn’t like the idea of Microsoft having all my stuff. I prefer to trust an European end to end encrypted service. And pCloud works pretty much the same as OneDrive: I can see my files at the computer’s File Explorer and I can see what is synced, what isn’t, and what is being synced. Syncing is fast and it has always been reliable.
I have Proton mail, but buying the lifetime storage from pCloud was much cheaper. I basically pay for Proton mail and VPN, and though I have Proton drive, I don’t have much storage space there and I don’t use it (because I prefer to use the storage quota for my email).
I like Proton a lot and trust them. I have been their client for many years. Unlike Microsoft, they can’t give their clients data if a government asked for it, because it is all end to end encrypted. I haven’t paid for the whole package, because for instance I don’t need their password manager, because at the moment Bitwarden is far superior.
Proton regularly gives more free storage space for their longtime clients, so I have regularly been gifted more storage, which is nice.
I kind of like not having all the eggs in the same basket, because things could happen. Like denial of service attacks or something. Proton has been very good at dealing with such things, though.
I also have two external hard drives, but once one of our drives got corrupted, so I don’t trust backing up my stuff only there. It is good to backup things in a hard drive and also online at a trusted and encrypted server provider.
I have been reading about VeraCrypt and I’m going to try it. 
It seems great.
I just signed up for a paid Proton Mail Plus account. They’re based in Switzerland and I’m happy to pay 3,99 €/month once yearly to exit my two GMail accounts. The 15 GB of storage that comes with a Plus account should be more than enough. I imported probably more than a total of 1000 emails from my 2 Google accounts. They consume about 700 MB.
One thing that totally sucks is that the emails are imported as Labels with the GMail folder name in the Label. Now I’ve got to recreate the entire folder structure and move all of those emails back into their proper folder.
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