Privacy-friendly Cloud Support

Optional Cloud Storage and Upload

All PEAs (PEA = Password Encrypting Archive) work also fine with all features offline, without any internet connection. Cloud access works manually, you must explicitly enable it.

Once cloud access is enabled, identical calendar files opened both locally and in the cloud are synchronized.

Always Encrypted

The content remains encrypted during every upload or download process and is only stored in encrypted form in the cloud. The possibility of inadvertently transferring data unencrypted is minimized because the data is generally never stored even on the hard disk in plain text.

The user passwords for cloud access are stored encrypted (see file cloud.properties). This makes it possible that they only need to be entered once and are still secure. However, the cloud access can therefore only be checked after entering the PEA password.

Limitations

If you don't use a PEA with the key file property, then the protection is only as strong as your password. Your password should be unique and as long as possible (a passphrase consisting of several words). Using the character tables from the PEAs menu with unusual characters increases their security.

Keep in mind that - although the contents are safe - the meta data of the files are not protected: File names, modification dates, etc. are visible to the cloud provider. If that makes you uncomfortable, then pick your cloud provider with care or run your own provider like Nextcloud, Owncloud, Seafile... In the cloud access form, only the path needs to be specified for this open source cloud software and the corresponding WebDAV base path is automatically filled in.

Supported Cloud Providers

Many of the major players are not supported: Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Apple iCloud, Amazon Cloud Drive... The PEAs intend to be privacy-protecting applications, which is why these providers are at the bottom of the to-do list.

The WevDAV Protocol

Currently only providers with WebDAV support are included.

WebDAV (Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning) is an extension of HTTP, the basic data communication for the World Wide Web, that allows clients to perform remote Web content authoring operations. This standard allows multiple cloud providers to be supported.

If you take a look around, you can find many such vendors: free or low-cost, privacy-compliant providers, vendors that run open source software, those that offer reliable support...

To take advantage of cloud support, you must already have an appropriate account.

Not all providers may run smoothly. Try a provider and switch if necessary.

Here are some providers that use WebDAV (no guarantee that they still exist and work with the PEAs):