Passwording Cloud Storage

April 14, 2018 9:27 AM

I'm looking for a service, any service, that will for free or a low cost (<$5 a month) allow me to share a folder and password it.

Ideally, I'd like to have over 5GB of storage, but I can work with less. What we're looking for specifically is a way to share a folder of pictures and password the folder. We don't mind friends and family downloading folder, but by requiring a password, we're hoping to prevent said friends and family from sharing the link without thinking. It's a little more than just asking "please do not share the link," although we are relying on our people being understanding enough not to pass it around. The extra bonus of preventing everything from being scraped by google is also nice.

We'd like to be able to do this without requiring everyone to be logged into a specific service and use their account name (as google drive requires) but rather with a password that we can send to additional friends if they request it.

I thought I could do this with Mediafire, but it appears that the information on how to do so is outdated and the current version does not allow it.

posted by Hactar to Technology (4 answers total)

Dropbox Professional allows you to do this, as well as allowing you to set an expiration date on shared links. It gives you 10TB (yes, TB) of storage. However, it costs $10 a month. Personally I think it's well worth it though—I get a lot of use out of my Dropbox subscription. I like the fact that it's not tied to any of my other accounts, unlike things like iCloud or OneDrive, yet it integrates well with all of my devices and has a usable web interface.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 9:40 AM on April 14, 2018 [1 favorite]

Oh, there's also Dropbox Plus which is only $6.99 a month. Dropbox Plus gives you 1TB of storage space. Also, Dropbox Plus has a 30-day grace period for accidental deletions (you can restore things that you deleted up to 30 days ago) and Dropbox Professional has a 120-day grace period.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 9:45 AM on April 14, 2018

Current Dropbox prices, as I upgraded mere hours ago:

$9.99 for Plus, $19.99 for Professional.
posted by mollymayhem at 1:06 PM on April 14, 2018

Use the free features of your system. (This is from memory so check my work)

Windows:
Create folder and copy photo files to folder.
Right-click the folder and select Properties.
On the General tab, click the Advanced button.
Check the box for the "Encrypt contents to secure data" option.
Click Apply and then OK.

Mac:
Open DiskUtility and select New Image
Choose sparseimage and select AES256 encryption and set password
Choose size sufficient to hold the photo files then save image to desktop.
Open image and copy photo files to image
Close and unmount image

Now theses folders/images can be put on iCloud, Google Drive, OneDrive, etc. safely and immune from scraping, etc. On GDrive, you can restrict the sharing of a file to a certain other user’s email address. It’s not visible by the general public. I use Google Drive extensively - all devices, free, etc. I have a Dropbox account but they just went public and how they are going to monetize there service remains to be revealed. I would still encrypt any files not on your own server.

Of course, you could run your own ftp/WebDAV/other server.
posted by sudogeek at 4:55 PM on April 14, 2018 [1 favorite]