Hello lemmings lemmons and any other lemm out there. I’ve always wanted to try to switch to more privacy focused options but it’s always been difficult for me as I’m not really tech savvy and frankly for a very long time haven’t really cared about privacy.

Transitioning has also been hard since I feel like I’m pretty much the antithesis of this community: using an iPhone and 2 windows computers (one for home use and one for my college classes on campus) and use OneDrive to sync work between the 3 devices.

Pretty much every account I have is under my gmail account and a second back up email is also under gmail.

Frankly I’m sure this is the highest form of insult to this community but I use edge simply because I’ve given up trying to fight Microsoft

So it’s been a challenge to switch but for browsers and just copy paste all my bookmarks and saved passwords when I download Firefox on my phone and computers but as for email and online accounts switching off that gmail account seems daunting but not impossible and I have no idea what to do to replace OneDrive since it is useful and works in file explorer with no extra software

I figured if anyone was smart enough to tackle the abomination that is my privacy it’d be you guys

  • Leraje@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    That vpn analogy makes sense so I mean is it necessary for home/cell data use and have it running 24/7 or would I only need it when I’m say connecting to some other network

    Your call really. I have mine running at all times on all my devices. There’s no data limit and no downside to having it on. Some sites block VPN’s but if that happens, or if you want to access something through your normal ISP connection, some VPN’s let you do what’s called Split Tunneling, which means you can temporarily let an application skip the VPN.

    But I’m assuming it works like…

    Exactly that. When you download the Filen application on your devices you can set as many what Filen calls ‘Syncs’ as you like. You tell it to constantly watch a directory on your machine and any changes that are made to the contents of that directory (such as you making a change to your Word doc or pasting in a bunch of files) get encrypted then uploaded instantly to a directory in your account on the Filen web server. It’s like having a clone of the directories you choose to watch.

    Then, if you want to have access to those same files on your lappy, you create a watched directory on that machine via Filen, do a one time download/sync and from that point on changes you make to those files/directories on either machine will be synced to the other one via your Filen acct.

    You can also upload things in non-watched directories so they’re there without being constantly overwritten - for backup purposes mainly.