Security · 2026-07-20 · 9 min read
Ask most people whether their files are safe online and they will think about hackers. Ask anyone who has actually lost data and you will hear a different set of stories: an account locked with no human to appeal to, a shared link that turned out to be public, a sync that faithfully replicated a ransomware encryption to every device, a folder that was deleted a year ago and only missed today. The dramatic risk is rarely the one that gets you.
So rather than grading providers, it is more useful to lay out every way files are actually lost or exposed, and then match each one to the control that genuinely stops it. Some of these your provider handles. Some of them nobody can handle for you.
The complete risk list
| Risk | How often it really happens | What actually stops it |
|---|---|---|
| Your account is taken over | Common — the single biggest cause of loss | A hardware key or app-based 2FA, not SMS. A unique password. |
| The provider is breached | Rare, but total when it happens | End-to-end encryption, or encrypting files yourself before upload |
| An insider reads your files | Hard to measure, impossible to disprove | The same: they can only read what was never in the clear |
| Ransomware encrypts everything, then syncs | Very common | Versioned backups, and at least one copy that is not live-synced |
| You delete something and notice much later | The most common of all | Real version history with a long retention window |
| Your account is suspended or closed | Uncommon, but no appeal and no warning | A copy somewhere that no company controls |
| The provider shuts down or drops the product | Happens on a multi-year horizon | Portability — data in open formats you can move |
| Silent corruption over years | Slow and invisible | Content addressing and integrity checks, not just copies |
| Legal seizure or a data request | Depends entirely on who you are | Encryption you hold the keys to, plus jurisdiction awareness |
| A share link leaks | Far more common than people admit | Audit your shares; assume any link can be forwarded |
The two questions that reveal everything
When you are evaluating any storage service, almost all of the above collapses into two questions. Who holds the decryption keys, and who can revoke your access? Everything else is detail.
If the provider holds the keys — which is the default nearly everywhere — then their breach is your breach, their insider is your problem, and a lawful request for your data does not need to involve you at all. If the provider can revoke access, then their business decisions, their automated abuse systems, and their continued existence are all part of your risk surface, no matter how good their engineering is. There is a longer treatment of the key question in Encrypted Cloud Storage: What “Encrypted” Really Means, which is worth reading before you trust any marketing page that says “secure”.
Security is not a property of a company. It is a property of an arrangement — who holds what, and what happens when one party disappears.
What good actually looks like in practice
A setup that holds up under all ten rows above tends to look the same regardless of which brands are involved. It is not complicated, it is just deliberate.
- Strong second-factor authentication on every account that touches your files, using a hardware key or an authenticator app.
- Anything genuinely sensitive encrypted on your own machine before it goes anywhere. The practical workflow is in How to Store Sensitive Documents Safely.
- At least one copy that is not continuously synced, so a mistake or a ransomware event cannot propagate to it.
- At least one copy that no single company controls, so a suspension or shutdown is an inconvenience rather than a catastrophe.
- A yearly ten-minute review: open your shared links, delete the ones you forgot, and actually try restoring one file from your backup.
Where decentralized storage genuinely helps — and where it does not
Two rows in that table are unusually hard to solve with any conventional service: account suspension, and the provider disappearing. Both exist because a single company sits between you and your files. A decentralized network removes that company. On Walrus Drive, a file is split into redundant pieces spread across independent operators and recorded on the Sui blockchain, and access is tied to a key you hold rather than an account somebody can close. Nobody can suspend you, because there is nothing to suspend. Losing a few operators does not lose the file — the erasure coding explainer shows why.
What it does not do is make your files secret. A public network stores exactly the bytes you give it, and anyone with the blob identifier can read them. That is a deliberate trade — the guarantee is durability and public verifiability, not confidentiality — and it means encryption is your job, not something you can assume. We would rather say that plainly than let you find out later. The FAQ answers the rest of the awkward questions in the same tone.
The practical takeaway is not to move everything anywhere. It is to notice which of the ten risks above are currently unaddressed in your setup, and to close those specific gaps. For most people, the unaddressed ones are the last two: no copy outside a company, and no honest test that a restore actually works.