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Everyone else here has covered explicit file naming and data structure. That's totally key, but I'm trying to do what you're doing with Keybase[00] right now. Migrating away from Dropbox, Google Drive/Docs, etc.

A caveat is that files are limited to 250Gb currently and private repos are 100Gb personal and 100gb per team. I'm not sure on team creation limits and I don't think they are offering paid storage yet. Because of this, I'm also looking at IPFS[0] for cold storage and using other methods to catalog and index.

They added encrypted private git[1] registries and dropbox like file management[2]. That plus the mobile app, teams (groups), chat, and that it's primarily an identity provider I think it's a killer platform for file management and organization. It's still kind of immature in the chat and friends list area (not in a way that makes it unusable, just a little unpolished), but it's open source[3] and all of the functionality that is there works flawlessly for me so far.

Their recent edition of "bomb" messages[4], where you can send a private message with an expiration, I've found to be super useful. It has clients for all major operating systems and mobile platforms. Source is right there on github if you'd like to modify/enhance. You can even browse your git repos from your phone! They haven't added the ability to commit/push to git from mobile yet.

Now I don't have to worry that if I change a credit card and forget to update dropbox that I'll loose my stuff. Which happened this year. I didn't loose anything, but I realized I had not checked in on my over a decade worth of archives in a bit and hadn't paid them.

I took a look at Keybase a couple months ago and decided to make this move after hearing the Software Engineering Daily podcast with the found Max Krohn[5]. It's a pretty good walk through on their goals and current offerings.

Even with it's lack of commercial SaaS flair, I've actually found using it for chats, file sharing, git, and organization to be a fairly large productivity boost. Maybe because it's pretty no nonsense. I've moved half of my work dev chat to it from slack, and I don't miss Slack at all except for video chat/screen share. I especially don't miss it's the terrible file management / organization.

The next phase of my organization, I'm working on connecting it to a personal web portal where I can share and access control the content, but also curate my links, writing, and media I create in an HN/reddit style feed and use Kb to federate to other people's (friends) sites for content to and group that content by relationship and content category. So basically a smarter web ring (Everything old is new again!) with RBAC/circle of trust access control and collaborative versioned content editing.

I'm also exploring other similar tech in tandem or instead of Keybase like IPFS/Mastodon/WebTorrent. So far, for a lot of what I want though, I think Kb has it nicely tied up with a bow, though I doubt it'll scale to any interesting level of traffic without some elbow grease on the ops/storage side.

[00] https://keybase.io

[0] https://ipfs.io/

[1] https://keybase.io/blog/encrypted-git-for-everyone

[2] https://keybase.io/docs/kbfs

[3] https://github.com/keybase

[4] https://keybase.io/blog/keybase-exploding-messages

[5] https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2017/10/24/keybase-with...




While keybase has been reliable so far github readme says "It is approaching release ready, though currently it is still in alpha. There may still be bugs, so please keep backups of any important data you store in KBFS. Currently our pre-built packages are available by invitation only."[0] so make sure to have a proper backup of your most important files.

[0] https://github.com/keybase/kbfs#status

Also one thing which bothers me is online only mode, you can't cache the data offline and in Europe those speeds are far from great (around 20Mbps for download).




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