Jotta can, and will spy on your data
- May 1, 2022
At the time of publishing, it’s 2 years since I’ve been booted as a paying customer from JottaCloud.
This post may come off as sour and bitter, but it’s not. I’m happy I got booted as a paying customer. It forced me to create a proper backup with restic, which also has client side encryption as a first class citizen.
Why it’s taken 2 years to publish this post is because of 1) life, and 2) Jotta must surely have deleted all my data by now.
For many years up until May 2020, Jotta has been rubbing me the wrong way. Some issues were:
- No client side encryption of data.
- Silent crashes of the client software.
- Crash dumps and logs silently filling valuable disk space on the system drive.
Sometimes it could go several weeks without any synchronization due to a silent crash. The Jotta client starts when you log in, but when having the computer running for weeks without rebooting, it takes a while to notice. The icon was still present next to the clock, but with no actual process behind it. It’s a known Windows feature.
In May 2020, some days after the subscription for the next month was paid, I got a not so nice email from Jotta, stating I’d been using Jotta to store business related data.
Strictly speaking, yes. It was true. Some documents were related to starting a business. At most, just a couple of megabytes worth of data was related to the business. Everything else, around 6TB in total, was personal.
- In the early days, Jotta had unlimited storage, no questions asked.
- After a while, upload speed got capped when reaching a certain storage size. I believe this was around 5TB.
- Still no client side encryption, and they scan through you data, just as they wouldn’t do that.
The majority was images taken with DSLR cameras. This could be another “trigger”. I did not want to find out or confront Jotta.
It was time to say goodbye.
So, bye!
Replacement
Restic. Pure and simple.
It plays well with major file storage services like AWS S3 and BackBlaze B2.
The best part is that all data is locally encrypted, even the filenames. For the storage provides, it’s just a blob of data.
See Also
- Notes on Hugo
- Is C++ your favorite programing language?
- Vcpkg and Cmake
- A Man With No Arms
- `enable_if` Contains Template Pack