Part 10 of a series on the tools I actually run.

I got tired of renting my own files.

That’s really the whole motivation. Google Drive, Dropbox and OneDrive all work fine, and all three are a line item that shows up forever and goes up whenever they feel like it. Dropbox raises prices. Google restructures a tier. You do nothing, and it costs more. Meanwhile the data sits on servers in a jurisdiction where it can be reached by processes you have no visibility into, belonging to companies whose actual business is elsewhere.

So a few years back I moved my personal storage to pCloud, paid once, and haven’t thought about it since. This is what I’d tell someone considering the same.

Why pCloud specifically

It’s Swiss. The company is based in Switzerland, which matters for the legal framework your data sits under. More usefully, at signup you choose whether your files live in their US or their EU data centre. Pick EU and your files are physically in Europe, under GDPR, out of reach of the more casual American legal instruments.

Pick carefully anyway, because getting it right at signup is free and changing it later isn’t. pCloud will move your account between regions, but they charge a fee each time, and it’s a migration rather than a toggle. Worth thirty seconds of thought at the point where it costs nothing.

The region also determines which API hostname your account answers on, which comes back to bite people when we get to rclone.

You pay once. This is the part that made me switch. pCloud sells lifetime plans as a single payment, and after that there’s no bill. Ever. No renewal, no price increase, no email telling you your storage tier is being reorganised.

Be honest about what “privacy” means here

One thing I want to be straight about, because a lot of writing on pCloud is not.

Choosing the EU data centre gives you jurisdiction. It does not give you zero-knowledge encryption. By default pCloud holds the keys to your files, the same as Google does. What it means is that a different set of laws governs who can compel them to hand anything over, and those laws are considerably friendlier to you than the American ones.

If you want files pCloud genuinely cannot read, that’s pCloud Crypto, and it’s a separate paid add-on, currently around $150 as a lifetime purchase. It gives you an encrypted folder with client-side encryption where the keys never leave your machine.

I think the EU data centre alone is a meaningful improvement over the American providers and I’m comfortable with it for most things. But “my files are in Europe” and “nobody can read my files” are different claims and it’s worth knowing which one you’ve bought.

Wait for a deal

Do not pay list price. pCloud runs promotions constantly, and a discount is closer to the normal state of affairs than an exception.

List prices for individual lifetime plans sit around $199 for 500GB, $399 for 2TB, and $1,190 for 10TB. The 2TB is the sweet spot for most people.

The break-even maths is simple. The annual 2TB plan is about $100. So $399 pays for itself in four years, and everything after that is free. I passed that point a while ago.

Sales run at Black Friday, around Christmas, and at various points through the year for no stated reason. Earlier this year the family plans were going at 65% off. If you’re not in a hurry, put it on a list and wait for one.

The “lifetime” caveat

Read their terms and lifetime means 99 years or your lifetime, whichever comes first. Which is fine, and not the real risk.

The real risk is the company. You’re paying up front for a service that has to still exist in ten years for the deal to have been good. pCloud has been going since 2013 with a large user base and shows no sign of trouble, and I still wouldn’t put anything irreplaceable in one place regardless of who’s hosting it. There’s a 14-day money-back window on lifetime purchases, which is enough to try it properly.

The family plan trick

This is the actual tip, and it’s the thing I’d have wanted to know two years earlier.

pCloud sells a Family plan, lifetime only, covering up to five users. The obvious use is your actual family. But look at what it really gives you: five separate accounts, each with its own login, its own private space, and a storage quota the admin sets.

Which means you can use it to keep things separated.

One account for my own files. One for the small VPS that needs somewhere to put backups. One for a machine that only ever writes logs. Each gets its own credentials and its own slice of the quota. If a server gets compromised, the token on it reaches that server’s account and nothing else. Nothing on the VPS can see, touch, or delete my personal archive.

Compare that with the alternative, which is putting your one personal account’s credentials on every machine you own and hoping.

The admin account can assign custom quotas per member, so you can give the backup account 200GB and keep the rest for yourself. Family lifetime lists at around $595 for 2TB, roughly $200 more than the individual plan, and goes considerably lower on sale. For five isolated accounts that’s a good trade, and it’s a cleaner security story than anything you can do inside a single account.

rclone

The official pCloud Drive app works. It’s also the part I like least, and on macOS it has been the source of most of my irritation with the service.

rclone has a native pCloud backend and I use it for everything now.

Setting it up

rclone config

Pick n for a new remote, name it, choose pcloud from the list, leave client id and secret blank, and let it open a browser for the OAuth handshake. Two minutes.

The EU gotcha: pCloud runs two API hostnames, api.pcloud.com for the US region and eapi.pcloud.com for the EU. If your account is in the EU region and rclone is talking to the US hostname, you get a token error that doesn’t explain itself.

When you authorise through a browser on the same machine, rclone now reads the correct hostname out of the OAuth callback and stores it. But if you’re configuring a headless box with rclone authorize from another machine, it won’t, and you have to set it yourself under “Edit advanced config”:

hostname = eapi.pcloud.com

That’s the single most common reason a pCloud remote doesn’t work on a server.

Then the usual:

rclone lsd pcloud:
rclone copy ~/Documents pcloud:Documents

On-demand mounting

This is where it gets genuinely good. rclone can mount the remote as a filesystem that downloads files only when something opens them:

rclone mount pcloud: ~/pcloud \
  --vfs-cache-mode full \
  --vfs-cache-max-size 20G \
  --vfs-cache-max-age 168h \
  --daemon

Everything appears to be there. Nothing is, until you touch it. Opened files get cached locally for a week, and the cache is capped at 20GB so it can’t run away with your disk.

--vfs-cache-mode full is the setting that matters. The lighter modes are lighter on disk and break any application that expects to seek around inside a file, which in practice means most of them. Use full.

On macOS you need macFUSE for this. On Linux it’s already there.

Make it a systemd unit if you want it permanent. On a Mac, a LaunchAgent, and remember from the Homebrew post that LaunchAgents don’t inherit your PATH, so use the absolute path to the rclone binary or it will silently do nothing.

As storage for a small server

The other use, and the reason the separate family account exists.

A cheap VPS with 20GB of disk can have terabytes of storage attached to it by mounting a pCloud remote. Backups, media, archives, anything you don’t need at local-disk speed. I’ve got a small box that writes nightly backups straight into a mounted remote, and the box itself stays tiny and cheap.

Two things to know. Latency is real, so this is for cold storage and sequential work, not a database. And rclone sync will happily delete things on the destination that aren’t on the source, so read what a command does before you run it against something you care about. Use --dry-run first. I say this with feeling.

Is it as good as Dropbox

No, and I want to be fair about it.

Dropbox’s sync client is better than anything else in this space. It’s faster to notice changes, better at conflicts, and it handles the awkward cases more gracefully. If your work depends on real-time collaborative sync across a team, pCloud is a step down.

For personal storage, which is what this is, the gap doesn’t matter much and the difference in cost over a decade is several hundred dollars. I’d rather have the money and the European data centre.

The sensible arrangement is to stop thinking of any of these as backup at all. pCloud is where my files live and where I reach them from any machine. Actual backup is a separate thing, in a separate place, with separate credentials. One cloud account is not a backup strategy no matter whose it is.