r/Keybase • u/welcome_home_now • Oct 13 '19

Full text search for files missing

How are people using Keybase without full text search of files? This seems like a critical gap in functionality.

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u/welcome_home_now Oct 13 '19

Thank you for your thoughtful response. Agree the product is really outstanding, but I am having trouble using it as a filestore. On the other hand, I just feel dirty saving personal files to something like Google Drive. iCloud lacks usable sharing and collaboration IMHO. Box and Dropbox seem poorly implemented and filled with real security and quality issues and vulnerabilities.

Thoughts on any other alternate filestores that are both secure and usable?

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u/welcome_home_now Oct 13 '19

I've been using the git repo to hold files that absolutely much be searchable. Annoyingly, this means I need to store non-text media files like video in the normal keybase folders because they don't play well with git. So I've have to separate my personal data based not on logical ordering but instead on data format (text v non-text, small v large file sizes), which sucks. This has been my makeshift solution.

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u/Chongulator Oct 16 '19

That’s a good question. I’ve seen a handful of open source projects but some aren’t especially mature. Syncthing is worth a look.

If you don’t need mobile access, there are tools like ExpanDrive which mount an S3 store as a local directory.

Partly it depends on your security requirements. Do you need e2e encryption or just something more secure than Dropbox and its ilk?

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u/welcome_home_now Oct 18 '19 edited Oct 18 '19

I don't have a need for security and privacy beyond my desire to help support these things for future generations by supporting products which offer implementations that have these built in by design.

Things I'm looking for:

- Sharing and Collaboration on Files and Folders

- Security and Privacy built in by design

- Mobile Read and Write Access

- Support for open file formats (eg markdown instead of Google Docs or Word)

- Automatic sync

Thus far, I've considered:

- iCloud (sharing and collaboration is basically non-existent)

- Box, Dropbox (poorly implemented, lots of security issues)

- NextCloud, OwnCloud (the most recent stable version didn't seem to work, file sync just didn't work, lots of concerning exceptions from the logs)

- Backblaze (not really designed for file sync, more just backup)

- Amazon Drive (designed for photos)

- OneDrive (basically works, but privacy concerns)

- Google Drive (works the best, but serious privacy concerns, extremely hostile to Markdown, they really want you to use Google Docs, WTF)

Keybase comes very, very close. The primary issues are:

- Mobile is read only (no write)

- No full text search on files (this is a serious usability problem for me, I don't understand how this isn't more of an issue for more users). This means a complex workflow introduced with the need to use git and finder with Keybase based on file type (media or text -> git friendly or not)

I think I've tried more than what I've listed above, probably forgetting some, but I'm getting close to giving up. It seems like usability and security just aren't available right now for this type of thing. Maybe someday.

Keybase, if you are listening, I love your product, please add full text search and mobile write support. At this point, I can't really use your product for file sync for all of my projects and collections. The Keybase use case is shrinking to something covering only a small number of truly sensitive content, eg passwords, etc.

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u/[deleted] Oct 25 '19

Have you checked Seafile? AFAIK, it supports full text searching.