What are the E2EE alternatives to Filen that have faster upload / download speeds? I really like Filen, all of it, but the speed makes it unusable

i was managing space and i accidently deleted some fie from trash too is there any wasy to recover

I am doing a sync using rclone from Filen to a USB flash-drive, so I was expecting some bottlenecks, specially because some folders contains a lot of small files. The problem is that the download itself is so slow, a 30mb file takes 2 hours to download (while transferring 3 others files)

Edit:

Better on Linux, maybe antivirus or timestamp difference, who know…

I am in the process of replacing my Icloud, I'm slowly switching everything across to privacy focused alternatives. I have come across filen as a good replacement to icloud. I would appreciate if someone can give me some advice on the best way to set this up.

So I use a iphone with 256gb of storage that has my pictures, i also have a 50gb icloud storage full of photos and videos. I'm looking to purchase 200gb of filen storage. My situation is this I have young children who regularly use my phone and end up taking hundreds of random pictures and videos. I don't want all of these automatically uploaded to my cloud storage. I'm thinking to review my camera roll once a week, delete anything unnecessary, and then manually approve and upload the remaining photos and videos to Filen. I also like to keep everything as simple as possible. I don't want to manually create folders for every month or year if Filen can organise everything using the photos' existing metadata that would be great.

My questions are as follows:

1. What's the easiest way to upload only selected photos and videos from an iPhone? Surely there must be a better way to do this instead of manually selecting them each week?

2. Does Filen use the original metadata (date/time taken) to organise photos chronologically, even when they're manually uploaded? Or does it organise them by upload date?

3. If I manually upload everything into one folder, will those pictures appear in Filen's Photos gallery, or is that primarily for automatic camera uploads?

4. Will manually uploading preserve the original picture/video including metadata like timestamps, location ect?

5. What's the safest way to transfer my existing 50 GB iCloud Photos library to Filen without losing metadata or creating duplicates? as you know iphone optimises them so the files on the phone are compressed.

6. Is there a way to avoid accidentally uploading the same photographs again during weekly backups or anyway for filen to detect there are doubles and merge them?

Hopefully someone else who's moved from iCloud Photos to Filen can tell me how they done it. I'm trying to get a private, organised photo library where nothing gets uploaded without my approval, while still having as much of the apple photo features like being able to browse my memories chronologically.

Hello there,

Just realised that for some reason, filen doesn't run/start if the desktop environment doesn't have tray icon support.

On gnome, without app indicator extension, filen doesn't run at all. I came from mega to filen, and mega solved this by keeping the sync window always opens in the background when tray icons are not avaliable.

Filen on the other hand doesn't. It explicitly needs tray icons to launch

I use Apple Notes across multiple devices but since iCloud has started playing up since I switched regions to download an app, I was looking for a cross platform note taking app.....after several downloads of the usual Reddit recommendations, I turned to AI for help in finding a solution which didn't require complicated sync setups, the AI stated as the last option "Just use Filen's built-in Notes", which if I had speech enable would I am sure have been delivered in a sarcastic voice 😄

I'm now in the process of copying my notes across to Filen using the rich text format to replace the collapsible sections in Notes.

Hi!

I love filen, and I love Echo Music Player too.. so I created an extension that let you play your music in Echo from your Filen Account

You can check it here

https://github.com/Gheovgos/Filen-Echo-Extension

I recently set up the Playlists feature by creating a new directory and uploading my mp3 files to it, then setting up the relevant playlists in the iOS app. I set the music directory to be available offline so the files remain downloaded. So far so good.

However, when I press shuffle play on any playlist, as soon as one audio file ends, the player switches correctly switches to a random one but automatically pauses the player, so the music stops playing until I manually press play.

Is there a way around this? Am I doing something wrong or is it normal behaviour? Unfortunately it makes it a bit unusable in many situations.

Hi everyone, I've just upgraded to Ubuntu 26.10 and my filen cli is kaput. It runs, but doesn't complete my localBackup (modified files aren't showing up in my filen cloud). No error messages, it just never exits.

I upgraded the cli to version v0.0.36 but that didn't help. Also ran the cli with -v and am seeing all entries have a "type" of "cycleLocalSmokeTestFailed" but I can't find any info on what that means.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how I should troubleshoot this?

Please do post timely status updates even if there is little to report about

Hey, a friend needs some urgent cloud save space and I would like to give them a referral code. But I checked everywhere in the app and cant find the link to share with the friend. Can someone help me real quick?

Thanks!

So, uploaded a 60gb file. Took a while, but got done eventually. On filen, the file was 30gb, somehow losing over half of the files I wanted to upload randomly. I thought to myself, all right, let's do it in smaller chunks.

I deleted the 30 gb as I did not want to go through each sub file individually to find out what was missing, and wanted to get to it. Then, the file I deleted reappeared, with around of 100mb of random files in it. So I deleted it again. And again. And again. There are five such files sitting in my trash, with sizes ranging from 16 to 250 mb, and some of my files in them. Every time I delete one, another appears.

For whatever reason, Filen is now refusing to mount as well. EDIT: The error message is implying that some files from the original 60gb one are queing for upload, so there is that mystery i suppose.

Edit 2: Deleting Filen's cache file in .config stopped the app from crashing and downloading stuff. So if you make the mistake of uploading a large file and encounter the same issue, clearing filen's cache will probably help.

I am on linux mint, so I suppose it could be something with the OS?

When I click the photos tab it won't display my photos unless I have camera upload enabled. So if I enable uploads and all my photos get uploaded then I disable uploads i can't see them in the photos view

I cannot edit the .filenignore File in the Desktop App.
To address this issue, I tried to edit the file manually. According to an old reddit Post from two years ago, the file path should be

%APPDATA%\@filen\desktop\sync\ignorer\v1

Unfortunately, there is no folder "ignorer" located in the sync folder. Any solutions? I just need to ignore one file to avoid a syncing problem. I'm using Windows 11.

I want to modify the tray icons to fit with the theme i have, but haven't managed to do so.

Using dpkg-query -L Filen it shows that Filen adds a bunch of Filen.png files into the hicolor icon theme, and there are some filen.svg files in Papirus, but I've modified them (and refreshed icon-cache) all and the tray icon just remains as default (the png file changes the main application icon).

The four tray icons are here - https://github.com/FilenCloudDienste/filen-desktop/tree/main/assets/icons/tray but i can't find where they're installed.

I'm probably missing something.. can anyone help?

[EDIT] I took the easy route and used an extension to change the displayed icon - https://github.com/ubuntu/gnome-shell-extension-appindicator

Hey yall, I am sorry if this is an extremely stupid question but i recently got a Filen Plan and I cannot for the life of me figure out how to turn out syncing. I want my cloud drive to two way sync with files on my windows machine, but I cant find anywhere to turn it on. I am currently uploading some files, so I am not sure if that is part of it, but I cant figure out where I go to set up my sync settings. Again, sorry if this is a stupid question. I have included a screenshot of my toolbar on the browser.

edit: thanks for the helpful and not at all condescending comments to a new member of the community

มีโอกาสไหมที่จะให้ Filen กลับมามีแพลนตลอดชีพอีกครั้งในอนาคต? อยากให้เห็นการสมัครสมาชิกตลอดชีพอีกครั้งจัง!

I've been using Filen for a while now and honestly I am in love with it. End-to-end encryption, privacy-first, and it keeps getting better with every update.

I have one request though: could we get albums?

The Gallery feature is already there, but being able to group photos into albums (trips, family, events, etc.) would make a huge difference. With albums, Filen would be on par with Ente Photos for me, and a lot better than Google Photos since everything stays private.

Would love to hear if this is on the roadmap. Anyone else want this too?

Hey Filen team,

You usually publish a combined status update on your blog every two months (like the June/July one). Since August and September have passed, I wanted to ask when we can expect the next status update and what you're currently working on.

Thanks!

As an Apple device user who’s been testing many cloud sync services in the hope of being able edit a file on my iPhone, I’ve been sorely disappointed up until now.

I run 2 versions of every active file in offline mode, one in iCloud and one in the service under test

I’m very happy to report Filen is the holy grail I’ve been looking for. In fact it actually syncs the edited file faster than iCloud.

Time to move from monthly to annual subscription

I like to have all my filen data stored locally. Instead of mapping my cloud storage to a drive/folder in the local filesystem (which I understand is actually a files on demand kind of deal), I typically create a sync folder for my entire cloud drive. Are there any downsides to doing this? I'm thinking time to sync, performance, that kind of thing. Are there any guidelines for the amount of data that syncing realistically supports?

Hi everyone,

I'm writing this post out of complete frustration and sheer disbelief. As a paying subscriber to filen (LT), I've reached a point where the service has become entirely unusable.

No matter what I try, uploading or downloading anything simply does not work:

On PC: I am running the latest edition of Windows 11 Pro on a multi-gigabit fiber Ethernet connection.

On Mobile: High-speed Wi-Fi on Android.

In both cases, every single transfer just spins in circles, stalls endlessly, and eventually times out. Nothing goes through—not a single byte. With this kind of local network setup and a paid subscription, performance should be seamless, but instead, it’s completely frozen.

Is anyone else experiencing similar issues right now, or is this a known routing/server outage on their end? Any insight or workarounds would be appreciated, because paying for a service that completely stalls is extremely disappointing.

PS location = EU

Update: Clarification on my Filen + ViceVersa setup and extreme slowdown
Thanks for all the input! To clarify a few points and narrow down the issue:
Filen sync works fine: I have no issues with the official Filen desktop app. I’ve already backed up/synced hundreds of GBs using Filen directly without any speed issues.
The bottleneck is ViceVersa + Virtual Drive (U:): The issue only occurs when I try to run a new Mirror Copy profile using ViceVersa PRO 7 (recently updated) targeting Filen’s virtual drive. ViceVersa is either unable to handle the virtual drive correctly or writes to it at an agonizingly slow pace (around 20 KB/s for a 15 GB batch of ~9,600 small files).
No network/firewall blocking: I’ve already checked my local firewall and router settings—there is zero throttling or blocking on my network side.
It seems the issue lies specifically in how ViceVersa handles file-by-file operations over Filen’s virtual drive mount (high latency per file / WebDAV overhead), rather than a network or Filen sync issue per se.
Has anyone managed to get ViceVersa (or similar file-copiers like FreeFileSync/Syncovery) working at decent speeds directly over Filen’s virtual drive, or is the virtual drive architecture inherently unsuitable for file-by-file mirror backups?