I'm thinking about switching from google drive to dropbox, due to safety reasons (I don't want any suspicious AI spy on my files). Today I noticed the Hetzner Storage box and mountain duck.

Hetzner storage box offers 1TB network drive for 3.2 EUR per month, and mountain duck offers a way to mount that network drive on Windows, with a 39 USD one-time fee. The software is made in swiss.

Due to the god damn GFW in China, the speed can't go over 100KB/s without proxy. Thankfully, with my proxy server set up on the Hetzner FSN datacenter, the upload speed is faster than 4MB/s, which I think is the limit of my network. The download speed is also not bad: 8MB/s at the beginning, drop to 2MB/s, sometimes stuck at 2Mbps. Not sure who should be blamed for this, since there are too many participants involved: mountain duck, my transparent proxy, my network ISP, the proxy server on Hetzner, Hetzner storage box, I don't know. But with WebDAV, it supports random access, which means I can stream a video and scroll back and forth without waiting for the stupid client software to download the entire file (It's you, Google Drive Client).

The price is also the cheapest. Hetzner's price is equivalent to 38.16 USD per TB per year (BX11, with BX41, you get 24.246 USD per TB per year), while Google Drive (2TB annually) is 49.995 USD per TB per year, and dropbox (2TB annually) is 59.94 USD per TB per year. The proxy server is kind of required no matter which service I use, so that's not a big game changer.

I will try this configuration for a while. If I think it's good enough, that would be a great deal.