MEGA

can't say anything about using it for serious work, because i use this for personal stuff. so treat this review as a review about personal usage option.

in my case, it's perfect for back-up, sync of always-changing small code projects, large files (high-resolution images and game files), sending files between users, copying files from other users to my cloud instead of downloading it right away, sharing folders (read-only or for people without account to upload something in there), comfortable uploading of files (through app functionality).

tho if you upload images through web-interface - don't forget to allow canvas in browser, otherwise thumbnails will be colorfully cursed. it's kinda slow sometimes, but i don't mind.

i use "pro lite" plan and it's more than enough in terms of storage and additional stuff (VPN).

from Brave AI; "MEGA, a cloud storage service, is headquartered in Auckland, New Zealand. The company offers zero-knowledge encrypted cloud storage, ensuring that only the user can decrypt their data." 20 GB storage free.

I liked Mega back in the day, when it worked. But it's not the case anymore. Upgraded to a paid tier, did a backup of my machine and that's pretty much it. Mega does not work anymore - not possible to log in, sync files, or anything. Support did not help to resolve the issue, as this is apparently a standard behaviour when you have thousands of files under sync functionality. Miraculously managed to cancel the paid subscription before it was automatically renewed.

RIP Mega. It was a great journey, but this is a deal breaker. Bye

Definitely a more "private" file backup service, but is more buggy than their competition. They've also set up their company in some quasi-stateless setup. Good for certain uses, but not as an everyday backup system for data you can't afford to lose.

I have used MEGA for two years and I'm utterly disappointed.

This service is unreliable:

• the mobile app takes a lot of time to open and it's very, very slow (I've looked into this, and the reason it is so is because of bad code and lacking some most obvious optimisations); most of these issues become notiable once you have more than 1 TB of data, I have around 4.
• to give you an example, the search in the mobile app is extremely glitchy, once you searched for something it would display the results, and then once you're scrolling through the results it would re-run the search and refresh the results. This is annoying.
• the synchronisation of pictures from the mobile phone is glitchy: it takes a long time to start, it sometimes completely ignores certain images and videos; when I installed the app on my friend's phone there was a total of ~1500 images and videos to sync in bulk: apparently that's too much for MEGA. After many attempts and restarts of the app, the syncronisation wouldn't start at all. Sometimes it would synchronise a certain amount of images and then it would just stop.
• if I wanted to share a file from another app (let's say WhatsApp) to a cloud drive on my phone, the mobile app would take at least 12 seconds to start, even when repeating the operation (hot start). It seems to me every time you start it, it fetches the manifest file from the server. Again, the lack of optimisation.
• the synchronisation is based on the file's Modified Date attribute: if I am editing my local files without changing the modified date (bulk processing of photos, for example), upon save the files get overwritten with the version from the cloud.
• when you cold start the app (e.g. after a PC reboot) it takes about 16 hours for it to get into a usable state: for 16 hours and sometimes longer it recalculates the hash of every file on the disk trying to determing whether the file is the same.
• it's impossible to reach the support to tell them about the issues: they don't respond to emails (although having a dedicated support mailbox), they don't respond to an in-app support submissions, etc. They don't look respond to the comments on Google Play. I have failed to find any way to contact the support team.

The cherry on top and the reason I'm finally leaving and searching for an Alternative has happened today:

• at some point they released an update that failed to install on my Windows PC: it reported a failure and rolled back to the older version;
• it was running like that for a couple of months, I would ocasionally try to run the update, but it wouldn't budge;
• yesterday I noticed that the files don't get synchronised at all, bidirectionally, so I decided to try and update it again: the update finally had been installed successfully, however after I ran the App it reported that all my folders are out of sync. Preparing to wait another 16 hours for a new synchronisation to go, I started ticking the checkboxes to start the re-sync for all my folders when I noticed that instead of scanning the local drive it's re-fetching the content from the cloud and overwriting my files. I immediately stopped the sync and started reading the log files: turns after the upgrade the App found an old manifest database somewhere and started doing the synchronisation based on the old db: this essentially ended up corrupting my data. Had I not noticed it immediately, the scale of the disaster could have been much greater.

This comment is getting too long and I probably have complaints for 3 times more than I have already written, so I'm going to stop here.

TLDR: MEGA is unreliable and potentially dangerous. If you don't want you files corrupted, if you need a robust service, this is not for you.

The reason why I chose it a couple years ago was the sheer amount of storage they were giving (10 TB) and End-to-end encryption, and back then not a lot of services could provide this. However, now there's better alternatives.