SFTP backup hosting
vs encrypted cloud storage

Quick summary

If you're running Restic, Borg, or rsync and you need a place to point them at: that's us. If you want a Dropbox replacement with encryption, that's Filen or Sync.com. The two products don't really compete - they solve different problems and sit at different price floors.

The honest version: ServerCrate's per-GB cost is 2-4x what Filen or Sync.com charges. We charge more because each customer gets a private vault on ZFS, not a shared bucket. The trade-off is real isolation, ZFS integrity verification, snapshot retention controlled by us, and a destination that's never going to be browsed by a stranger's accidental sync.

Below: the actual feature differences, the workflow differences, and how to know which you want.

What is a backup destination?

A backup destination is a place your backup tool dumps encrypted snapshots into. You don't open it. You don't browse it. You don't drag files into it. Your tool (Restic, Borg, rsync, restic-rest-server) handles all the access, and the destination just holds whatever the tool encrypts and sends.

Backup destinations are designed for:

• Append-only writes. Backups add new snapshots without rewriting old ones. The destination is optimized for that pattern.
• Integrity verification. ZFS checksums everything on write. Bit rot on a 3-year-old archive gets caught and corrected.
• Scheduled access. Your backup runs at 3 AM. The destination doesn't need to be fast for your phone tapping.
• Predictable, isolated cost. Each user gets their own dataset. You're not contending with a noisy neighbor.
• Fast restore. When something goes wrong, you want all your bytes back fast, not metered by an "egress fee" page.

That's what ServerCrate, BorgBase, and rsync.net all do. We differ on which tool we optimize for (we're Restic-native, BorgBase is Borg-first, rsync.net is rsync/borg/restic-friendly), but the product category is the same: encrypted destination, headless workflow, dedicated vault.

What is general-purpose encrypted cloud storage?

Filen, Sync.com, pCloud, MEGA, and ProtonDrive are drive-in-the-cloud products. You install their app on your laptop and phone. You drag files into a magic folder; they appear everywhere. You share files via a link. You view a photo on your phone, you edit a doc in your browser. It's a Dropbox replacement with stronger encryption.

Cloud storage is designed for:

• Real-time sync. Add a file on your laptop, your phone has it 30 seconds later.
• Daily access. Open files from a web app, edit in-browser, share via links.
• Collaboration. Multiple users, shared folders, permission management.
• Mass-market UX. Drag-and-drop friendly, no command line required.
• Cheap per-GB pricing. Built on shared object storage. Many users in the same buckets. Cost amortizes across the user base.

Cloud storage is good. It's just not a backup destination. If you put your only copy of important data into a sync product, the next time the desktop client gets confused and deletes your local folder, the sync helpfully propagates the delete to the cloud. That's not what you want for "things you'd lose sleep over if they vanished."

When do you want one versus the other?

You want general-purpose encrypted cloud storage if:

• You want a Dropbox replacement with encryption
• You need files accessible from phone, laptop, web in real time
• You share files with people who don't run backup software
• You're moving daily working files between machines
• You want apps to install, not commands to type

You want a dedicated SFTP backup destination if:

• You run Restic, Borg, rsync, or similar - or you want to start
• You want client-side encryption that you control via your own tooling
• You want SFTP / SSH access for scripted, scheduled backups
• You want a destination that's only your encrypted repo - no app shimming, no real-time sync that could accidentally delete things
• You want snapshots that aren't trivially deletable by an attacker who got root on one of your machines
• You're backing up servers, NAS devices, homelabs, dev environments - things that don't have phones

Why per-GB pricing is so different

Filen's 2 TB plan is around $9 per month. ServerCrate's 2 TB plan is $29 per month. That's roughly 3x. The honest reason is architectural:

Cloud storage providers run shared object storage. Hundreds of customers' files sit in the same physical pools, addressed by hash, served by a CDN-grade frontend. The cost per GB is genuinely low because they amortize across the user base. Your files are crypto-isolated from other users (zero-knowledge), but the bytes share infrastructure.

Backup destination services typically run dedicated vaults. ServerCrate spins up a private ZFS dataset for every paid customer. Your SFTP credentials only land at your vault. Your snapshots are kept by us (not by a third-party storage layer). Your ZFS checksums run on hardware we paid for, with no neighbors writing to the same dataset.

Dedicated vault costs more per GB. You're paying for isolation, integrity guarantees, snapshot retention, dedicated bandwidth on restore, and a destination that's never going to surprise you with someone else's load pattern. The price floor is just genuinely different from shared object storage.

If price-per-GB is your only metric, Filen or pCloud or Sync.com will always win. If "this is the only copy I have of family photos and 10 years of dev work," the trade-off looks different.

The Restic workflow - this is what we exist for

You install Restic on the machines you want to back up. You point it at your ServerCrate vault. From there, every backup is encrypted on your machine, then uploaded as ciphertext blocks. The vault holds ciphertext. The Restic password lives on your machines - we never see it, never store it, can't recover it.

# first time: initialize the repo
restic -r sftp:vault@vault.servercrate.net:/data init

# daily: snapshot everything that matters
restic -r sftp:vault@vault.servercrate.net:/data backup /home /etc /var

# list what's there
restic -r sftp:vault@vault.servercrate.net:/data snapshots

# restore yesterday's state to /tmp
restic -r sftp:vault@vault.servercrate.net:/data restore latest --target /tmp

That's the workflow. Headless. Scripted. Cron-friendly. Encrypted client-side. No GUI between you and your data. That's the loop a backup destination is optimized for, and it's not the loop cloud storage products are designed around.