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One Year Into Switching to an EU Cloud Storage Provider
Mac Apps
It's a given that we all need a safe place to store or back up our digital lives--somewhere our data will survive if a laptop gets stolen or a house burns down. Beyond simple protection, there's the everyday convenience of being able to reach your files from any device, anywhere with an internet connection. For most of us, that means choosing a cloud service that fits our needs. The usual suspects are U.S.-based: iCloud, Google Drive, Dropbox, and plenty of others.
In 2025, I decided to rethink that default. For privacy reasons, I wanted to reduce my reliance on U.S.-based cloud providers and move toward services located in countries with stronger data-protection laws. One of the companies I landed on was Koofr, which is based in Slovenia and operates under EU privacy regulations. After more than a decade of paying monthly fees to Google and Dropbox, I found a lifetime deal for 1 TB of Koofr storage on StackSocial (still available) and bought it immediately.
Koofr's privacy story is refreshingly straightforward. Files are protected with strong encryption, there's no ad tracking, no content scanning, and no behind-the-scenes data harvesting. Because Koofr operates under EU data-protection standards--currently some of the strictest in the world--your personal data is treated as exactly that: yours.
Koofr has a long feature list, and I covered it in detail when I first migrated. If you want the full breakdown, you can read that here. The short version:
- You can connect multiple cloud accounts (Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive) and search across all of them from a single interface.
- It includes in-browser Office support for editing Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files.
- File sharing is flexible, with expiring or permanent links, public receive links, and no hard restrictions on file size or type.
- It works everywhere: web, desktop apps, mobile apps, and even through WebDAV or rclone if you want to integrate it with other tools.
Moving my data over was painless. From the Koofr web interface, you can mount other major cloud services and simply drag files from one to another. If you prefer command-line tools, those work just as well.
There are several ways to access Koofr from a Mac. You don't technically need any special software--macOS Finder can mount WebDAV drives, and Koofr supports that natively. Apps like QSpace Pro can maintain a persistent connection and automatically mount Koofr at startup. For my own workflow, though, I prefer the official Koofr desktop app. It's faster than plain WebDAV and adds useful features I rely on.
One feature I didn't expect to love is Koofr's local shared folders. You can create shared spaces between computers on your home network where the data never leaves your LAN. It has quietly become my favorite way to move files between my Macs. In the ten months I've been using Koofr, I haven't experienced a single outage that affected me. Just as important, they don't bombard me with upsell attempts or marketing emails--something that feels almost unheard of in the tech space these days. At this point I'm syncing a lot of my digital life to Koofr: my personal music library, ebook and audiobook collections, software archives, important documents, and roughly 75,000 photos. I even managed to accidentally delete a large batch of files through the web interface. Thanks to Koofr's restore tools, I recovered everything without having to re-upload a thing.
The main criticism you'll see online is speed--specifically that Koofr can feel slower than the big U.S. providers. I can't really speak to that. For my needs, performance has been perfectly fine, and I've never found myself waiting around wishing it were faster. I'm not a heavy user of the iOS app, but some people do wish it were as polished and feature-rich as the Dropbox or Google Drive mobile apps.
Who Koofr Is (and Isn't) For If your top priorities are privacy, straightforward pricing, and reliable cross-platform file storage, Koofr is an excellent choice. It's especially appealing if you like having multiple ways to access your data--native apps, WebDAV, rclone, or even direct browser access--without being locked into a single ecosystem.
It's also a great fit for people who want to break free from the endless subscription treadmill. The lifetime plans make financial sense if you plan to keep your data around for years, and Koofr has been around long enough to feel stable and mature rather than fly-by-night.
On the other hand, Koofr probably isn't ideal if you live entirely inside Apple's ecosystem and depend heavily on deep iCloud integrations, or if you need ultra-fast collaboration features on par with Google Workspace. Power users who rely on tightly integrated mobile apps with every bell and whistle might find Koofr's apps a bit more utilitarian.
For everyone else--especially Mac users who care more about control and privacy than about shiny extras--Koofr hits a practical sweet spot. It's not flashy, but it's dependable, reasonably priced, and refreshingly respectful of your data. For my workflow, that matters a lot more than another animated onboarding screen.