How does it connect to my devices when I'm away from home?

Harbor uses Tailscale, a widely-used networking service built on WireGuard. You install the free Tailscale app once on each device. In most setups your phone talks directly to the dock over an encrypted tunnel, with nothing in between. When a direct connection isn't possible (some mobile carriers, restrictive wifi), Tailscale relays the encrypted traffic — they can see that you connected, not what you sent. Harbor's servers are never in the data path; we don't see your files at any point.

Can I import files from Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud, or other cloud accounts?

Yes. The dock includes an rclone-based UI that connects to Dropbox, Google Drive, Proton Drive, iCloud, OneDrive, Mega, and any other service rclone supports. You can pull files in once for archival, or set up ongoing one-way or two-way sync per folder. The connection lives on your dock, not on a Harbor server, so the credentials stay with you.

What if I only have one dock — how does backup work?

Harbor uses your existing cloud accounts as distributed backup. Connect Proton Drive, Mega, and a couple of other free tiers, and the dock spreads encrypted file copies across them automatically — staying under each provider's free-tier limit. The backup overview UI shows what's stored where, so you can see at a glance which folders are covered and which still need a target. Pairing two docks gives you the cleaner mutual-sync story; the cloud-free-tier approach is what gets most people a real off-site copy without spending a cent extra.

Why ARM and not a mini PC?

ARM single-board computers are the right shape for always-on appliance storage: single-digit watts idle, low heat, no fans, designed to run for years. The dock is meant to live behind a TV or in a closet, not to crunch numbers. The bottleneck for storage like this is the USB drive and the network, not the CPU. A mini PC would be more powerful but consume 4 to 6 times the continuous power for no benefit on this workload.

Does it work on iPhone, Android, and desktop?

Yes. Mac, Windows, Linux, iPhone, and Android all work. Once you install Tailscale on your device, the dock appears like a local server. Open any browser, type its name, and your files are there.

What happens if my home internet goes down?

Devices on your home Wi-Fi can still access the dock normally. It is a local network device first, remote second. Remote access from outside the home pauses until your internet returns, the same as any home server. Your files are never lost; they live on your drive.

The Harbor Dock itself, a small low-power device, plus a power adapter, an Ethernet cable, and a quick-start card. You bring your own USB drive (any size, any brand).

What size USB drive can I use?

Any standard USB drive works. Common sizes range from 1TB to 20TB. Use one drive for personal storage, or pair two docks (one at home, one at a friend's or family member's place) for automatic encrypted off-site backup.

What happens if the drive dies?

A single dock with a single drive has the same failure profile as any single-drive setup: if the drive fails, what was on it is gone. Harbor isn't a RAID array; we don't pretend it is. The intended pattern for anything you can't afford to lose is two docks at two locations, syncing to each other. That's the off-site backup story. If you only buy one dock, treat it like you'd treat any external drive holding important files: keep a separate copy of the photos and documents you can't replace.

How much power does it use?

It's a low-power ARM device designed to run 24/7, like a Wi-Fi router. The impact on your electricity bill is minimal, closer to a smart hub than a desktop computer.

Will it be open source?

Yes, that's the plan. The dock software and companion tools will be open for anyone to audit, build, or fork. You probably won't ever need to look at the code, but knowing the option exists is the difference between owning your storage and renting it.

What if Harbor Dock the company disappears?

Your drive keeps working. Files are stored in standard formats. Plug the drive into any computer and read them directly. Tailscale is independent infrastructure that keeps running without us. You are never stranded.

April 26, 2026

Off-site backup for free: distributing files across cloud free tiers

Most off-site-backup advice ends with 'pay $5/month to BackBlaze.' There's a free path that works for personal-scale data, if you understand what breaks. The honest version of the cloud-free-tier pattern.

Most off-site-backup advice ends the same way. “Pay $5 a month to BackBlaze. It's the cheapest insurance you can buy.” That's a fine recommendation for someone with a hundred gigs of photos who values their evening more than five dollars. It's also not the only option, and for a specific kind of person there's a free path that actually holds up. This is the honest version of how it works and what breaks.

The pattern

Most cloud storage providers offer a free tier somewhere between 2 and 20 gigabytes. Individually that's a toy. Combined, it adds up to something useful. Proton Drive gives you 5 GB. Mega gives you 15-20 GB depending on the promotion. Filen gives you 10 GB. Sync.com gives you 5 GB. Dropbox gives you 2 GB. iCloud throws in 5 GB if you have an Apple ID. OneDrive offers 5 GB for a Microsoft account. None of these will hold your video archive, but together they comfortably hold a household's photos, documents, and project files.

The pattern is to treat the union of free tiers as a single backup destination. You split your important folders across providers, encrypt the data before it leaves your machine, and keep a manifest somewhere that says “photos live on Proton, documents live on Mega, project files split between Filen and Sync.” You restore by pulling each one back. It's a poor person's erasure coding, without the math.

What makes it actually work: rclone

The boring tool that turns this from “sounds clever” into something operable is rclone. It speaks every major cloud-storage API, has a robust crypt backend that encrypts files client-side before upload, supports verification and retries, and can be driven from a config file you keep next to your other dotfiles.

A working setup for one folder of personal documents looks roughly like this. Configure two rclone remotes pointing at two different providers (say Proton Drive and Mega). Wrap each remote in a crypt remote so the provider sees opaque blobs. Schedule rclone sync to run nightly via cron or systemd. Done. The provider can ban your account, lose your account, change pricing, or get hit by an outage, and you still have the other copy.

What breaks

This isn't a free lunch. Free tiers come with real costs, just paid in friction rather than dollars.

Provider terms change. Sync.com used to give 5 GB free; that could become 2 GB tomorrow. Mega occasionally throttles unauthenticated transfers. iCloud is tightly coupled to Apple devices and not usable as a general remote without workarounds. Plan to revisit the list once a quarter.

API limits and rate caps.Some providers cap egress bandwidth on free tiers. A full restore at 2 AM after a drive failure is when you'll find out. Test restore from each provider once a year while you don't need to.

Operational complexity grows linearly.One provider is one thing to monitor. Five providers are five things to monitor. Credentials rotate. OAuth tokens expire. Mega's SDK is famously cranky. The labor cost of keeping this running is real, and most people won't do it without tooling.

Restore is harder than backup.A BackBlaze restore is one URL and one password. A free-tier restore is N URLs, N passwords, and a manifest of which file lives where. If the manifest is on a drive that just died, you're going to spend a Saturday on it. Keep the manifest in version control somewhere safe, and write the restore steps down.

When this is the right answer

The pattern fits a specific shape of person and dataset. You have personal-scale data: tens of gigabytes of photos and documents you can't afford to lose, not terabytes of video. You don't want a recurring bill, either because you're budget-conscious or because subscription sprawl annoys you on principle. You're comfortable enough with command-line tools to keep an rclone config in git. And you're willing to spend the maintenance cost in exchange for not paying the recurring one.

For terabyte-scale media collections, it's the wrong answer. The egress alone breaks the model. For a household who wants something that works without configuration, the answer is BackBlaze, full stop. For everyone in between, it's a defensible path.

The honest tradeoff

Free-tier distributed backup is a strategy that trades money for time and complexity. It buys you sovereignty: files encrypted with your keys, scattered across providers who all individually have access to nothing useful, with no single failure that takes everything down at once. It costs you the maintenance overhead of running it. Whether that trade is worth it depends on whether you'd rather spend $60 a year, or spend the equivalent number of hours once a quarter making sure your tooling still works.

Either choice is fine. The bad choice is the third one, which is to mean to set this up someday and never do either, and then lose your photos.

Curious what your current cloud bill works out to over five years? Run the math here. The number tends to be larger than people expect once you include realistic price hikes.