As the title states. Does adding any encryption to files I move to gdrive or stream from the gdrive to plex get any slower due to the files being encrypted? I would run unecrypted files but it seems that people suggest that you should encrypt files just so google can’t see what you have.
Is encryption worth it at all if Google really doesn’t mind you having files (Media) as long as you don’t share them?
I am just trying to get the best speed to plex as possible and if getting rid of encryption can help I probably will do it. Thanks for reading.
It matters if you care about your privacy and preventing Google from knowing what you’re storing (regardless of whether they will do anything about it). Given that Google is inherently an analytics and advertising company, it seems reasonable that they might use data about what you’re storing to figure out what you’re interested in and build a profile about you.
On top of this, there is the question of data breaches. Assuming you care about this data to any reasonable extent, you probably don’t want any random person who has access to the server to be able to access your files. While it’s true that Google probably won’t have a major data breach, there’s the example of when the APIs exposed to programmers gave them access to more info than they were supposed to get. Encrypting your files (on your end) means accidents like this (as well as deliberate server-side breaches) don’t affect your security or privacy.
So while I can’t say anything about whether encryption slows things down (I’m currently using tar + zstd + split + gpg to create encrypted blocks of data for archival/backup purposes - a very different purpose than the one you are using this for and one that doesn’t work well with rclone's crypt backend), I’d absolutely recommend you encrypt files if you can (if it doesn’t affect performance too much).
Thank you for your advice it is good to know the implications of having unencrypted data on the cloud. Now just wondering if it hurts performance or not.