u/crazyserb89

I've been a MEGA Pro subscriber for two years. Their backup feature was the main reason I stayed. Then it broke about two and a half months ago, and I started seriously looking for alternatives.

Filen caught my attention immediately. Zero-knowledge E2EE by default, open source, competitive pricing, clean desktop client, and a team that actually responds. Everything about it screams "this is built by people who care." I even reached out to their support and had a genuinely useful back-and-forth conversation with them.

But after digging into the sync modes, I hit a wall.

What I need is simple in concept but apparently rare in practice: a true real-time backup mode. My entire D drive mirrored to the cloud instantly, every file change, rename, deletion, and metadata update pushed to the cloud the moment it happens. A live 1:1 replica, always in sync, no manual intervention.

The part that makes this a backup rather than just a sync: the cloud copy must be strictly read-only. No way to delete, move, or modify anything from the web app, another client session, or any other interface. Only preview, stream, and download. The moment cloud-side writes are possible, the mirror is no longer trustworthy.

Filen's "Local to cloud" mode gets close, but as their own support confirmed, there is no write-lock enforcement on the cloud side. Another logged-in session can touch the cloud folder, and versioning is the safety net rather than a preemptive block. That is not the same thing.

Versioning and trash retention are also part of what I need, and Filen already has both. That part is covered.

The sync engine is apparently being rewritten right now, which means the timing for this kind of feature request could not be better. I already submitted it on features.filen.io.

Filen, you are genuinely the closest thing to what I am looking for. This one addition would make the switch a no-brainer.

https://preview.redd.it/v07ckre765yg1.png?width=830&format=png&auto=webp&s=d748cf5c858a187c26914340066e074a421cb87e

I've been paying MEGA Pro I for almost 2 years and recommended them to anyone on Reddit.

I'm here to take it all back. Here's why:

February 21, 2026. I reinstall Windows. Open the MEGA desktop app. Try to set up my backup again. Error. Try again. Error. Try the official troubleshooting steps. Error. The device is stuck in their backend under an old motherboard ID that I cannot see, cannot rename, cannot delete from anywhere. Not the Android app. Not iOS. Not the web Device Centre. It's a ghost their system refuses to let go of.

I open a ticket. Then another. I send logs. I record videos. I screenshot every settings page on every platform they ask for. Two weeks of this.

Then the kicker: Their own devs eventually admit it's a backend bug in how they handle device lifecycle. The same bug I had reported six months earlier in a different ticket. They never fixed it then either.

"Fix coming in 6.2.0. No later than 6.4.0." No date.

6.2.0 ships. No fix. 6.2.1, 6.2.2 nothing. No fix. "Now it'll be in 6.3.0, in the next several weeks." Who knows when.

After weeks of asking for something fair, a refund for the downtime or a Pro I extension equal to it, they refused both. Then came the games:

First, they switched me to Pro II for 3 months without asking. I told them three times in writing that I don't need more storage, I need the backup to work. They called it a favor.

When I rejected it, they shut Pro II off and came back with "no refund possible, but here's 2 months of Pro I free." Catch: to actually access those 2 months I have to cancel my Google Play subscription, which permanently kills my legacy pricing. Their "compensation" would cost me money every year going forward. And it's only 2 months. The bug is already deep in its third month with no fix shipped. They refuse to extend further. Final answer.

Refund refused. Real extension refused. What's left is either a financial trap or storage I don't use. That's MEGA's idea of fair.

Third month of paying for a broken core feature. No fix. No usable compensation. Just "escalated to developers" copy-pasted every week.

Why I'm posting:

If you are considering MEGA specifically for backup, read this first. Their backup feature has a known device-lifecycle bug that triggers on any Windows reinstall or hardware change.

I'm filing a Google Play refund dispute next. If anyone here has gone through that process for a non-functional paid app feature, I'd like to hear how it went.