Hoodik vs OneDrive: An Encrypted OneDrive Alternative

OneDrive is rarely a decision. It arrives with Windows, it is where Word saves by default, and if you pay for Microsoft 365 you already have a terabyte of it. That bundling is the product's real strength and it is also why most people have never looked at how it protects files.

Personal Vault Is Not End-to-End Encryption

This is the most common misunderstanding about OneDrive, so it is worth being precise.

Personal Vault is a folder that requires a second identity check to open, locks itself after a period of inactivity, and on Windows stores its local copies in a BitLocker-encrypted area. Those are real protections against someone with access to your unlocked laptop or your signed-in session.

None of them stop Microsoft from reading the contents. Files in Personal Vault are encrypted the way the rest of OneDrive is encrypted: per-file keys, held by Microsoft, in Microsoft's key store. Microsoft can decrypt a Personal Vault file for a legal request, an internal process, or an automated scan, exactly as it can for any other file. Personal Vault raises the bar for an attacker at your keyboard. It does not change who holds the keys.

Hoodik has no equivalent feature because it does not need one. Every file is encrypted on your device before upload, with a key wrapped for your account. The server stores ciphertext and holds no key that opens it. File and folder names are encrypted the same way, so the server sees a UUID rather than severance-agreement.docx.

Where OneDrive Wins

The bundle. Microsoft 365 Personal is around $9.99/month and includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and a terabyte of OneDrive. Judged as storage alone that is very cheap, and judged as an office suite the storage is close to free. Hoodik does not compete with that on price and does not try to.

Office co-authoring. Two people editing the same spreadsheet, changes merging live, version history in the file. This requires the service to read the document, and it is genuinely useful. Hoodik has an encrypted notes editor for your own writing and nothing that replaces Excel.

Windows integration. Files On-Demand puts placeholder files in Explorer that download when opened, so a terabyte of cloud storage costs almost nothing on disk. It is well built and deeply wired into the OS. Hoodik has no Windows client at all; Windows users work through the web app.

Enterprise administration. Tenant-wide policies, retention, eDiscovery, compliance tooling, Entra ID integration. If your organization already runs on Microsoft, OneDrive is the path of least resistance and often the only path IT will approve.

Where Hoodik Wins

The server cannot decrypt your files, so scanning, disclosure, and insider access all stop being questions of policy. Microsoft scans OneDrive content against its Services Agreement and hash databases, and accounts have been suspended over automated matches. Because a Microsoft account is also your email, your Xbox, and your Windows sign-in, a suspension is expensive. Hoodik's server holds ciphertext, so there is nothing to classify and no classifier.

Search does not require handing over the query. Hoodik tokenizes search terms on the client with a BERT tokenizer, hashes each token with SHA256, and sends only hashes for matching. You get search across every file from any device while the server learns neither the query nor what matched. OneDrive's index is built from your plaintext, on Microsoft's servers.

The cryptography is current. File keys are wrapped with a hybrid of X25519 and ML-KEM-768, the key exchange NIST standardized for the post-quantum era, so recorded traffic does not become readable when quantum computers arrive. Login uses OPAQUE, meaning your password never reaches the server in any form and cannot be leaked from it.

You can inspect it and you can leave with it. Hoodik's server is source-available Rust that you can read, compile, and fork. Run it on a machine you own, or let us run it on Hoodik Cloud, which uses the same publicly auditable code and lets you export the entire instance and self-host it later. OneDrive is a black box you cannot run yourself.

Who Should Use Which

If you pay for Microsoft 365, OneDrive is already included and works well for documents you actively edit. Nothing here argues you should stop using it for that.

The argument is about the other pile: identity documents, tax filings, medical records, contracts, legal correspondence, the archive you keep because you have to and would rather nobody indexed. That material never gets co-authored. It sits there for years, which is exactly the situation where "the provider holds the key" and "recorded now, decrypted later" both matter.

Running a server is optional. Hoodik Cloud is €9/month for 100 GB or €19/month for 500 GB, in the EU or US, provisioned in minutes with a 14-day trial. It is a managed service the same way OneDrive is, except we cannot read your files and you can take the whole instance with you.