Split. Scatter.
Secure.

Nothing critical — that's the entire point of ShardHex. Your file is split into N erasure-coded shards (typically 5) distributed across different providers. Any K of them (typically 3) mathematically reconstruct the original. If Google Drive bans your account or deletes your data, you still have OneDrive, Dropbox, S3, R2 — any 3 surviving shards bring the file back. There is no single point of failure to ban, attack, or accidentally delete.

No. AES-256-CTR encryption happens entirely client-side, on your machine, before any byte leaves it. Each shard contains a slice of already-encrypted data plus Reed-Solomon parity bytes — there is no plaintext anywhere in transit or at rest in the cloud. Even if every cloud provider colluded, they could not read your data without your AES key, which never leaves your computer.

Whatever K you chose at split time. The default is 5-of-3: split into 5 shards across 5 different providers, any 3 are enough to restore. You can configure other ratios — for example 7-of-4 for stronger redundancy, or 3-of-2 if you only have a few accounts. Higher N adds resilience at the cost of a bit more storage.

Yes. ShardHex appends your encrypted shard after a JPG, PNG, or MP4 file's normal end-marker. The carrier file opens correctly in any photo viewer or video player — the extra bytes sit in a region image and video decoders silently ignore. This is useful when an obviously-encrypted blob would itself attract scrutiny; the stego file looks and behaves like an ordinary photo.

Cryptomator encrypts a folder before syncing it to one cloud — if that cloud bans your account or loses the data, your encrypted vault is gone with it. rclone moves files between clouds but does not split or shard them across providers. Duplicati does incremental encrypted backups to a single destination. ShardHex is the only tool that combines client-side AES-256 encryption with Reed-Solomon erasure coding across multiple cloud providers — losing one provider entirely is a non-event, your file remains fully recoverable.

Your license is tied to your purchase email and activates up to 3 devices via a hardware fingerprint. If you lose the key, contact support from the original email and we will re-issue it. If you switch to a new computer, you can deactivate the old device from inside the app to free up a slot — the new machine then activates normally. Tokens are signed offline, so the app keeps working without an internet connection between activations.