I have a free OneDrive account. How secure is it?

I want to use it to keep stuff, and to transfer files across my home network (2 desktops and 2 laptops).

Use Google Drive or Dropbox instead.  Microsoft recently fucked over people with free OneDrive accounts by dropping the storage limit from 15GB to 5GB.  They also stuck a 1TB cap on people who paid for "unlimited" storage.

OneDrive, Dropbox, and Google drive all leverage 2 factor authentication. None of those options have zero knowledge encryption.

SpiderOak has zero knowledge, but frankly their interface is just horrid.

Either way I doubt you would actually require zero knowledge storage, so pick the one that has the most free storage space.

Okay, next question: How secure is it against probing by Microsoft employees? How secure is it against search & seizure by the Feds?

Purely hypothetical questions, of course.

Not at all.

Eh, all the providers have done that shit once they account for the real cost of storage and realize the demand is outpacing their acceptable losses on "free" tier products.  DropBox will be next once they start repaying the loans for that shiny new datacenter infrastructure they are building to replace AWS.

As for the OP's question:  The security, relatively speaking, is as good as any of the other public cloud storage providers.  Probably better actually.  Microsoft has put some serious coin and design chops into these products to compete with AWS and Google.

I wouldn't worry about it any more than you worry about the security of your email while it's on the remote server or any other Internet bounded service.  OneDrive is a good product but to be in full disclosure, I've never used the free version.

Onedrive also blows for other reasons.  I recently had to provide about 17GB of files to someone across the company.  "Hey, I get OneDrive with my O365 subscription, I'll use that."

Nope.  For starters, some of the individual files were over 2GB, and OneDrive can't handle them.  Doh.  Then, the rest were comprised of something like 85,000 small files, and OneDrive won't allow that many files, even if you're well under the storage limit you're paying for.

https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_sc_0_13?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=terabyte+hard+drive&sprefix=Terabyte+hard%2Caps%2C303

It also can't sync folder paths greater than 255 characters.

I use SpiderOak to back up financial documents and share them between laptops. The user interface is a bit odd, but once you figure it out and set it up it's easy to just forget about it and use their "Hive" directory to share files between devices.

Anything not on your own personally owned hardware is highly susceptible to hacking/government seizure/internal seizure and/or snooping by whoever owns the hardware.  No matter who owns the hardware.

What is your hypothetical use case for storing hypothetically highly sensitive information on the hypothetical cloud?

Maybe a internet accessible local storage device would be better for your dick pics?

Spideroak is zero knowledge. They couldn't provide the feebs with your data even if they wanted to.

Securing your own personally owned hardware, while possible, is certainly challenging for your average cloud storage user. There is definitely an upfront cost in knowledge and dollars in providing a reasonably secure environment to store sensitive data.

So they say.  If you're using their software, even if the key is locally stored, there's nothing saying there isn't some tomfoolery going on.

I agree that home gamers in the clound realm are going to spend more in time and money to get the same amount of 'security' as provided services.  However, my statement is still true.

Do your encryption locally and use any cloud storage, you have basically the same thing as Spideroak...unless I'm missing something?  They just make it a little easier for the non-tech savy people to encrypt their stuff before sending it over the wire.