Pastedb is now Paste.me

Like I have announced in late 2018. A new project was born called PasteDB. The mission was clear. Provide a way to securely share short text snippets with your friends and family, without anyone intercepting the message, not even the hosting provider.

We can now daily read in the news how big tech giants mine our data to provide a more targeted experience for their users, collect data under the pretence of providing a “better service” for their users/customers. This may be true in some cases, but we can not be sure anymore.

To have a little recap, paste.me provides an easy way to share short snippets and now also small files with your friends and family. The paste name and paste contents are encrypted client side and the original paste name or content never touches the server API in any way.

The sending of small files is a recent addition to the Paste.me webapp. There are some limitations though, currently you are able to attach a maximum of 4 files, while these individual files, should not be bigger than 30MB each. The spirit is the same, the name of the files and the contents never reach the server and the encryption is running on the client side. Due to this, the creation and decryption of pastes can be slower, based on the amount and size of the files and of course all of this depends on the client’s resources (mostly CPU) for the decryption process. So please be aware of this fact, when sending files.

The webapp is fully responsive and also mobile compatible. So you can easily open the webapp on PC’s with modern browsers and also on mobile devices.

We also offer a command line client. With this, you can easily upload pastes to Paste.me and share them amongst your friends too. This is open source and can be found here at pasteme-cli. The CLI tool is written in Go and it is fully compatible with all the platforms you did use until now, we offer a precompiled binary under the releases tab, which you can use right away. Feedback is welcome, also if you find a way to improve this, please send a PR.

I sometimes find myself in the need to send some config file from one server to another, the best way would be to send it through SSH for example, but in some cases it is not possible to set this up, so using pasteme-cli is quite easy and saves you a lot of time. I am also working on a way, to get the paste decrypted from a paste URL, so stay tuned :)! The cli app does not support the upload/download of files yet, but this will be available soon.

The frontend uses React and the backend is written in Go. The database engine is MongoDB, I think this suited the needs for such a project better than any SQL type of engine we could be using, since we are basically storing JSON type of data, which can have various lengths and size.

As always, constructive feedback is welcome and I will gladly discuss about this further if required.