Dropbox (YC 07) Thumbdrives | Hacker News Reader

Dropbox (YC 07) Thumbdrives

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35 pointsprbuckley10 comments

Huh? Why not just use web access?

Isn't a thumbdrive something dropbox hoped to get rit of?

Edit: the rest of this comment is a misconception on my part. I agree with you completely, except that now you can use a smaller, cheaper thumb drive than you could before (though arguably bandwidth limits effect the same result).

If you're dropboxing large files, using a lookaside cache means that you can greatly reduce latencies and often improve throughput (assuming you're not on 1 or 10 gigabit directly to the dropbox servers). But I doubt the dropbox servers themselves support this kind of functionality.

More likely is that you can move your files to various disconnected computers more easily and automatically without dealing with manually pushing them around from dropbox folders to portable drives.

If you often use multiple computers for accessing various password-protected things (maybe as a system admin or just the occasional need of accessing something on another computer), then you could use a password manager that runs off of the flash drive and Dropbox portable to keep it synced with new passwords and password changes.

I have Keepass and Dropbox on my flash drive just in case I ever need to access something when using someone else's computer, without having to worry about keeping my password database up to date. Much easier than downloading Keepass on a computer that isn't mine--rude at best, not possible due to permissions at worst--and then downloading the database from the web access and cleaning up when I'm done.

It's helped me once or twice; not often, but the relatively small files on a multi-gig drive is worth it.

KeePass in the office is exactly what I'll be doing with the thumb drive version! In my office, the IT staff actually runs scans of your system and goes through reports of what's installed. So to me, this is exactly what I needed.

Huh? Why not just use web access?

I want my Dropbox stuff available to me in the office, but it's not my computer, so I'd rather not install the regular Dropbox. And going out to the web client is a lot less convenient than just having a file there locally. I've been wanting something like this for awhile.

It's not so much a thumbdrive, but disk space that I own in the office.

Will this make it possible to have multiple portable installations of dropbox linked to separate accounts for cheap misers (like me) to have more than 2GB of free storage?

(Note, don't actually want dropbox to lose money because of this and hope that they will see this and fix the installer appropriately)

If you don't want dropbox to lose money then:

1. Don't abuse their freemium model

2. Buy a premium account

did you read through what I have written?

His message could also be addressed to everyone else reading this thread.

For this to be really useful, I would need a way to get strong encryption support (without admin access like installing TrueCrypt).

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