The Cleverest Ways to Use Dropbox That You’re Not Using
lifehacker.com
lifehacker.com
A small additional file changes the encrypted file so much that it causes dropbox to sync a large change through to the server although dropbox only sync's changes.
The biggest problem I've had storing TrueCrypt volumes in Dropbox has been forgetting to unmount the volume when I move from one system to another, resulting in unsynced changes and lots of conflict files.
One solution is to store your entire Dropbox directory within a TrueCrypt volume, but this is a bit cumbersome as you'd need to create a separate TrueCrypt volume on each system, and ensure that you have the volume mounted before running Dropbox (although this can easily be worked around with a launch script).
Has the security of dropbox ever been analysed by someone who knows what they're doing? How safe are my files there, from a "not losing them" point of view, and from a "not being hacked" pov?
Personally, I am interested to know more about privacy. Can dropbox employees access any files anytime they want and look at any information from account? Reading some comments (last year) on their forum in reply to file deletion I got the impression that they have unlimited access to user files. I don't have any citation nor can I verify that assumption at the moment.
Dropbox will sync on any computer you use though. That means that you have a copy per computer, plus the server.
That, to me, doesn’t seem to be a very defensible position – every program could just access your filesystem and upload random stuff. But a service which reminds people of that fact is bound to run into problems.
(The story with my friend has a happy ending, by the way. When he learned a bit more about the company and its history he started to trust them and didn’t just sign up for the free account but bought 50 GB of storage for a year.)
For what it's worth, I've been using the 0.7x series with several small-to-medium-sized Git repositories (over a quarter-million files/directories) with no ill effects to speak of beyond Dropbox taking a while to initialize.
Of course the repositories themselves have several copies on the various developer machines and GitHub, and I keep a Time Machine volume handy as a backup.
Now that I think about it, $HOME in Dropbox might be ok since (presumably) there'd only be one person using it at any given time.
One issue: because editing and saving is not live there were some issues, namely that we had to coordinate who was using the document when. We ended up with several conflicted copies and extra work.
I didn't dig too deep, but when we let someone go, we'd prefer that they not be able to access our private files anymore. (Especially when they go to work for a competitor!)
If you're still worried, change the password every time someone quits. (Which is usually a good idea.)
We're currently trialling it for corporate templates (Coaching Programs, Project Documents etc). Point their MS Office to a Dropbox folder, and every coach in the world will have the latest templates all of the time.
We would benefit from some permission levels (read, no write etc) to make sharing less of a risk for a bigger team, however. While it can be unwound, one person accidentally changing a template could go unnoticed.
Basically, their customers had to upload hundreds of photos to a website and found it to be a pain. We created an unofficial dropbox API and were able to automatically create a shared folder (and invite the customer to it). Then, when the customer added files to that folder, we automatically synced them with the web app, bypassing the web uploader.
Would also make a great Facebook Pics/Dropbox app.
They recommend putting the real folder inside your Dropbox folder, and symlinking to it from the other locations.