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Comment by mryall | Hacker News Reader

This is a really interesting way to sell cloud-based storage. My parents use Dropbox for synchronisation of files on multiple computers, but they don't really understand how it acts as a backup system too. Pitching cloud storage as a safety deposit box clearly spells out the benefit to people.

On a related note, Mac OS X can already create password-protected encrypted disk images with a few clicks in Disk Utility. These are great for creating a "safety deposit box" yourself on an existing system.

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> On a related note, Mac OS X can already create password-protected encrypted disk images with a few clicks in Disk Utility.

There's a major annoyance with these. The dialog that accepts the password does not support paste. You actually have to type the password. I don't even want to know my password--that's the job of a password manager.

I've been using TrueCrypt instead.

but once you do type the password into that dialog you can save it and password manager will do its' job from then on.

True, but since it’s fairly easy to disable paste in applications this was done on purpose.

IIRC, Apple broke the first responder chain, and there’s workarounds to paste into it. [1] Most likely this was to prevent any script-based brute force attacks as the disk mounter does not lock down after any number of failed attempts.

[1] http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2004012018442215...

> but they don't really understand how it acts as a backup system too.

Maybe your parents are just more sophisticated than you and know the difference between redundancy and backups.

Dropbox also lets you go back and open past versions of all your files, meaning that anything in your Dropbox is effectively backed up as well.

Versioned storage isn't a backup, but it is quite helpful. Additionally Amazon S3 does redundant storage ( http://aws.amazon.com/s3/#protecting ) but in the end you're relying on a single service with a single account.

I still say Dropbox provides a legitimate backup, consider the features my free Dropbox account offers:

  (1) Redundancy - All files in your Dropbox are saved on every computer and stored on Dropbox's servers
  (2) Accessibility - Files in the Dropbox can be reached from any computer with internet access via a browser and downloaded
  (3) Versioned Storage - Every saved version of every file in the Dropbox going back thirty (30) days is available online
  (4) Deletion Protection - Every file in the Dropbox is available online and can be restored, even after the file is deleted from the computer and removed from the dropbox

I may be missing something, but what exactly does a "true" backup system do that Dropbox doesn't?

You're ignoring that DropBox has access to your original copy on your computer and can just delete that one when it goes bezerk and deletes the cloud copy too. ;)

With that said once a month I copy my DropBox directory to an external hard drive and call it good enough for my data.

True, I hadn't thought about that. Have you heard of it happening before?

With that being said my backup dataset is way too big to make Dropbox a cost-effective solution so I also have Backblaze account that backs up everything including the local copies of my Dropbox, so personally I'm ok.

You're playing semantics. Fundamentally all "backups" are just storage redundancy.

The difference is isolation. If I accidentally rm a file on a RAID, which is redundant, but not a backup, it's gone for good. Backups protect you by providing a distinct interface to >= 2 copies of a piece of data, this provides greater protection against malice, mistakes, and hardware failures.

As you say, RAID (specifically RAID level 1) is redundancy.

Time Machine is a form of generational/chronological backup.

Apple has stated that Time Machine is not archival. I wonder is this new patent is referring to an extension of TM, to the cloud, to provide something as close to archival as can be achieved.

This is equivalent to a version-controlled FS with storage redundancy.

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