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Comment by yesbabyyes | Hacker News Reader

Dropbox has an advantage here, in that all files are stored local (mirrored, really) in user's computers, and they are backed up. It doesn't scale to shared editing, though.

I'm turning more and more to plaintext/markdown on Dropbox.

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Dropbox-style mirroring is still susceptible to the hypothetical "service problem killed/corrupted a file, the mistake was happily sync'd down to all mirrors."

In short: if you're reliant on the cloud service for your backups (as distinct from your sync'ing), you're at risk.

Of course, simplistic mirroring solutions will have these problems. However, the right mirroring solution for syncing information (documents, presentations, etc.), should provide auditing, providence of created documents, and rewind for all actions.

At which point you're using technology even more complicate than dropbox and you have to trust that it works just as you have to trust that dropbox works. Not to mention that anything that can write to primary store (i.e. the "rewind for all actions" in your hypothetical solution) is just as likely to corrupt that store as dropbox is.

Dropbox stores different versions of files so even if files are corrupted/deleted and this change is sync'd up to them, you can still restore your files.

But so does Google Docs. The problems start happening when all versions of a document are corrupted.

For backing up files that need to be on Google Docs, I use GDocBackup (http://gs.fhtino.it/gdocbackup) and have it download my Google Docs to a Dropbox folder.

That's where we've moved all our Shared files. I don't love the pricing models, or the privacy issues, or the security model, so we're looking for something else.

AeroFS is the best off-site solution so far, but it's still very beta.

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