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Comment by __jonas | Hacker News Reader

I recently set up rclone to do nightly backups of my entire OneDrive to Dropbox, I feel pretty safe with this in terms of reliability, I find it unlikely that both services will catastrophically fail like this at the same time.

Would recommend rclone to anyone, it has worked pretty consistently so far.

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Dropbox constantly scans your data and can easily block your whole account permanently. It's hard to recommend it unless you encrypt your data.

I remember OneDrive doing this too, where photos of parents' children taking a bath etc. were flagged as child porn. Unfortunately unless you encrypt your data locally, privacy is one of the tradeoffs in using these services.

This happens with Apple iCloud as well. Staff member had their iCloud photo collection locked because of this. Was able to regain access but I would definitely caution anyone storing all family photos online without another backup option.

According to NCMEC Apple does not do any proactive scanning of photos.

> Last year, while Meta’s Facebook and Instagram submitted a combined 26 million reports, Google 2 million, and TikTok nearly 300,000, Apple submitted 234. The year before that: 160.

> Apple isn’t a social media company, so this is hardly a direct comparison. That said, WhatsApp, which is end-to-end encrypted, scans unencrypted content such as profile and group photos for CSAM. It provided over 1 million cybertips to NCMEC in 2022; Microsoft sent in 110,000; Dropbox, nearly 46,000; and Synchronoss, the cloud storage provider for Verizon, over 30,000.

https://archive.is/AyuCq

I'd venture to say Apple probably has a "less false positives" policy than the others. I can't say whether or not they do or do not scan, but if they review incidents with humans and not automated this could be why. They probably know flagging / disabling / reporting accounts incorrectly has a high cost on user satisfaction.

You’re thinking Google https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...

they don't, but they were planning to: https://www.wired.com/story/apple-photo-scanning-csam-commun...

They canceled their plans for client-side scanning. They do scan content on their servers. Therefore whether your data in iCloud Photos is scanned depends on whether Advanced Data Protection is enabled or not. It’s disabled by default. Enabling ADP will turn on E2E encryption and disable account access via iCloud.com.

It wasn't really a conscious choice on my part, I had to get the subscription since I needed to collaborate on some files with people who were using it, and it forces you to add shared folders to your own Dropbox if you want to use them for collaboration, causing them to count towards your quota which is very annoying.

So I thought I might as well use it as a backup location if I have to get this subscription. I don't really expect privacy from these services, I guess it's a tradeoff.

Thats why you setup Cryptomator

yeah, cryptomator is the way to go for dropbox for windows in my experience at least for a FOSS solution (all the others I've tried were comparatively flakey though less memory intensive...)

rclone is a fantastic tool. I’ve done a few data migrations the other way, from NAS to M365 (for reasons) and it’s been mostly straightforward every time, even coping quite adeptly with request rate limiting by OneDrive.

"I recently set up rclone to do nightly backups of my entire OneDrive to Dropbox ..."

I hope it is interesting / useful for you to learn that you can maintain a workflow like this without ever installing rclone.

rclone is already built into the rsync.net platform so you can use it to orchestrate transfers like the one you describe:

  ssh user@rsync.net rclone sync s3:bucket dropbox:whatever

... using only ssh.

Does rclone allow you to do some kind of diff or are you literally copying the full contents of OD into DB?

I'm interested in doing something similar for our GD into DB or Backblaze but not if it's a full copy each day - we have 400GB in GD

It does diff, and can be configured to use various diff methods (checksum, modified datetime). I use it with S3 and to diff with checksum it needs to do an expensive, slow metadata read - so I use `--use-server-modtime` which only copies files newer than the remote S3 file time. https://rclone.org/s3/

Amazing, thanks for confirming. Will dive into the docs properly

Similarly I recently setup rclone to mount google drive and restic backup it up a la 3-2-1.

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