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Comment by mirkules | Hacker News Reader

There are many reasons not to use Dropbox:

1. Sensitive/Confidential info - I would never feel comfortable storing any kind of documentation on a 3rd party server that is sensitive to me like mortgage docs, tax docs or receipts.

2. Many companies have a strict policy disallowing use of Dropbox because it would leak information. On a personal level, any kind of work that I don't want to share with others (this includes Dropbox employees) does not go on Dropbox.

3. Slow, limited or capped internet connection. 50GB over the wire in those circumstances will net you a very, very big bill.

Just because you can't understand why someone wouldn't use it, doesn't mean there is no use case for it.

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This defeats some of the uses of Dropbox, but 1.+2. can be worked around with EncFS. I am using http://www.boxprotect.com/ as a frontend, but I will try to replace it by directly using EncFS soon. I already do the latter on Windows.

I still get some of the benefits like having everything everywhere, even when I'm offline, and LAN computer-to-computer sync.

If you're a Windows user, then I'd recommend using TrueCrypt (http://www.truecrypt.org/) to encrypt all of your files. Then put the TrueCrypt file in your Dropbox folder.

I have to throw in that TrueCrypt runs quite well on Linux and Mac OS, too.

Doesn't TC volume need to be unmounted in order for Dropbox to sync it? Or have Dropbox added Volume Shadow Copying support?

Yes, and then be left with N copies of your Truecrypt image, because it turns out that its was mounted on two machines a couple of times. Been there, done that.

I use Boxcryptor. When I look in my dropbox folder all the files, file and folder names are encrypted. Instead of this, I as a user interact with my mounted Boxcryptor drive where I view same files and folders unencrypted.

Regarding sensitive / confidential info, why not set up a volume with TrueCrypt that you can just mount when needed for sensitive stuff?

I used to do this for passwords and such. The problem was that the file would become un-synched and I'd end up with several "<computer name>'s version..." copies. The problem is that with Dropbox you aren't accessing a single file, you're accessing a local copy. So concurrent access, especially when a file is being held open on Windows, creates problems.

Because dropbox will save bandwidth by only updating the parts of files that have changed. If you use truecrypt the entire file will change for every small change you do. Basically you lose any advantage of using dropbox over a standard FTP system.

Yeah but you can opt to only use encrypted volumes for certain files that don't have to be accessed daily.

You don't take advantage of Dropbox fully, but it's still pretty convenient to be able to sync that small encrypted volume containing tax reports etc.

If it's only a KeePass database or a small (1MB?) TrueCrypt volume for text/documents, the traffic still won't ever become appreciable. Also, you're implying that the only selling point for Dropbox is that it uses deltas, which is far from true.

Actually dropbox and truecrypt work really well together, even with large truecrypt containers because of the way truecrypt updates its container on file changes.

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