5 ms·

Marco Arment on Dropbox: Don't use it for anything valuable

43 points by rsobers 14y ago

mtgx 14y ago
Can we please get a good cloud storage provider from Europe? I'm getting really tired of American companies snooping on our data at will, or the US Government snooping on it at will as well, without even a Court order, just because they passed a law that says they can do that, or sometimes even illegally.
- stephengillie 14y ago
  Or maybe one hosted on one of the Pacific islands which is supposed to be a privacy and tax haven?
  - Jabbles 14y ago
    Pacific islands typically have poor internet connections... Japan excluded. Australia not.
  - goatforce5 14y ago
    I'd be concerned that it would be relatively easy for someone to bribe a government/police/datacenter official to physically get at the servers located in a developing country that held my data.
- rickmb 14y ago
  Wuala, http://www.wuala.com http://www.wuala.com (by LaCie) deliberately keeps it's storage out of the US and inside Europe.
- squidi 14y ago
  One option is to store your data on Amazon's S3 instance in Dublin. You can use https://www.jungledisk.com/ https://www.jungledisk.com/ or other tools to do that. Edit: There is also a good overview of options (inc. location) here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_online_backup_services http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_online_backup_ser...
- runjake 14y ago
  If you're worried about "US government" snooping, you should really be worried about UKUSA snooping, and keep your data out of all participating countries. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukusa http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukusa
stephengillie 14y ago
“Anything that is really sensitive or extremely valuable or needs to be kept very secret, I wouldn’t store on anybody else’s servers. That, to me, seems ridiculous unless I held the encryption keys like with the online backup service that I use.” He doesn't say anything specific about Dropbox that couldn't be applied to other cloud-storage locations.
- rarrrrrr 14y ago
  Several cloud storage vendors including SpiderOak, Wuala, and Tarsnap do encryption client side, encrypting the data before it leaves your machine and only decrypting it back on your machine. In the SpiderOak case, all we see server side are sequentially numbered containers of encrypted data.
mcmillion 14y ago
While I agree, this is kind of a no-brainier. Dropbox is a great service, especially for keeping settings and such in sync, but anything that needs to be kept private shouldrpbably be kept...private.
1SaltwaterC 14y ago
Nobody stops people to use a stackable encrypted filesystem such as EncFS or eCryptfs over Dropbox. This "cloud security snafu" thing is getting old.
- rsobers 14y ago
  Yes, but out of 25,000,000 users, how many of them know what encryption is, nevermind EncFS? The important point is that it's generally a good idea to treat anything you don't control as nearly public.
  - lvh 14y ago
    How many of those users care or need to know what encryption is? The argument appears to be that users treat Dropbox like a private store when it isn't, and somehow that's Dropbox' fault.
    - 1SaltwaterC 14y ago
      Their privacy policy contains some interesting stuff about your actual privacy: "Compliance with Laws and Law Enforcement Requests; Protection of Dropbox's Rights". Also, the "Security Overview" page explains that the files are encrypted by themselves after they are uploaded, plus the fact that they manage the encryption keys. Combine that with the previous statement. Dropbox is responsible for what they say. It isn't responsible for what the user understands, or the fact that people don't properly read/understand ToS'es. People that care about their privacy, take measures.
- huggyface 14y ago
  Nobody stops people to use a stackable encrypted filesystem such as EncFS or eCryptfs over Dropbox. I have never tried, and don't know, but does Dropbox deal elegantly with encrypted filesystems? If I have a 1GB encrypted volume sitting in my dropbox folder, and I save a change to a 1KB text doc in it, what does dropbox transmit? My suspicion is that they transmit the entire 1GB file (falling ever behind each time I do a save in it). They don't do low level file hooks, to my knowledge, and there's no way they're doing large scale binary diff'ing.
rickmb 14y ago
I find this kind of odd. I wouldn't store anything valuable on my own systems either unless I held the encryption key. When it comes to accidental data loss, I trust cloud services a lot more than my own little server. Ditto as far as security is concerned (in that I assume neither of them are safe from being compromised). If you encrypt it yourself, Dropbox is an excellent place to store anything valuable. Just make sure it's not the only place you store it.
- ed209 14y ago
  > Just make sure it's not the only place you store it. This is the main problem for me. I'd love to have my working files (say photoshop files) in dropbox so I could access them on any mac I use, but I don't trust it to hold the master file. All it takes is for it to be flattened in one place and I lose layers everywhere. Does anyone know of products that clone files to Dropbox? Almost like TimeMachine with dropbox as the target?
  - fredoliveira 14y ago
    I think the versioning support built into Dropbox solves that problem. Should someone flatten your psd you can always go back a version and be okay.
  - envex 14y ago
    It's not a version control system for Dropbox -- but you could also use LayerVault (http://layervault.com/ http://layervault.com/) to keep a nice backup of your files incase Dropbox does fail.
  - mnicole 14y ago
    I use it exactly as a master for my PSDs for a year or so and I've been really happy with it, even when the file is open on another machine or two while I'm editing it on a a third. If there's a potential to flatten the file upon save, I'd create a second directory for those files and keep them separate from the PSDs. If you really don't trust accidents not to happen, maybe create read-only or password-protected masters in addition to those editable PSDs. They've also got the backup/versioning service you can pay for.
andrewparker 14y ago
I wonder if Marco hosts his own email? Email's the place where embarassing/sensitive information is most commonly stored, not the FS.
- metafour 14y ago
  I believe he uses fastmail.fm. He mentioned this on B&A and on his blog in the past when talking about having control of your identity on the Internet.
- arthurgibson 14y ago
  Email was designed to be explicitly private, where file sharing, well its file sharing.
  - aw3c2 14y ago
    I wish. Mail is designed to be not private at all. It is transferred unencrypted through the internet unless you as user take care of upper level encryption.
giulianob 14y ago
Why not just encrypt your data with your own keys as well ( https://www.boxcryptor.com/ https://www.boxcryptor.com/ )
- domador 14y ago
  I've been doing that for Dropbox, indeed, since the last security scandal, many months ago.
gurkendoktor 14y ago
If you think Dropbox is bad, what about the recent preview of Office 2013 that stores all business documents in the cloud by default? (I haven't been able to find any mention of client-side encryption.) Non-US governments should seriously consider anything from sales bans to education in order to protect their citizens' privacy and business secrets.
- ghurlman 14y ago
  You mean the preview that isn't licensed for production use? That Microsoft warns you away from using for anything useful? That preview?
  - glhaynes 14y ago
    Isn't the point that the released version is expected to behave the same way?
    - ghurlman 14y ago
      If you buy the cloud version, you get the cloud stuff. There will be a standalone version that works like it's always worked.
  - pteromyscus 14y ago
    Why do people keep saying such things regarding previews and demos? He is not complaining about a bug. Nor does he complain about a not ready for primetime feature in some early development version. Those are expected. He is complaining about how a feature is implemented. Features such as this, rarely, if ever, change between preview/demo and final release. If it does change, it will be mostly because of the outcry, not because it was supposed to change in the final all along.
- squidi 14y ago
  I am using the Customer Preview without the 365 cloud storage. It is not mandatory in my experience; you can just chose to not log in with a WLID.
rwhitman 14y ago
Is there a more secure cloud drive option for sensitive data out there that is as convenient as Dropbox or Google drive etc?
- bfirsh 14y ago
  I haven't used either, but http://sparkleshare.org/ http://sparkleshare.org/ and http://owncloud.org/ http://owncloud.org/ seem to be the best open source options. I may give them a try soon - I'm getting more and more concerned by Dropbox.
- mdc 14y ago
  I use TrueCrypt to create encrypted files containing the sensitive data I want on the cloud. TrueCrypt is free and quick to install, so I can pretty easily access the files from any computer if I need to.
  - mynegation 14y ago
    While this (and other things mentioned like EncFS) is a solution, it integrates badly with user experience. I cannot access my data via web interface or smartphone app and I value this very much. It is a bit complicated, but you _can_ create smartphone application and web interface for the data encrypted on a server.
axx 14y ago
I don't see any reason to be shocked about marcos statement about dropbox. Dropbox has the only advantage to be the first cloud-storage provider who get's the job done right. It's not Dropbox's security that made it so popular, it's just the way how simple it is to setup. Create an account, download the client, insert credentials and BAM you're ready to go. There is also an alternative to Dropbox called "Sparkleshare" (http://sparkleshare.org/ http://sparkleshare.org/) it's nearly equal to dropbox's functionality (except the webinterface). The only reason why i'm not using it (yet) is the fact that they use there own IRC server to keep your data in sync (some kind of sync-messaging between your client machines). So if you're having real security concerns, you can use sparkleshare and use your own IRC server (https://github.com/hbons/SparkleShare/wiki/Notification-service https://github.com/hbons/SparkleShare/wiki/Notification-serv...). Rent a small/slowish VPS with enough hdd space for your needs, run sparkleshare on it and you have your own dropbox. :)
- nroach 14y ago
  That's fine if you're storing only small files, but sparkleshare is based on git and absolutely chokes on large files. So photos, home movies, and the like which live happily on Dropbox are a disaster on Sparkleshare. The main reason seems to be that it wants to buffer the entire file in RAM during the sync, which rapidly kills most consumer-grade machines.
  - axx 14y ago
    Oh, afaik, isn't Dropbox also based on Git? "home movies" - i see what you did there!
mynegation 14y ago
Unencrypted data is the main reason I am trying to move away from Dropbox to Spideroak that at least claims to encrypt stuff without knowing the key (cannot verify that as their client is closed source). The setup of Spideroak seems a bit more complicated compared to Dropbox though.
Kiro 14y ago
Am I the only one who doesn't own any valuable data?
- johncoltrane 14y ago
  No. Not owning valuable stuff is nice, too. Losing everything you own because of a basement fire is an eye opening experience.
jsvaughan 14y ago
Value to you doesn't equate to value to someone else
mattmaroon 14y ago
I just throw sensitive stuff inside a truecrypt volume. Dropbox works pretty well for that, as long as you don't leave the volume open on one pc and then log into it from the next. Even then you just have a second copy you have to reconcile with the first.
- patdennis 14y ago
  I do this too. The only problem I have is that, for my larger sensitive folders, any small change will result in Dropbox having to sync the whole (often multiple gig) volume. Which is only really annoying if you're trying to access these things through a slow connection.
  - makaio 14y ago
    I use encfs instead because it encrypts at the individual file level, so there is no need to sync an entire volume. Additionally the volume can be mounted on multiple computers simultaneously without causing sync conflicts. http://www.packetslave.com/2011/04/21/dropbox-encryption-w-encfs-on-macos-x/ http://www.packetslave.com/2011/04/21/dropbox-encryption-w-e...
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
xwowsersx 14y ago
So what online backup service does Marco use?
- rsobers 14y ago
  I think he said he uses Backblaze (on a different episode), but don't quote me. It's either that or CrashPlan.
  - rdl 14y ago
    With Crashplan you can also host your own server (setting that up myself); it's an annoying piece of Java, but we had a spare 40TB box or two lying around.
chmars 14y ago
I guess Marco Arment doesn't use iCloud either?!

43 points by rsobers 14y ago

mtgx 14y ago

Can we please get a good cloud storage provider from Europe? I'm getting really tired of American companies snooping on our data at will, or the US Government snooping on it at will as well, without even a Court order, just because they passed a law that says they can do that, or sometimes even illegally.

stephengillie 14y ago
Or maybe one hosted on one of the Pacific islands which is supposed to be a privacy and tax haven?
- Jabbles 14y ago
  Pacific islands typically have poor internet connections... Japan excluded. Australia not.
- goatforce5 14y ago
  I'd be concerned that it would be relatively easy for someone to bribe a government/police/datacenter official to physically get at the servers located in a developing country that held my data.
rickmb 14y ago
Wuala, http://www.wuala.com http://www.wuala.com (by LaCie) deliberately keeps it's storage out of the US and inside Europe.
squidi 14y ago
One option is to store your data on Amazon's S3 instance in Dublin. You can use https://www.jungledisk.com/ https://www.jungledisk.com/ or other tools to do that. Edit: There is also a good overview of options (inc. location) here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_online_backup_services http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_online_backup_ser...
runjake 14y ago
If you're worried about "US government" snooping, you should really be worried about UKUSA snooping, and keep your data out of all participating countries. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukusa http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukusa

stephengillie 14y ago

“Anything that is really sensitive or extremely valuable or needs to be kept very secret, I wouldn’t store on anybody else’s servers. That, to me, seems ridiculous unless I held the encryption keys like with the online backup service that I use.” He doesn't say anything specific about Dropbox that couldn't be applied to other cloud-storage locations.

rarrrrrr 14y ago
Several cloud storage vendors including SpiderOak, Wuala, and Tarsnap do encryption client side, encrypting the data before it leaves your machine and only decrypting it back on your machine. In the SpiderOak case, all we see server side are sequentially numbered containers of encrypted data.

mcmillion 14y ago

While I agree, this is kind of a no-brainier. Dropbox is a great service, especially for keeping settings and such in sync, but anything that needs to be kept private shouldrpbably be kept...private.

1SaltwaterC 14y ago

Nobody stops people to use a stackable encrypted filesystem such as EncFS or eCryptfs over Dropbox. This "cloud security snafu" thing is getting old.

rsobers 14y ago
Yes, but out of 25,000,000 users, how many of them know what encryption is, nevermind EncFS? The important point is that it's generally a good idea to treat anything you don't control as nearly public.
- lvh 14y ago
  How many of those users care or need to know what encryption is? The argument appears to be that users treat Dropbox like a private store when it isn't, and somehow that's Dropbox' fault.
  - 1SaltwaterC 14y ago
    Their privacy policy contains some interesting stuff about your actual privacy: "Compliance with Laws and Law Enforcement Requests; Protection of Dropbox's Rights". Also, the "Security Overview" page explains that the files are encrypted by themselves after they are uploaded, plus the fact that they manage the encryption keys. Combine that with the previous statement. Dropbox is responsible for what they say. It isn't responsible for what the user understands, or the fact that people don't properly read/understand ToS'es. People that care about their privacy, take measures.
huggyface 14y ago
Nobody stops people to use a stackable encrypted filesystem such as EncFS or eCryptfs over Dropbox. I have never tried, and don't know, but does Dropbox deal elegantly with encrypted filesystems? If I have a 1GB encrypted volume sitting in my dropbox folder, and I save a change to a 1KB text doc in it, what does dropbox transmit? My suspicion is that they transmit the entire 1GB file (falling ever behind each time I do a save in it). They don't do low level file hooks, to my knowledge, and there's no way they're doing large scale binary diff'ing.

rickmb 14y ago

I find this kind of odd. I wouldn't store anything valuable on my own systems either unless I held the encryption key. When it comes to accidental data loss, I trust cloud services a lot more than my own little server. Ditto as far as security is concerned (in that I assume neither of them are safe from being compromised). If you encrypt it yourself, Dropbox is an excellent place to store anything valuable. Just make sure it's not the only place you store it.

ed209 14y ago
> Just make sure it's not the only place you store it. This is the main problem for me. I'd love to have my working files (say photoshop files) in dropbox so I could access them on any mac I use, but I don't trust it to hold the master file. All it takes is for it to be flattened in one place and I lose layers everywhere. Does anyone know of products that clone files to Dropbox? Almost like TimeMachine with dropbox as the target?
- fredoliveira 14y ago
  I think the versioning support built into Dropbox solves that problem. Should someone flatten your psd you can always go back a version and be okay.
- envex 14y ago
  It's not a version control system for Dropbox -- but you could also use LayerVault (http://layervault.com/ http://layervault.com/) to keep a nice backup of your files incase Dropbox does fail.
- mnicole 14y ago
  I use it exactly as a master for my PSDs for a year or so and I've been really happy with it, even when the file is open on another machine or two while I'm editing it on a a third. If there's a potential to flatten the file upon save, I'd create a second directory for those files and keep them separate from the PSDs. If you really don't trust accidents not to happen, maybe create read-only or password-protected masters in addition to those editable PSDs. They've also got the backup/versioning service you can pay for.

andrewparker 14y ago

I wonder if Marco hosts his own email? Email's the place where embarassing/sensitive information is most commonly stored, not the FS.

metafour 14y ago
I believe he uses fastmail.fm. He mentioned this on B&A and on his blog in the past when talking about having control of your identity on the Internet.
arthurgibson 14y ago
Email was designed to be explicitly private, where file sharing, well its file sharing.
- aw3c2 14y ago
  I wish. Mail is designed to be not private at all. It is transferred unencrypted through the internet unless you as user take care of upper level encryption.

giulianob 14y ago

Why not just encrypt your data with your own keys as well ( https://www.boxcryptor.com/ https://www.boxcryptor.com/ )

domador 14y ago
I've been doing that for Dropbox, indeed, since the last security scandal, many months ago.

gurkendoktor 14y ago

If you think Dropbox is bad, what about the recent preview of Office 2013 that stores all business documents in the cloud by default? (I haven't been able to find any mention of client-side encryption.) Non-US governments should seriously consider anything from sales bans to education in order to protect their citizens' privacy and business secrets.

ghurlman 14y ago
You mean the preview that isn't licensed for production use? That Microsoft warns you away from using for anything useful? That preview?
- glhaynes 14y ago
  Isn't the point that the released version is expected to behave the same way?
  - ghurlman 14y ago
    If you buy the cloud version, you get the cloud stuff. There will be a standalone version that works like it's always worked.
- pteromyscus 14y ago
  Why do people keep saying such things regarding previews and demos? He is not complaining about a bug. Nor does he complain about a not ready for primetime feature in some early development version. Those are expected. He is complaining about how a feature is implemented. Features such as this, rarely, if ever, change between preview/demo and final release. If it does change, it will be mostly because of the outcry, not because it was supposed to change in the final all along.
squidi 14y ago
I am using the Customer Preview without the 365 cloud storage. It is not mandatory in my experience; you can just chose to not log in with a WLID.

rwhitman 14y ago

Is there a more secure cloud drive option for sensitive data out there that is as convenient as Dropbox or Google drive etc?

bfirsh 14y ago
I haven't used either, but http://sparkleshare.org/ http://sparkleshare.org/ and http://owncloud.org/ http://owncloud.org/ seem to be the best open source options. I may give them a try soon - I'm getting more and more concerned by Dropbox.
mdc 14y ago
I use TrueCrypt to create encrypted files containing the sensitive data I want on the cloud. TrueCrypt is free and quick to install, so I can pretty easily access the files from any computer if I need to.
- mynegation 14y ago
  While this (and other things mentioned like EncFS) is a solution, it integrates badly with user experience. I cannot access my data via web interface or smartphone app and I value this very much. It is a bit complicated, but you _can_ create smartphone application and web interface for the data encrypted on a server.

axx 14y ago

I don't see any reason to be shocked about marcos statement about dropbox. Dropbox has the only advantage to be the first cloud-storage provider who get's the job done right. It's not Dropbox's security that made it so popular, it's just the way how simple it is to setup. Create an account, download the client, insert credentials and BAM you're ready to go. There is also an alternative to Dropbox called "Sparkleshare" (http://sparkleshare.org/ http://sparkleshare.org/) it's nearly equal to dropbox's functionality (except the webinterface). The only reason why i'm not using it (yet) is the fact that they use there own IRC server to keep your data in sync (some kind of sync-messaging between your client machines). So if you're having real security concerns, you can use sparkleshare and use your own IRC server (https://github.com/hbons/SparkleShare/wiki/Notification-service https://github.com/hbons/SparkleShare/wiki/Notification-serv...). Rent a small/slowish VPS with enough hdd space for your needs, run sparkleshare on it and you have your own dropbox. :)

nroach 14y ago
That's fine if you're storing only small files, but sparkleshare is based on git and absolutely chokes on large files. So photos, home movies, and the like which live happily on Dropbox are a disaster on Sparkleshare. The main reason seems to be that it wants to buffer the entire file in RAM during the sync, which rapidly kills most consumer-grade machines.
- axx 14y ago
  Oh, afaik, isn't Dropbox also based on Git? "home movies" - i see what you did there!

mynegation 14y ago

Unencrypted data is the main reason I am trying to move away from Dropbox to Spideroak that at least claims to encrypt stuff without knowing the key (cannot verify that as their client is closed source). The setup of Spideroak seems a bit more complicated compared to Dropbox though.

Kiro 14y ago

Am I the only one who doesn't own any valuable data?

johncoltrane 14y ago
No. Not owning valuable stuff is nice, too. Losing everything you own because of a basement fire is an eye opening experience.

jsvaughan 14y ago

Value to you doesn't equate to value to someone else

mattmaroon 14y ago

I just throw sensitive stuff inside a truecrypt volume. Dropbox works pretty well for that, as long as you don't leave the volume open on one pc and then log into it from the next. Even then you just have a second copy you have to reconcile with the first.

patdennis 14y ago
I do this too. The only problem I have is that, for my larger sensitive folders, any small change will result in Dropbox having to sync the whole (often multiple gig) volume. Which is only really annoying if you're trying to access these things through a slow connection.
- makaio 14y ago
  I use encfs instead because it encrypts at the individual file level, so there is no need to sync an entire volume. Additionally the volume can be mounted on multiple computers simultaneously without causing sync conflicts. http://www.packetslave.com/2011/04/21/dropbox-encryption-w-encfs-on-macos-x/ http://www.packetslave.com/2011/04/21/dropbox-encryption-w-e...
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]

xwowsersx 14y ago

So what online backup service does Marco use?

rsobers 14y ago
I think he said he uses Backblaze (on a different episode), but don't quote me. It's either that or CrashPlan.
- rdl 14y ago
  With Crashplan you can also host your own server (setting that up myself); it's an annoying piece of Java, but we had a spare 40TB box or two lying around.

chmars 14y ago

I guess Marco Arment doesn't use iCloud either?!