Cloud Storage....anyone doing this?

Cheetah Designs said:
Where is flaw in the security model anyways? (out of interest)
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a) You don't know where the data is stored (locality, facility, environment etc)
b) You don't have any knowledge of the storage/network infrastructure they use.
c) You don't know their staff ( => giving your data to untrusted people)
d) You don't know what they may extrapolate from the data you give them e.g used for data mining, profiling, advertising etc.
e) No knowledge of their security efforts, you can't rely on their say so coupled with the terms and conditions.

Basically everything is outside of your control, so it makes sense to take steps to secure things before you hand them over.
 
Cheetah Designs said:
Hmmm....it seems to sync it a lot, even when there arent any changes.....there must be an easier way.

Where is flaw in the security model anyways? (out of interest)
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As long as it isn't transferring the whole lot each time, what's there to worry about? I imagine it has some kind of option to change the sync frequency if it really does concern you. And what do you mean by an easier way? How else do you expect it to update other drop boxes automatically?

tntcoder pretty well summed up the security implications above. So using encrypted files is definitely a must if you are concerned about the security/privacy of your data.
 
SiriusB said:
As long as it isn't transferring the whole lot each time, what's there to worry about? I imagine it has some kind of option to change the sync frequency if it really does concern you. And what do you mean by an easier way? How else do you expect it to update other drop boxes automatically?

tntcoder pretty well summed up the security implications above. So using encrypted files is definitely a must if you are concerned about the security/privacy of your data.
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The way it works normally (unencrypted) is fine as it only syncs if it detects a change....

...but using an encrypted partition and syncing the trucrypt volume, it syncs all the time without any changes...I'm probably just be to fussy about it.
 
Is the TruCrypt volume mounted while doing this? Windows does stuff in the background that could be causing changes to the encrypted volume. If it is mounted, unmount it and see what happens.
 
Will one of these cloud storage jobs sync properly if only one of the two machines is switched on at once? By that I mean you copy some files to your dropbox folder or whatever, or edit some files already in the dropbox folder, then shutdown that pc, when you turn the other pc on will it automatically sync when it detects new or edited files in it's local dropbox folder? I thinking along the lines of using this to copy savegame files between the main pc and laptop without the phaff of having to have them both on at the same time, may as well use a network share if that was the case.
 
Bubo said:
Will one of these cloud storage jobs sync properly if only one of the two machines is switched on at once? By that I mean you copy some files to your dropbox folder or whatever, or edit some files already in the dropbox folder, then shutdown that pc, when you turn the other pc on will it automatically sync when it detects new or edited files in it's local dropbox folder? I thinking along the lines of using this to copy savegame files between the main pc and laptop without the phaff of having to have them both on at the same time, may as well use a network share if that was the case.
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They sync to servers out on the interwebs. So as long as the latest files were synced before switching the PC off, then yes they will be up to date everywhere else.

To be honest I don't see the point of DropBox or the rest if you only intend to share files locally, so I would probably use a standard network share anyway. If you don't like leaving your PC switched on - transfer your saves to an external HDD or USB Drive.
 
Cheetah Designs said:
Yeah its mounted....and for convenience I would like it to remain mounted.
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Then I would guess this is where the problem lies. Though you haven't apparently bothered to test either way like I suggested!

I imagine lots of people use TrueCrypt and DropBox together, so there may be info on resolving the problem as syncing all the time can turn out to be a pain if the volume grows very large.
 
I can't imagine combining DropBox with TrueCrypt would be very pleasant. If you have a 500MB volume and you update a 10KB Word document within it, aren't you going to end up resyncing the whole 500MB? Or can it detect which parts of a file have changed? Otherwise, there goes your DSL connection for the next few hours!
 
I certainly wouldn't use one large volume. If I did use DropBox I would probably have smaller volumes which hold just a few related docs each - no more than a few MB each anyway.
 
tntcoder said:
Not the plaintext password no, but they wouldn't need it because they would have direct access to the server where the data is stored.
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It was more for if I decided to encrypt data using the same password (in a theoretical world - yeah I know you shouldn't etc....)

....I just wanted to know if they could see the plaintext version.
 
Cheetah Designs said:
It was more for if I decided to encrypt data using the same password (in a theoretical world - yeah I know you shouldn't etc....)

....I just wanted to know if they could see the plaintext version.
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Well if they used a secure design then they will only have access to a hashed version of your password (think encrypted but only one way, they cant decrypt). So there would be no way for them to get your password and use it to decrypt your files. This is the correct approach to storing passwords, so if they are compromised they are of no use to anyone.

Saying that though, we have no idea how Dropbox systems are designed. They could easily have plaintext versions of your password stored somewhere for whatever reason.

But you're correct, it's a bad idea to use the same password :)
 
Love Dropbox! I use it for sharing files quickly across multiple PCs and backing up any wallpapers/random pics I might want to keep. For proper backups I use Windows Backup weekly on my external hdd. :)
 
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