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

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

I find this kind of odd. I wouldn't store anything valuable on my own systems either unless I held the encryption key.<p>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).<p>If you encrypt it yourself, Dropbox is an excellent place to store anything valuable. Just make sure it's not the <i>only</i> place you store it.

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

I don't see any reason to be shocked about marcos statement about dropbox.<p>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.<p>There is also an alternative to Dropbox called "Sparkleshare" (<a href="http://sparkleshare.org/" rel="nofollow">http://sparkleshare.org/</a>) 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).<p>So if you're having real security concerns, you can use sparkleshare and use your own IRC server (<a href="https://github.com/hbons/SparkleShare/wiki/Notification-service" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/hbons/SparkleShare/wiki/Notification-serv...</a>). Rent a small/slowish VPS with enough hdd space for your needs, run sparkleshare on it and you have your own dropbox. :)

<i>“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.”</i><p>He doesn't say anything specific about Dropbox that couldn't be applied to other cloud-storage locations.

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

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.

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.

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.

Why not just encrypt your data with your own keys as well ( <a href="https://www.boxcryptor.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.boxcryptor.com/</a> )

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.

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

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

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

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

So what online backup service does Marco use?