Cloud Storage

[SimonMac]

With Google and Microsoft both publicizing their offerings this week, add to the fact Dropbox (my personal choice) and Apple iCloud what's everyone's preferred solution?

[Sysman]

There have been security concerns about Dropbox, 'cos their employees can see your data if asked to by the (Yank) authorities. Don't save dodgy stuff there.

If you want your content to be encrypted:

• Wuala. Just upped their free offering to 5GB. Needs Java though, which I don't really want to load everywhere.
• SpiderOak - couldn't get this working properly last year, might give it another go.
• tarsnap - pay for what you actually use rather than "up to" x GB

If you want to roll your own, there's also ddar - last time I looked this was aimed at Linux, though Mac OS X and Cygwin versions were underway.

[d000hg]

I'm a fan of DropBox since for my usage - being able to use multiple PCs interchangeably - it just works. On Windows at least the automation is great. I suppose having to setup your directory structure a certain way can be a pain, but OTOH also means you can easily see which bits of your file-system are synced.

I am interested in GoogleDrive, but I think it might just be very similar except with Google-doc integration?

[Sockpuppet]

Amazon S3

My setup is files are synced from company laptops to FreeBSD in the garage (tis nice and cold). This uses rsync and fuse-fs to sync with Amazon. I'm not fussed about accessing the data other than in the event of a hard drive failure so works for me.

Currently ~300Gb of data costs £6 per month. I delete stuff after ~6-7 years.

[SupremeSpod]

With Google and Microsoft both publicizing their offerings this week, add to the fact Dropbox (my personal choice) and Apple iCloud what's everyone's preferred solution?

We use "Box.com" and "azure" at work.

[SimonMac]

I'm a fan of DropBox since for my usage - being able to use multiple PCs interchangeably - it just works. On Windows at least the automation is great. I suppose having to setup your directory structure a certain way can be a pain, but OTOH also means you can easily see which bits of your file-system are synced.

I am interested in GoogleDrive, but I think it might just be very similar except with Google-doc integration?

Its not just automation on Windows, I have it synced between my MacBook Pro and Win7 machines so stuff like iTunes works on both of them.

As for security there are ways to protect your Dropbox data, a Truecrypt folder within for instance. They way the US are with over reaction to the eye-rabs if they want to see your data they can pretty much do it.

[Bunk]

Its not just automation on Windows, I have it synced between my MacBook Pro and Win7 machines so stuff like iTunes works on both of them.

As for security there are ways to protect your Dropbox data, a Truecrypt folder within for instance. They way the US are with over reaction to the eye-rabs if they want to see your data they can pretty much do it.

How well does Truecrypt work with Dropbox? I thought that if you change a file within the Truecrypt container Dropbox would try to sync the container file again, which would be a pain if you've modified a single small file but your Truecrypt container is a couple of GB.

[SimonMac]

How well does Truecrypt work with Dropbox? I thought that if you change a file within the Truecrypt container Dropbox would try to sync the container file again, which would be a pain if you've modified a single small file but your Truecrypt container is a couple of GB.

I would assume its an all or nothing job, but do you really have GB's of really sensitive stuff? As with all back up routies the planning is the key, for example have multiple truecrypt folders with different stuff in it

[Sysman]

How well does Truecrypt work with Dropbox? I thought that if you change a file within the Truecrypt container Dropbox would try to sync the container file again, which would be a pain if you've modified a single small file but your Truecrypt container is a couple of GB.

I've only tried a small TrueCrypt container (5 MB) and as far as I can tell Dropbox doesn't try copying it until you have dismounted it from TrueCrypt, i.e. dismount it and Dropbox will then synchronize it to your other machines.

Incidentally, the modification date of the container file doesn't get updated each time - mine still shows up as 2011, even though the files inside it have later dates.

[squarepeg]

With Google and Microsoft both publicizing their offerings this week, add to the fact Dropbox (my personal choice) and Apple iCloud what's everyone's preferred solution?

Rackspace Files for the long term, DropBox for a cloud /tmp.