Why Dropbox ticks all the boxes

Jon Honeyball Read more August 9, 2011

Dropbox is a superb example of a targeted and highly focused solution to a single problem – namely, out-of-office data access.

The client software seamlessly and without fuss or complaint transparently copies data files from your local hard disk and stores them on a cloud service, and it keeps an unlimited number of undoes for you too.

Better still, several computers can log into the same account and share this data among themselves, like a big replicating engine, and if two of them are on the same local network they can update at full LAN speed.

As a total package, it ticks all the boxes

This isn’t all – you can have public folders and even set up sharing folders between multiple accounts, and there are mobile clients for iOS, Android and BlackBerry, as well as the desktop clients for Windows, Mac and Linux.

As a total package, it ticks all the boxes. I use it all the time and pay for the full 100GB storage allowance, of which I’m currently using about half. My machines in the lab now back up to each other and over the internet to the cloud, and my data is synced to other servers held off-site, including one at home.

Cloud-based lining

So imagine my surprise on reading a tweet this morning from Manifest – a London-based communications company working in PR, social media, advertising and so forth – which had suffered a break-in at its office.

Apparently, the computers were stolen and Alex Myers tweeted: “Despite having all our comps nicked we’ve lost no important data thanks to using Dropbox as our server. Every cloud has a cloud-based lining.”

Later on it appeared that the police had found some of the computers, but that there would be a delay in their return while waiting for them to be dusted for fingerprints. All of which invokes a big sigh of relief from all concerned, I’m sure.

But this story made me wistfully nod in the direction of my own Dropbox storage in the sky. Everything important, all my hard work in progress, is backed up there, and I’ve paid for the unlimited undo option. Of course, Dropbox could go bang tomorrow – the firm might simply vanish off the face of the planet – but if that were to happen my data would still be stored on seven different servers with multiple operating systems and platforms.

Everything would still be in place, but synchronisation would cease. I’m assuming the total failure of Dropbox wouldn’t mean that all files were deleted from my local machines, too, but I do have multiple other backup solutions in place to cope with that eventuality.

Encryption

When I wrote about Dropbox a few months ago, my only criticism was that it didn’t allow you to encrypt everything before sending it up into the cloud.

These would do nothing to deter an official attack under the Patriot Act, but I’ve written about that enough for you to have got the message by now

The traffic itself is encrypted, but it’s possible that the data could be read within Dropbox’s datacenters. The firm has now updated its FAQ to clarify this point: system administrators can gain access to your data and decrypt it, but there are strong access control measures in place. These would do nothing to deter an official attack under the Patriot Act, but I’ve written about that enough for you to have got the message by now.

Some solutions are starting to appear that enable you to encrypt your data within the Dropbox framework, and one that might be worth looking at is SecretSync.

This is a Java applet that sets up a special folder rather like Dropbox’s but separate from it; put your files into this folder and it will encrypt them and copy them to a special folder inside the Dropbox tree. When files appear in this SecretSync special folder within Dropbox, it copies them out and decrypts them into the unencrypted SecretSync folder outside Dropbox.

There are a number of problems with this approach. First, it’s still a bit of a kludge; and second, it isn’t actually built into the fabric of Dropbox. I’d rather have a “secret key passphrase” that I could type into each of the Dropbox installations I’ve synced together and know that this would just work. Better still, load a full public/private keypair as appropriate and use that.

Finally, it’s Windows-only at the moment, which might not matter to you but matters a lot to those of us who use several platforms. Nevertheless, it might be worth a look.