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Dropbox Wants To Replace Your Hard Disk
Barence writes "Dropbox has kicked off its first developer conference with the stated goal of replacing the hard disk. 'We are replacing the hard drive,' said Dropbox CEO Drew Houston. 'I don't mean that you're going to unscrew your MacBook and find a Dropbox inside, but the spiritual successor to the hard drive is what we're launching.' The new Dropbox Platform includes tools for developers that will allow them to use Dropbox to sync app data between devices. The company's new APIs will also make it easier for app developers to include plugins that save to Dropbox, or choose files stored in the service for use within apps."
I do not play with the clowd clowns I own my own hardware and software. I do not walk in the valley of DRM. I do not beg to receive the fruits of my labors from datachangers. I shall not want.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Now network failures can cripple more of my devices. So long productivity!
Dropbox Wants To Forward All Your Info To The NSA
FTFY
I don't trust you with my data.
I don't trust your security.
I don't trust your longevity.
I don't trust that you at some point in the future won't hold my data hostage.
I don't trust you to keep my data away from big brother.
I also don't trust my ISP!
FINALLY, I don't want to wait all day for a file to load.
It's not like the illusion of privacy I had in pretending the NSA couldn't get to my HDD data had much basis in reality anyways. I figured it was mostly because I hadn't done anything that got anyone annoyed enough to actually care
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you
... and I approve this message.
not a chance in hell, why not just sync a folder in the oval office also
captcha=observe
However much you might encrypt the hell out of my data, I think not. My customized open source OS uses middle-aged gigantic butt porn for all interface elements, and this must remain private.
.... and I approve this message.
You're based in the US. You know that we have crap for bandwidth, our ISPs fight over backbone peering, we get charged by the gigabyte, and finally government agencies love to peek at data that isn't in a person's physical possession.
Dropbox doesn't have encryption built-in, and this seems like a truly obvious feature. It's always been a mystery to me why they haven't implemented it. Their info page reads: "Dropbox employees are prohibited from viewing the content of files you store in your account".
This has been especially curious since the last year or two, when everyone's been complaining about how your data isn't safe in the cloud. Even the launch of Mega hasn't prodded them to add security in order to stay competitive.
Anyone know why they don't have an option to secure your data using encryption? Why we have to trust their employees not to peek at our stuff?
(Yes, I know there are 3rd party apps that add this.)
1. Privacy (from several categories of snoopers: government, businesses, hackers)
2. Latency
3. Cost, billing hassles
4. Availability (freedom from outages that seem to contradict the HA guarantees these providers spout out)
5. What if they fuck up and lose your data
My Internet connection enjoys a 1 megabit per second upload speed. My SATA connection in my PC is 3 gigabits per second, which is quite a bit faster than the hard drives that are attached to it. Dropbox replace my hard drive? I don't think so. If I wanted to pay more money to my ISP, I could get 2 megabits per second upload speed. And... that's it. I can't get anything faster where I live. We've got a long ways to go before Dropbox can replace my local hard drive. Now, if I lived in Kansas city, that would be different.
Oooh, does this mean they're doing a kickstarter?
Wants to do the same thing with SkyDrive. I wonder who has the advantage?
am I giving up MY data to "the cloud". They can tout all the free storage they want. They can encrypt it using 394029465 bit encryption all they want. You know how drug dealers got people hooked on some drugs? FREE samples, or greatly reduced prices. Then, when they are hooked, you jack up the price, because they are now a hostage to the drug. Same thing with "free" file storage, or even pay for file storage. Eventually, they will either start charging, or, will raise the price. What are you going to do? You will have to pay up. Well, you can download your data? LOL....say you have a few hundred gigs of files stored. I'm sure your ISP would love to have you download a few gigs of files, charging you an overage. My data, I'll keep it thank you very much.
This post sums up my feelings about it as well.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
No, dropbox is going in the wrong direction. The direction is going to be smaller, faster, portable HDDs. Thumbdrives are already common at 64gb, and SSDs at 256gb. People already carry around a lot of data on their phones and, more to the point, they already carry around a device as large as a phone. Current gen SSDs are about that big. It won't be much to get people to either carry around a second, similarly sized device, or for the technology to just adapt to allow your phone to store terabytes.
Those are already happening; when finally mature, why would you use the cloud? With increasing proliferation of per-byte charges for data, and with the ENORMOUS gulf in access speeds between SATA and the most common internet plans--a gulf that's unlikely to shrink for years, perhaps decades, as both technologies make their own, separate, speed advancements--people aren't going to spend more money for slower access to their own data that they don't even control.
That I can host my own server for. Let them keep the special sauce of balancing the data out on there end. Getting rather tied of closed cloud systems we need one api to rule them all :)
No sir I dont like it.
As someone who has been responsible for medium sized infrastructures – © 500 desktops - , as well as enterprise wide security, I will say I explicitly deny dropbox for all users. It’s a huge security hole. Without the ability to control, monitor, secure and most importantly log, it will never make it in the corporate environment.
Not a chance, not here in NZ... i have a 200GB cap... not even close to enough for what i want to do if i used dropbox... [Currently @ 7TB of HDD space, 5TB of which is used] (Strike One)
Also, with the TSA crap.... no again (Strike Two)
I dont have to pay to store data on my HDD's... (Strike Three)
"I figured it was mostly because I hadn't done anything that got anyone annoyed enough to actually care"
Yeh live the bland life, upset no-one, do nothing of note, don't have anything somebody could want, don't marry any woman someone else could covert. It's a solution to living in a surveillance state. Also make sure your family and friends and kids and loved ones to the same, pesky metadata linkage.
DropBox was specifically mentioned in the PRISM document, so go out and specifically use it, putting only grey photos of cats on it.
Because this country isn't worth fighting for.
"Replace your hard drive" my ass.
Seriously, who writes this shite?
-SS "Teach the ignorant, care for the dumb, and punish the stupid."
It'll be a cold, snowy July 4th in downtown Miami before I outsource my storage to "the cloud". Remember, any online-hosted service can vanish tomorrow without a warning or trace. Maybe someone will hack their system and use it to steganographically weave kiddie porn into the data of 47 million customers, leading the FBI to storm in and forcibly shut everything down, innocent customers and collateral damage be damned. Maybe terrorists will take out all the longhaul fiber leading into your town for a few days, leaving you SOL and fighting with 4 million others to suck a few bytes at a time through a few T1 lines and microwave links. Or maybe they'll just decide it's no longer making enough money and shut down, like plenty of services (*cough* Visto *cough*) did ~10 years ago.
Never, ever, EVER trust the fate of your data entirely to someone else.
OK, maybe we can use Dropbox for easy sync'ing of phones and tablets, since Microsoft has progressively fucked up and crippled Windows networking beyond all recognition ever since Windows 2000.
~18 years ago, I had 10baseT coax strung across my house, and my housemates & I had a nice, working Windows NT domain-based network that ran flawlessly. Now, I can't get my goddamn desktop running Win 7 Pro to reliably share files with my Laptop running Vista, neither computer can connect reliably to Samba (one can't connect at all, one keeps forgetting how to connect to it and unmaps the drive), and I haven't been masochistic enough to even TRY connecting my Android phone or tablets to either computer over NetBIOS.
Assuming Microsoft hasn't taken away the ability to install thirdparty protocols and network services under Windows (including Home Edition), native Samba for Win32/Win64 would totally *rock*.
Third party doctrine
Personally, I'm never dealing with these dumbfucks again. This is the company that turned passwords off for every goddamn client and 'box' in their hands for several hours before the blunder was caught. I'm not going to trust them with my goddamn grocery lists.
I find it somewhat disappointing that despite the connectivity options we have today, we still so far from being able to access our own data in a secure and consistent manner that's easy for everyone. It's even more disappointing to see a company like Dropbox solving only the "consistent" and "easy" parts of it. I say it's disappointing because I have problems with the encryption scheme [1] and non-decentralized way they're currently doing things.
As it's been pointed out [2] and essentially beaten to death recently, these things may not matter a whole lot to most people now, I think you have be pretty optimistic to think they won't matter in the future.
[1] https://www.dropbox.com/help/28/en
[2] https://medium.com/surveillance-state/b804de3b5b
that's why more and more manufactures are moving to SSD, so the HD can't be removed.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
Wait a minute. I'm a manager, and I've been reading a lot of case studies and watching a lot of webcasts about The Cloud. Based on all of this glorious marketing literature, I, as a manager, have absolutely no reason to doubt the safety of any data put in The Cloud.
The case studies all use words like "secure", "MD5", "RSS feeds" and "encryption" to describe the security of The Cloud. I don't know about you, but that sounds damn secure to me! Some Clouds even use SSL and HTTP. That's rock solid in my book.
And don't forget that you have to use Web Services to access The Cloud. Nothing is more secure than SOA and Web Services, with the exception of perhaps SaaS. But I think that Cloud Services 2.0 will combine the tiers into an MVC-compliant stack that uses SaaS to increase the security and partitioning of the data.
My main concern isn't with the security of The Cloud, but rather with getting my Indian team to learn all about it so we can deploy some first-generation The Cloud applications and Web Services to provide the ultimate platform upon which we can layer our business intelligence and reporting, because there are still a few verticals that we need to leverage before we can move to The Cloud 2.0.
Even if I didn't care about the privacy issues, can they offer me anywhere near the performance of my SSD? Of course not. It's latency is expressed in microseconds, my network in 2-3 digits of milliseconds. Its bandwidth is near enough 500MB/sec, my network caps out at about 4MB/sec (30mbit).
I fail to see why the hell I'd want to store my data on such an inferior setup.
Now backups to a remote site, sure that is something that can make sense. However that isn't what they are talking about. That is more like what Acronis does. They seem to think I'd want them as straight out storage.
Hell no. Until the performance issues are resolved, it is all 100% moot. Then and only then am I even interested in examining the other issues, which would rule it out anyhow.
About all I use dropbox and co for is as a virtual USB device for transferring files easily between machines.
They should be targeting a goal of replacing the USB stick not the hard disc drive.
At first I thought they were making a hard-disk free version of dropbox. Maybe via Overlay-FS + RAM-FS? Then you could run drop-box in ram (why? I have no idea), but instead it looks like they want to replace the file system with a proprietary API that only is supported by their servers.
Yes: they want to kill the file system.
With all the great work on file system implementations, why exactly would anyone want to replace the file system concept with a proprietary API? Sure, if their API was just 9P, and they just exposed their cloud as big file system, that would be fine (its just a networked file system), but its not. Its some random proprietary crap. I absolutely will not support this. I'm pissed enough that mobile OSs hide the file system from me, I don't need more "apps" doing that crap in even less standard ways.
Just bribed or hypnotized by the NSA?
This is basically Dropbox parroting Google's Chromebook. I use a Chromebook at times, and it's remarkably good for 90% of what I do. Doesn't seem to run automake, however.
Fiat Lux.
Paul Thurrott, the world's premier Microsoft fanboy, has been running a few articles about his concept of "zero data" - that is, keeping ALL computer data where feasible in the Cloud as opposed to your local HDD. He does so willingly because he has in his mind too much clutter, and would rather let some corporation take control over it instead of trimming what he has down to something more reasonable:
http://winsupersite.com/cloud/zero-data-hardest-part-saying-goodbye
http://winsupersite.com/cloud/zero-data-reducing-storage-clutter
It's one thing to give away so much of your personal data to a company - it's anther thing to then perform destruction over your local copies so everything you've ever done is totally out of your control. To me, the idea of giving away that level of control over MY data to a company is totally horrifying, but apparently I'm too stubborn and old-fashioned by saying so. Oh well.
Why would I use Dropbox when I can roll my own with ownCloud? It works pretty much the same, has Ethernet speeds, as much hard disk space as I want to throw at it and I control the security.
I don't replace HDs with services that provide the government with access to my files. I eliminate those services like the bugs they are.
Privacy, security, PATRIOT, NSA, cheap reliable consumer disk, rent, internet requirement, latency, throughput, trusting your life's work to a 5 year old company staffed by 25 year olds with a CEO named Drew, the fact that 99% of the use cases for Dropbox are 99% will be solved when email attachment size limits move into the 21st century
Won't the NSA already do this for us?
Exciting new ways to share my data with the government!
Putting my data on networks accessible to the NSA and other spying agencies ? Letting anyone have my data is out of the question ! How could anyone want someone else to keep his most precious data never knowing if they will loose it , have the company share all it's most private contents with fuc**** spies ? ..
You got to be freaking kidding me . Did these guys missed the past 6 weeks with the Snowden story ?
No way, That one's a dead rooster laying in the road . Not to be mean , but ill drive my car over it to make sure he's dead and stopped suffering .
And probably back up to make really sure
I purchased a Synology NAS and it creates my own "cloud storage" that I own...It cost me $400, plus $150 for a 3TB drive, I have another bay in the NAS which I will in turn into a 6TB RAID when the time comes (don't need that much space yet). I am not sure on dropbox's plans... but in the long run my solution is much cheaper for price per GB. AND..... I don't have to worry about somebody else owning my data, or my information being sold to 3rd parties or my data being lost due a company no longer existing. I can access my data anywhere... on my phone, any computer, and it is stored at MY HOUSE. It even backs up my machines to an external hard disk once a week, (no such thing as too much redundancy at the cost per GB of HD's these days) I can also stream my movies/audio to any of my devices, does dropbox offer that?
Dear dropbox:
I am not that stupid
when *someone else* causes a cloud server's gear in a datacenter(s) to be indiscriminately confiscated by the government. already happened more than once.
How nice of you. I'll take a large capacity SSD. In the local machine not in the cloud, thank you.
I thought we learned from MegaUpload that you don't completely rely on an online storage service.
That's fine, Dropbox, but I do have some non-technical requirements:
As I see it, the first and second make syncing data between devices impossible. Whether it's push or pull, one end of the connection must always be unreachable by the other. And the access requirements pretty well rule out using anything in the cloud, even to transfer data. The only way it would work is using public-key encryption so what was stored in the cloud was an encrypted opaque blob, and that poses a lot of technical problems trying to efficiently modify and access only portions of that encrypted blob.
I suppose something like Dropbox would work for published content where I intend it to be accessed by the general public, but 90% of my stuff falls into the heading of "do not want to or am not allowed to make this stuff publicly accessible".
NB: that's also why, while I'll cheerfully use GMail for nonsensitive personal e-mail, anything business-related or sensitive goes through my own mail server where I know who can get access to it.
a bigger hard drive.
The cloud can shove it.
Also this is an interesting opportunity to talk about the shortcomings of American ISPs. No one will want to use your stupid cloud as a hard drive until ISPs start providing real bandwidth so that it'll take less than ten minutes to save a large file.
Even then, I'd prefer to store my data locally, thank you very much. Maybe if you're nice and incredibly cheap I'll encrypt the hell out of some of my files and use you as an off-site backup service.
For this to work out.
3G / 4G / LTE speed and covage can very and with roaming at $20 a meg. Forget about it.
Hotel wifi can very and some places have low speed caps.
Home HSI still has low upload speeds as well.
Dropbox and similar services are the last-gasp of web hosting. Things will be going the other way, quite soon.
It made sense to have a web hosting provider when people were on dial-up, and could slowly upload a file once, allowing many people to download it quickly from a fast host. But now, we're on the verge of the stars lining-up to make the peer-to-peer distributed internet practical for everyone.
First, internet speeds are getting faster... Google, FIOS, and others have made "gigabit" internet the new "FAST", even while most people can't get 100Mbps internet service yet. Very high speed services like FIOS are expensive, but the price will keep falling, quickly, until everyone can justify the price. Then, downloads from your home box will be just as fast as downloads from Dropbox's servers.
Second, IPv6 is just around the corner. Comcast was practically forced to use IPv6 for their network. 4G LTE networks are natively IPv6. And we're just plain running out of IPv4 address space, and carrier grade NAT is unpleasant enough that it won't win. An IPv6 service is basically a static IP service, so you can buy any DNS name you want, and point it to one of your home servers.
Third, low powered devices are proliferating... With OpenWRT, a number of very low power and dirt cheap WiFi APs/routers can be used as full-fledged Linux systems, and with USB ports, can act as a full-fledged SAN, all with no increase in your electric bill, noise, space, etc.
Finally, SSDs. No longer does keeping a server running mean noisy, spinning rust. Once some form of SSDs are large enough to store your entire media collection, and cheap enough that everyone is buying them, then your home file server can be silent and low power, while performing well enough to rival Dropbox and the like.
It's just over the horizon. As long as all of the above pans out, which all indicators say it will, the internet will become a much more symmetric place, just like originally intended. And all manner of hosted services we have now, will be reduced to a tiny niche, as they stop making sense for most use cases.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
With apologies to Theodore Geisel:
I do not want your new dropbox
I will not try with FireFox
I will not have it in my house
I will not click it with my mouse
I do not want it on the train
I cannot use it on the plane
My data is not here or there
My data could be anywhere!
My data is my own and so
I do not want this, CEO.
Why would I want to put all my data where the F*CK*ING NSA can get at it?
Duh...
Hard drives are currently the greatest bottleneck in 95% of systems. Why do you think "get an SSD" is the new "add more RAM"?
A good hard drive will have average latency around the 5ms range, and throughput around 200MiB/s (in actual usage, not benchmarks). Cheaper ones will be closer to 10-15ms latency and 100MiB/s throughput.
I just tried pinging dropbox.com - 98ms latency, round-trip. And my bandwidth peaks around 400KiB/s, orders of magnitude below even a slow hard drive. And that's for download! Upload, you're looking at maybe 100KiB/s. I've gotten faster transfers over USB (and not that fancy new USB 3.0).
You may be saying that "users don't need that much speed for most stuff - give them an SSD for OS+Apps, and everything else goes in THE CLOUD".
Perhaps you're right. Perhaps many users could be satisfied with such an arrangement. But until Flash is nearly as cheap per gigabyte as spinning rust, there will remain plenty of tasks that need more capacity than a (reasonably-priced) SSD can provide, but more speed than a cloud solution can physically provide.
The latency is the biggest killer. For sequential access, a high-end hard drive can keep up with common SSDs - from the slowest HDD to the fastest SSD is perhaps an order of magnitude, probably less. But the latency is the killer - it's easily two orders of magnitude between discs and flash, and even more on the high end. You can easily feel that - I stuffed an SSD into a half-decade-old workstation, and it went from sluggish and unresponsive to smooth and lightning-fast (and that with a slow SSD and 3gbps SATA). My laptop boots in seconds, and is the snappiest computer I've ever used.
Cloud storage, just by physics, are another order of magnitude below local hard drives, just because of speed-of-light. As I mentioned, I get 100ms ping times to dropbox. And that's just for pings - if they actually have to pull my data up, you're adding the same latency as disk (because seriously, are they going to use Flash?). I don't even want to think about how slow that's going to feel.
A blog I once read provided a useful metaphor. Imagine a read from RAM takes one day (this was high-latency/high-bandwidth GDDR5; DDR3 latencies would be around 3 hours or so). Depending on your processor, you'd be executing instructions in the scale of minutes. Accessing a hard drive takes around fifty years. Reading from the cloud would take nearly six centuries.
*That* is how slow the cloud is. And that's why I use it, at most, for backups, or for running cloud servers - NOT as a replacement for local storage.
If its used right, cloud storage isn't *evil*, but there are still some hurdles that need to be overcome:
Universal data. Spotty ( and expensive ) coverage makes it less attractive. Use cloud and burn your bandwidth caps. Mobile, good luck getting 100% connectivity.
Monthly costs to keep your data there. A PC hard disk doesn't cost you more after the purchase..
Single vendor point of failure. A distributed non-vendor share would be good.
Encryption. Everything has to be encrypted. Even your grocery list.
Having someone else deal with the hardware, backups, upgrades, bla bla, *is* an advantage. Plus you magically get your data on all your devices, without having to futz around with creating your own server at home, currently way beyond the average Joe. ( and most likely violate your ISPs TOS )
Cloud has its place.. it really does.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Criticisms of Cloud Computing
Link
Dropbox as my hd? That'll be the day.
"SO we bide our time, waiting for a purer kick to bloom and the future is still bleak, uncertain and beautiful" -GSYBE
When can we boot from dropbox?
from my cold, dead hands.
Using DropBox as my boot drive.
But in this one you know that the NSA (and associates, around 5 millon people) all have direct access to everything put there. Should be ok if what i put there is public anyway, but for companies and private stuff this should be considered malware (trojan, ransomware, spyware, etc, pick your labels for it).
Slashdot is a technology crowd in a "post-technology" world (in that "technology" is increasingly no more than another word for "household appliance"). People here are all about RAID, hot swap, offline backups, rsync, blah, blah, blah. Give me a break. This is precisely why tablets are so successful—they are zero administration devices for the average person that doesn't want to root/configure in the first place.
The average person absolutely STRUGGLES to:
(1) Back up their data
(2) Access it anywhere
(3) Simply copy a file
(4) Share any non-Facebook file format with their friends
Dropbox does all of these things in a point/click way.
People here are talking SANs and SSDs. Seriously? Momma don't do dat. And her hard drive ("computer") has "crashed" more than once by now, 20-30 years after the dawn of the computing age, and she lost her prized photos and recipes. And Slashdotters dutifully told her to "back her data up, then." Which she didn't do because (a) she doesn't know how, no matter how many times you explain it or tell her to go get a Costco USB drive, and (b) she doesn't want to spend time on or think about that even once, much less once a week.
Services like Dropbox are going to own the data storage market.
People above seem to be predicting that hard drives of some new sort are the wave of the future—everything old is new again. I'll boldly predict the opposite: Dropbox is right. In five years, the average person will own zero large hard drives. Their devices (tablets, netbooks) will have enough local storage to boot an OS. Everything else will be in the SaaS (software as a service, storage as a service) space.
Mark it down and come after me if it doesn't happen.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
I think it's been ten years or more since I've said it; but everything you need to know about why "the cloud" sucks can be summed up in one line:
"I can't use my word processor. The network is down".
I think I may have started saying this to people back when Sun (remember them?) had a slogan about "the network is the computer". Sheesh... whenever somebody is trying to tell you that one thing is another, a big red warning light and a siren ought to go off. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm tired. I've been freedoming over a hot stove all day.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
How about no?
Dropbox will never be able to replace our HDD until we get at the very least 1 Gbps(125MB/s) upload speed everywhere.
I am NOT uploading multiple GB over the internet at 1MB/s, that's not happening.
On the other hand, I suppose this is mostly aimed for people who take pictures with their phone and want a backup on the cloud.
Here are all the skeletons in my closet. Let's post them "anonymously":
Q:What is the worst that could happen?
A: Ha ha ha...you'll never get to be POTUS, for starters...remember what you did in college?
Q: Yes but...oh, that...hmmm...POTUS isn't looking feasible anymore. Secretary of State maybe?
A: Yes, but that is a dead-end job...
Q: Yes, but is it a *safe* dead-end job?
A: Sorta!? Do you have friends in Venezuala?
Q: Um, yeah...is that important?
A: Fuck yes, get an airline ticket an an in with the embassy. Pack a toothbrush!
There are a few alternatives that come to mind if you're like me and adhere to the philosophy that "data that doesn't exist on hard drives I can clone or shoot, either doesn't exist, or exists in the hands of my enemies"...
Where seamless sync isn't an issue, FTP/SFTP can work well. FreeNAS and NAS4Free do this with a great back end file system, but UnRAID, while not free, does do a pretty good job of performing a similar tasks if you have a hodgepodge of hard disks lying around. In all three cases, you're looking at a dedicated OS install.
OwnCloud is a good sync app and browser based file portal. The Android app for it is still very much in beta though and doesn't always sync everything you want it to.
Ajaxplorer is a great browser-based file manager, and they have a desktop sync client in beta. It's gotten a LOT prettier in this last release and has great user management tools, as well as a public folder system for collaborative efforts.
Both OwnCloud and Ajaxplorer run on a LAMP stack; the Turnkey Linux project and Bitnami both offer builds for both applications to make things relatively simple if you've got the hardware or a VM at your disposal.
Tonido will do desktop sync a la Dropbox with a point-and-grunt Windows installer; 2GB of sync is free, 100GB of sync is $29/year.
Looking for an inexpensive server to put it on? I had a great purchase experience from the guys over at ServerWorlds; it's possible to get a properly spec'd IBM x3550 from them for less than $500 using backplanes that will use off-the-shelf SATA drives in a RAID-1, and it'll fully support ESXi if you want. eBay is also a fountain of such things.
If home internet is too slow and/or untrustworthy to the point where you trust a colo provider instead, GoRack (the only colo center I could Google that gives actual pricing information) seems to be willing to power and shuffle data to your server for some $50/month or less. Clearly Dropbox has the edge here as far as availability and uptime as opposed to a single x3550 (along with the convenience of not having to manage your server), but if you load up the server with a pair of 2TB drives, the only offering Dropbox has that can compete with that is the business package that costs some $800/year.
Depending on your level of expertise, what you've got at your disposal, who you trust, and what you can spend, there are more than a few options besides dropbox.
[*] Store this file for me and NSA
[ ] Store this file for NSA only
Once people realised the value of knowing not necessarily what people were doing, but when / where / how they were doing it, and that you can begin to predict their behaviour by comparing that information with that of known models, the world well-and-truly went to Hell.
Seriously, Dropbox doesn't care _what_ data you store on their servers, what they care about is your usage behaviour, data that can then be added to the ever-expanding mountain of statistics used to further refine those already surprisingly accurate profiles increasingly used by savvy advertisers, governments et al. to define you even better than you could likely define yourself.
"Congratulations! We've identified you as person-type 1845194. You're sure to be interested in this product we'll love to sell you, this new television series you're certain to enjoy, this commentary you're sure to agree with. Soon, you'll think the world was made especially for you, since the world we'll continue to show you is tailored to appeal directly to your specific person-type. Enjoy!
"Also, since your person-type is ten times more statistically likely to lie on your tax-return, we're going to suggest the tax department audit you every single year... sorry about that. We all need to pay our fair share. Your person-type also has an increased tendency to..."
Remember, it's not so much what you say, but how you say it...
I am pretty sure I just saw you over on the massive Enders Game thread spouting some pretty idiotic stuff yourself. Don't be casting stones brah.
What I want is to be able to stick a box in my house and have access to that simple interface that DropBox, SkyDrive, etc. provide. But, we don't have the infrastructure that makes it affordable or practical. Sure, I could get a business account and set up a server, but everybody in my neighborhood did it, no more bandwidth.
I find it funny that projects like Google Fiber will make most of what Google and their cloud services provides vulnerable to host it your own software. Everything that is old will be new again.
And here I was worried that the NSA barely gets any access to my data what with almost everything stored on a local harddisk. At least now the Good Guys can have full access to all my data at their own convenience. I am getting goosebumps from all this good ole Made in America Freedom. OH YEA DUFF BEER!
I don't want my data in the cloud
I don't want my data in a crowd
I don't want my data on the net
I don't want my data on diskette
I don't want my data over there
I don't want my data everywhere
I know the spooks don't give a damn
I do not trust you Uncle Sam!
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
My hard disk is getting a bit old and I could use some more space, so a new hard disk sounds great. Unfortunately, I'm a bit low on cash at the moment so if DropBox wants to replace my hard disk for me that sounds great.
No, I didn't read TFA. I didn't even read TFS. Why?
Ok, my home PC is actually running PATA/133, but it's still a lot faster than my DSL connection.
And yes, your 3TB drive may fail over the next five years, but you can buy two of them and do mirroring or incrementals.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Doesn't Dropbox's policy allow free access to the FBI?
Who would want this?
Dropbox encrypts each of the steps - your PC to their server, their server to their storage, their storage back to your PC/phone/etc. That's very different from user-controlled encryption, where you've got the keys, Dropbox only ever gets cyphertext (which it might wrap another layer around for extra security), and if the FBI hands them a warrant, they've got nothing useful to hand over.
It's somewhat of a business model problem for them, though - if they want to start adding lots of extra features, like Evernote's conversion of data between formats (OCR scanned pictures, read email via text-to-speech, etc.), they need access to the plaintext, but I have no intention of outsourcing my plaintext.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Houston ,we have a problem ,all our hardisk are taken over
someone somewhere still has to have the physical media, I'd rather have it myself.
You can have my hard disk when you pry it from my cold dead hands
... i just searched for Prism within the comments, and not a single hit... I herewith change this :-)
It's all fun and games untill the FBI comes and raids their office and confesgates the hardsdrives (Because someone stored plans of WOMD somewhere in there)...
The bad part about having a certain amount of computer knowledge: you have to watch other people do silly things with their privacy and money. BTW, I have created about 100GB of content; the cloud doesn't make sense for graphic, sound, video multimedia, people, anyway.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
I'd rather have my data in my own personal storage drives. The cloud is good for backup though.
It's included in my rent, so I pretty much have to move or hire a lawyer (gonna cost more than Comcast does in a year).
What are the alternatives?
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
Or is this a share and share alike thing (of HD space).
Cause if it's the latter I'm not going to be able to help out. I've never ever had any HD space that wasn't being pruned.
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
Dear Drew Houston,
The NSA has killed your business model.
Yours truly,
The Government
Because the network is all and as we all know TW is the greatest most user friendly supportive and easy to deal with company on the planet. But that's nothing compared to the mobile brilliance that is your phone company. As a Sprint customer I fully expect to get dial tone any decade now and data? Well we're getting a data network around the year 2759.
What's a Dropbox?
Fata viam invenient.
If this was an article about Apple wanting everything to be stored in their iCloud then everyone would be singing its praise.
Cloud isn't cool until the company hosting it is cool I guess.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Yeah, that's not going to happen. The fastest up-stream available from my home is around 50 Kbytes/second and has been for the past seven years. It would take something like 145 days for me to upload just my CD collection.
Also, I hope we all know better than to store anything interesting in The Cloud. The last couple of weeks must have been hard on folks like Dropbox...
- chrish
We are replacing the hard drive
Fuuuuuuuuck off.
They're replacing my hard drive? This is perfect timing! My hard drive just died on me yesterday.
I asked the NSA if I could borrow their copy, but they haven't gotten back to me yet. Hopefully they will soon so I will be able to populate it once Dropbox ships me the replacement.
Oh, wait, that was figurative? Oh. Nevermind.
www.wavefront-av.com
I like this. The ability to install Angry Birds on my phone and tablet and have dropbox sync the app data so that I am on the same level on both devices is a great servic for me. In cases like this where security is irrelevant, I don't care who knows what Angry Birds level I have reached, dropbox app syncing is a great service that I am definitely looking forward too.
Obviously you don't want to sync important data using this service as privacy is an issue, but for a lot of what I do this service would be very much welcome.
It sounds like a good plan to have my hard disk replaced by Dropbox so that free backups by NSA are guaranteed.
perhaps when dropbox can manage to stay OFF the annual list of worst cloud outages each year, one should consider it. until then, no thanks. I'll keep my data local!
Dropbox was one of the NSA-providers, just sayin...
Top 8 Reasons Dropbox Won't Be Replacing My Hard-Drive Anytime Soon
1) Speed - Obviously a hard-drive will continue to be necessary to serve apps (not to mention the OS) for the forseeable future, but even when it comes to my data I'd rather have it accessible locally rather than wait for it to torturously download from the Internet.
2) Access - Dropbox requires an additional complication to an already complicated system with the addition of a necessary Internet uplink. If the Internet is down - beware the backhoe! - then my data is not accessible. Data stored locally is also subject to failure but it's one less component to worry about. Also, I can usually prepare for local disasters - backup the data, multiple workstations, etc - but what happens if Dropbox.com itself is down? I have no remedy.
3) Privacy - Increasingly, corporations and governments are tossing aside all moral and legal restrictions in their greedy attempts to data-mine the entire world. Whether it is my personal medical history or my "Little Rascals" fanfiction (just kidding!), I only want people I specifically allow to have access to that data. I have little faith that Dropbox will honor my request.
4) Security - Yes, the average user's local machine is often riddled with viruses, trojans and other spyware. But increasingly we are seeing that large corporations suffer the same problems and inadvertently letting user information out into the wild due to poor security practices. And given how large a target Dropbox would make itself, I'd rather stay under the radar than trust them with my data.
5) Compatibility - You know what programs work with my hard-drive? All of them! You have to go back nearly thirty years before you start running across programs that didn't expect a hard-drive. You think that all these developers are going to update their programs to take advantage of this new Dropbox development? And I don't care how hard Dropbox works at integrating their service with the OS, there will always be programs - usually that one absolutely necessary to your work - that won't be compatible with the Cloud.
6) Longevity - I have data from 1991 on my hard-drive. Okay, it's not the same hard-drive I used back in '91, but it's followed me through every upgrade over the past two decades and I expect it will continue to do so over the next twenty. Will Dropbox still be available in twenty years? I have my doubts. And then how will I access my data?
7) Cost - For most users, the cost of a hard-drive is essentially $0.00; it is included in the cost of the computer. I doubt that if Dropbox were suddenly to replace the HDD, the cost of computers would significantly change. On the other hand, I have little doubt that - were it to become as essential to computing as they hope - that the price for Dropbox's services would significantly increase.
8) Control - Oh no! Due to a changing political climate, the "Little Rascals" are now banned from the United States; no distribution of any "Little Rascals" material is allowed within its borders. With my data stored locally, this sudden shift would not affect me because my "Little Rascals" fan-fiction (just kidding, really!) is outside the control of corporation or government. But if it were on Dropbox, it would be available to scrutiny and deletion.
So, yeah, I think I'll stay with the hard-drive for a while longer Dropbox. Your mediocre advantages in no way counter the numerous disadvantages. Maybe I'll use your service (or any of the hundreds of other similar services) to supplement local storage but it won't be replacing it anytime soon.
But, there's no way it replaces my Hard Drive.
For one thing, while my internet is reliable, it's not 100%. I can work on my local copy whether the internet is up or down.
Also, I have multiple copies of my data. The cloud, but also my desktop and my laptop. If the cloud disappears in a puff of smoke, I still have my data.
Last, but not least, there's some data I don't want in the cloud.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
I backed this:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/clintgc/space-monkey-taking-the-cloud-out-of-the-datacente
I like it a lot better then any of the standard 'cloud data' offerings and plan to use it for sharing TrueCrypt drives and as an easy to sync method.
Are we sure Houston does not work for NSA? For national security purposes, NSA could have started dropbox. But then dropbox is too good to be a govt. product. :)
If it doesn't exist in three places, in two formats, one offsite ... it doesn't exist
Nothing like explaining this to someone who's house just burned down and all their digital photographs for the last 20 years are gone. Or a business that had all their computers and their safe stolen. Or flooding, tornado, hurricane, earthquake, airplane smashing into a building or ....
How much is your data worth. It is that simple. How much can you afford to lose if you lose everything? I make my clients put a dollar value on their data, write it down and look at it everyday. It forces them to think about it.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Is there a grub module that can boot off of them?
I want a business model where I can make people completely dependent on on my services and my constantly changing and unreadable legalese which I will use as the basis for defending myself when you realize how badly I've screwed you over. See, because when my services are compromised by criminals, government or criminal government, I will not be at fault for complying with their requests.
All this because you're too lazy to handle your own technology... sacrificing security for convenience... I guess Franklyn or any of the other money-face people didn't think anyone would sacrifice security for convenience because they didn't think anyone could possibly be that stupid.
Coming soon to a cloud storage TLD near you is everyone's favorite American pastime, Storage Wars! 3 months after you stop paying your Dropbox bill, they'll begin auctioning off your data by the terabyte. Will you get a .zip full of Metallica .mp3s? Will you get a folder filled with the backed up photos from a celeb's phone? Will you get HIPAA data? Who knows!
Just slot that deck into my terminal and lets see what you got, chummer. Renraku Blackmail Files.. hmm.. this one appears worthless. Club Penumbra Janitorial Logs.. hmm.. I'll give ya 900 nuyen.
I can save a file on my PC to dropbox folder, and then access that file on my phone, or android device, nearly instantly. Or I can access the file from my work computer, or a public library, or whatever. No more of this: "oh damn! I left that file on my other device."
I use it for stuff like recipes, to-do lists, shopping lists, etc. all the time. Other cloud services make it easy for me to access my music, or books, from any device, any time.
..coming to a dungeon close to you.
All the network connectivity and lack of encryption aside, Dropbox is just about the worst company you could trust to handle this sort of thing. Not only have they repeatedly built in exploits that any security-aware company would see a mile away, but they have also been terrible at communicating these to the point where they were blaming users for their mistakes. Thanks, but no thanks, Dropbox.
As a home user why should i trust anyone with my data? I have 3 hard drives. 2 are for backup. Reason? lessons learned, hard drives fail,things happen that i cant control. And first most, i trust no internet company. Ive seen millions of people loose there personal data, image that will never or can be replaced by company's going out of business and taking everything with them. Cloud is nothing more then a server farm and when the money runs out so does my ability to get back my data. So that is my reasons for laughing at/ refusing to use the Cough "Cloud". Hard drives are cheap and easy to connect to computers internally or externally why pay for something that should give us a piece of mind when it clearly has shown cannot.
Jack of all trades,master of none
I think I may have started saying this to people back when Sun (remember them?) had a slogan about "the network is the computer".
And Sun is being proven right. They were just about 20 years ahead of their time.
And "whom" is most certainly still a word. I'm sorry that you don't know how to use it properly. Try reading Strunk and White some time.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
"I lost all my documents because my hard drive died."
Now think about which of these is most likely to happen, and which one is worse when it does happen.
As with any technology, it should have something better to offer than what is existing, at a comparable cost. Or much better at higher cost
Surprisingly it often doesn't work that way. Read up on disruptive innovation, particularly the work of Clayton Christiansen. Many new technologies are worse (at first) in many ways than the things they ultimately replace. As you correctly point out there are some noteworthy drawbacks to services like Dropbox - privacy and security not the least among them. On the other hand it provides a major boost to efficiency and convenience to those who need access to the same documents in multiple physical locations. For many data needs the drawbacks of online storage are heavily outweighed by the advantages, even taking unit pricing into consideration.
So what you actually have is greater cost, plus security concerns... for a rather minor amount of convenience.
Minor to you perhaps. Huge to many others. Having a convenient way to have all your data available anytime you connect to the internet is not a "minor convenience". For many of us (including myself) it is hugely helpful. While I could not care less about Dropbox specifically, the service they offer is clearly something that many people are looking for. It's very popularity belies your argument that it doesn't provide much convenience.
I'm NOT going to pay DropBox hundreds of dollars a year just for the privilege of replacing my hard drive.
Nobody does that. What they do pay them a lot of money for is convenient access to the contents of their hard drive anywhere they happen to be standing. Without some sort of accessible online storage files located only on my hard drive at home may as well be located on the moon when I am at work. Online storage is one solution to that problem and pretty clearly one that a lot of people like. While online storage has its drawbacks, so does lugging around a storage device everywhere you go. Pick the poison that works for you.
If you don't need access to your files from anywhere with internet access then of course Dropbox and its competitors would be a waste of money. While I don't care at all about Dropbox specifically, what they offer is genuinely valuable to many people. For documents where I am unconcerned about security or privacy, it is a nice option to have. If I'm concerned about any of the drawbacks of their service, there are other solutions available.
Dropbox doesn't have encryption built-in, and this seems like a truly obvious feature. It's always been a mystery to me why they haven't implemented it.
Several reasons come immediately to mind.
1) Implementation Cost- implementation would cost a sizeable amount at the scale and reliability needed.
2) Support - if they encrypt everything they are creating the need to support (with attendant costs) the use of that encryption. Encryption is very difficult to make simple. If you don't believe me, try to explain public key encryption to your grandmother.
3) Demand - their service is popular without offering encryption so it's fair to question whether the marginal revenue increase is worth the extra cost.
4) Legal - Offering bulletproof encryption could cause them all sorts of legal headaches. Better to let third parties handle it.
5) Performance - encryption requires computing resources which could degrade the performance of their product unacceptably
6) Credibility - how can you ever be sure they do not have the encryption key and thus defeating the entire purpose of the encryption?
I'm sure I can come up with more. I'm not shocked at all that they haven't offered secure encryption - the business case for it is pretty weak.
Does it provide a boost over simply carrying a USB stick in your keychain?
Very often yes. There are drawbacks to any storage system. There are times when a USB key is a great solution but they aren't the optimal solution in many circumstances.
Some of the problems with a USB stick:
1) Easily lost/destroyed/stolen/forgotten
2) Must be backed up or synchronized (online storage automatically serves this function)
3) Not usable with some devices (smartphone/tablet)
4) Requires me to carry a physical device
5) I don't always carry keys with me nor do I want to
The point is that offsite backup (or even on-site backup) and application functionality are two separate things. You shouldn't have to give up one function to get another.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
is a business school grad-type who doesn't fully understand the utility of a hard disk. Some particular uses are easily replaced with Dropbox. Accessing your files when there's no internet connection is not one of them.
John_Chalisque
As for myself, although I find dropbox quite invasive, I've lost just too much data, so I'd use it if it were more practical. I can't move that muchh data back and forth though without incurring the wrath of Shaw cable... in their opinion anyone moving that much data is "stealing movies" and inmmediately gets throttled, and I don't have super super fast internet anyways.. although a coupe of times i've observed speeds of 10 megs a second that's as fast as she goes.
Mandatory strong encryption.. as long as encryption is optional then you're a target .. as in "encrypted harddrive? Ooh let's call up the NSA hackers.. we've got a live one here". If EVERYBODY has to encrypt their data though, then no more "if you didn't do anything wrong, you'd let the examiners peek up your asshole!"
Anytime you allow someone else (the "Clown" er, the " Cloud ")
to control your data, they have the ability to control you.
Why would I want to pay so much for all of my storage when it is so unsecured? http://www.backupthat.com/ is my personal favorite for backup because it is practically unlimited and free! I have backed up 500GB of files there so far and it hasn't cost me anything.
And ... how do you access your dropbox hardrive when there is no internet? Like 80% of the time in Alaska ? What? You can't? idiots.
i do not trust it. however, if i want to backup my baby pics, dog pics, or something of the sort, that's the place to do it. tho i wouldn't backup my mp3s or anything else replaceable. so, even tho i dont trust it, i can still use it.