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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
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.
... 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
From the linked article
Datastores work offline, too
With datastores, your app works great even without an Internet connection. When a user goes offline, your app can continue to work with all its data locally. The next time the user is online, Dropbox will take care of syncing things up.
So, let me get this straight... If you already have a local copy of your work... then you can work on it when the connection goes down. Hmmm.... What magical device is storing all of that data if you don't have a hard drive...
Is everything in your dropbox folder supposed to be kept in ram on your device???
Syncing has some merit.... Replacing the local storage is idiotic. Any company that would propose anything so stupid CAN'T be seen as a credible player!
Sounds like they need to be drop-kicked.
Mr. HeReadTheFuckingArticle
Now network failures can cripple more of my devices. So long productivity!
Let alone the massive lag of loading or storing anything of size.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
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."
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
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.
Delta encoding and compression really doesn't help much in many cases.
My iTunes collection in Apple Lossless for example takes over 300GB. Yes, it's all paid for music I ripped from my own CDs.
That would take eons to upload at the current broadband speeds currently available from most carriers.
I am also sure as hell not going to do my video editing, code compiles, etc on a remove drive, either. Even photo editing is painful. It still takes far too long to upload RAW files. I get 50 MB/s from my UHS-1 card to the hard drive with a USB 3.0 card reader. That's 400 Mbit/s. 4 times as much as the peak download speed available from my cable provider. And I don't know how many times the upload speed.
-- Julien Pierre http://www.madbrain.com/blog
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.
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?
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.
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.
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"?
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...
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
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
Assuming I understand what you are claiming, which I am not sure of, according to Dropbox that is categorically incorrect. "Dropbox applies encryption to your files after they have been uploaded, and we manage the encryption keys ... As set forth in our privacy policy, and in compliance with United States law, Dropbox cooperates with United States law enforcement when it receives valid legal process, which may require Dropbox to provide the contents of your private Dropbox. In these cases, Dropbox will remove Dropbox’s encryption from the files before providing them to law enforcement."
If instead you mean that you pre-encrypt your data yourself, then clearly it doesn't matter what any third party's policy is (such as Dropbox). You could just as well chisel the encrypted data on the Washington monument and nobody else could decrypt it.
With SpiderOak, you do not have to worry about going to the trouble of pre-encryption. Their software encapsulates that step and forces it on you. There is nothing to forget or screw up. SpiderOak's privacy policy is very different. It is essentially "Sorry NSA. We do not have the ability to decrypt; end of story."
Companies can legally be compelled to turn over data, but I'm not sure they can be legally compelled to run an active attack on their users.
Sadly, just because I'm not sure it would be legal, doesn't mean I'm at all sure they wouldn't do it.
in USA they can be legally compelled to do that, to run an active attack. and by legally I mean that it's enforced by the state that the state can tell a company/person to do that or face secret court proceedings. it's not very likely nor used much but legally the possibility and precedents are there.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
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.