Comment by Sir_Cmpwn
10 years ago
Great article, but poor conclusion. He finds that Dropbox is untrustworthy, a finding that likely surprises no one, and reaches for iCloud as the solution. Why move into another walled garden driven by corporate interests? OwnCloud or a similar self hosted solution would be better. I just use NFS and a dead simple storage server to make ~/shared available on all of my machines.
If you're going to use a Mac, you're trusting Apple already. How does using iCloud make you trust them more?
Because Apple doesn't have a mechanism to access files on your Mac, while they do have a mechanism to access files on iCloud. This means someone guessing your security questions, or somebody with a warrant, or somebody abusing their access rights can get to your files.
They do provide the OS, so they implicitly have access to all your files at a level that dropbox would have a hard time achieving.
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I wouldn't use a Mac, either :)
And if you're using Ubuntu, you're trusting package managers, and if you're using Gentoo, you're trusting original developers (how often do you audit source code?)
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"OwnCloud or a similar self hosted solution would be better."
Perhaps better for limited use cases that don't really apply to the vast majority of Dropbox's user base.
You start off comparing apples to oranges, and with your latter solution, you aren't even comparing to fruit anymore.
What happens when you take a laptop to another network?
Everything freaks out, unfortunately. I would work on a better solution, but I'm not particularly inconvenienced by this issue.
Isn't a bit naive to think that your solution, which has obvious flaws is one-size-fits-all?
I use cloud storage (e.g.) have access to my password file between my computers and my mobile devices. NFS shares on ~/share that only work on the local network don't really solve this issue.
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In many cases self hosted is better. One needs to consider that this also needs some time to maintain, though. Personally I also like ownCloud but still mostly use Dropbox.
agreed. The cost of hard disk/ssd storage is constantly falling, I hate having my crap locked up in the "cloud" knowing that if I miss a couple payments it's toast.