malo comments on Less Wrong Product & Service Recommendations - Less Wrong

24 Post author: lukeprog 02 July 2012 01:18PM

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Comment author: malo 03 July 2012 11:39:36PM *  6 points [-]

For those concerned about the security of storing your information online Spider Oak is a service worth considering. Their zero-knowledge policy ensure that—by design—they cannot access the data you store on their servers. Your data is encrypted on your computer and then sent to their servers (they don't have access to your private key).

Benefits:

  • Securely store your data online, and have it sync between computers.
  • Allows you to select which folders to backup/sync.
  • Less expensive then Dropbox. Really great student rates.
  • Allows over 100 GB. This allows me to use it as an offsite backup for all my files (except video).

Downsides:

  • Not as user friendly. UI needs some work.
  • Sharing options well behind Dropbox.
  • No apps/services integrate with it.
  • Upload process seems slower, though I haven't actually tested this.

Given the downsides, I use Spider Oak for backup and sync exclusively while also using a free 2 GB Dropbox account to take advantage of all it's awesomeness.

Comment author: Jolly 04 July 2012 06:49:06PM 4 points [-]

I'm a hacker/computer security expert. I use DropBox for low sensitivity files (it sync's far faster, and has better integration) and SpiderOak for more sensitive data.

Comment author: malo 19 July 2012 04:35:33AM 1 point [-]

With Dropbox's announcement of new plans and pricing, two of the benefits I listed above for SpiderOak are no longer true. Pricing is now equal (not considering SpiderOak's student rates) and Dropbox has introduced 200 GB and 500 GB plans.

Additionally using symlinks one can add any folder to their Dropbox (note I've done this on OS X, I can't speak to whether this is possible on Windows).

That leaves SpiderOak with it's security benefits. However as this thread from the Dropbox forum details, there are many solution to this problem, one possibly coming from Dropbox itself!

As such, I've made the switch back to Dropbox.

Comment author: handoflixue 18 July 2012 11:50:09PM 1 point [-]

An alternate security solution is to encrypt sensitive files - I use a combination of Dropbox, Truecrypt, and KeePass for most things. There's still a few things that I keep local and encrypt, simply because they're especially sensitive.

Comment author: malo 19 July 2012 04:14:26AM 0 points [-]

Very true.

You may find this thread on the Dropbox forums interesting.

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