[DM-MUG] does anyone have a comment on DropBox?

[Matthew Nuzum]

On Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 6:12 PM, Jim <jlagnese at gmail.com> wrote:

> That's fine and all well and good, but what if you had users that you had
> to tell not to look into the red LED on a mouse (and we are talking about
> educated people, just not computer savvy at all)?
>
>
One nice thing about Dropbox is that there is versioning (probably not if
you share a .dmg). If someone deletes or wrecks a file you can go into the
web site and restore it.

There were some recent privacy concerns. Dropbox got a little bad press
because they can access your files and give them to the government if
requested. In theory, it should have been impossible for Dropbox to view
your files because they're stored encrypted. The logical conclusion is that
if something bad happens at Dropbox HQ (hacked, malicious employee, who
knows) your files could be visible to people you don't know or trust.

I use dropbox but if there is something critical to your business,
livelyhood, privacy, etc, simply don't put it up there. You can mitigate
this by using an extra layer of encryption.

Another option to consider if you have a server under your control is to
create a share using the WebDav protocol. This is a feature built into the
extremely common Apache web server and the files can be shared by all
operating systems (Windows, Mac OS and Linux all support WebDav). I hear
that Mac OS Lion Server will support this type of file sharing. Because it
uses web protocols you can access your files from anywhere as long as your
server is connected to the public internet. You can use standard HTTPS to
encrypted the transfer and routine backups to protect their integrity.

-- 
Matthew Nuzum
newz2000 on freenode, skype, linkedin and twitter

♫ You're never fully dressed without a smile! ♫
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