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Poll: Did you “drop Dropbox”?

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231–240 of 316 posts

Re: Poll: Did you “drop Dropbox”?

#231
post #34

I continue to use Dropbox and I'm pro the appointment of Condoleezza Rice as for the sake of our industry it is wise for us to have better political links to the US government. (Politics is irrelevant to me, but power is not. The government can already twist your arm; being on first name's basis with somebody important will be invaluable.) Edit: I thought we could openly state our opinions, but it seems I am getting…

> us to have better political links to the US government. Us? Are you on Dropbox's board? Why is wedding corporate power to political influence wise for this industry? Astonishing naiveté. > don't downvote or upvote just to normalise your own political beliefs. What a meaningless statement. Post on your blog if you don't want your opinion torn apart like a piece of meat. All the comments I've seen thus far are civil.…

Yes - if you work in the tech industry you are affected by policies which affect the industry as a whole.

Wedding corporate power to political influence is wise for the industry because that is exactly what we are up against already: corporate power has been wedded to political influence for a very long time and one can easily point out attempts that have already been made to protect previously established industries.

See, it's easy, I was able to argue back without resorting to name calling.

Re: Poll: Did you “drop Dropbox”?

#232
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> high reliability For pictures of my family, yes that high reliability is worth it, I don't want to permanently lose a single photo because of a hardware or software failure. I backup my dropbox to s3 via Arq and also have a IFTTT that pushes photos to the free TB of space flickr gives everyone.

You have a backup on every device you choose to sync and if one of these devices happens to be a server with a copy-on-write file system like btrfs[1] i find it very unlikely you will ever loose those files to corruption or a single point of failure. [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Btrfs

> i find it very unlikely you will ever loose those files to corruption or a single point of failure.

Unless you happened to live in New Orleans in 2005. And really of all that sounds like a lot of work to set up and maintain for the near zero chance that some government type wants to spy on me to look at harmless and boring pictures of my pets and family.

Re: Poll: Did you “drop Dropbox”?

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Politics" is discrete from ethics. Condi is a pariah, ethically speaking-- a war criminal walking free. Political links to the US govt are also a bit of a hazard-- the more you willingly approach them and enable them, the more they will take from your pocket and the more they will push you around. The Snowden leaks have painted a bad picture of the US companies as a result of their compliance with ridiculous governm…

The question is whether it is possible to run a significant business in the United States without interacting with the federal government. I don't think that it is. It's not like ISPs and tech companies went to the NSA and offered up their data--there is no proof at all of that. What the evidence shows is that the government used its force of law to compel cooperation from these companies. The people's tool for contr…

"The question is whether it is possible to run a significant business in the United States without interacting with the federal government. I don't think that it is."

That may be true. It probably is true once you reach the numbers-beginning-in-B level.

Nevertheless, there are lots of political operatives, former officials, and other contacts you could find without stooping as low as a former member of the Bush administration.

Re: Poll: Did you “drop Dropbox”?

#234
I used to use my own Dropbox account at work teaching kids computer-stuff, so they'd have an easy way to share files and a place to store their things without having to remember which particular PC they worked at last time (and messing about with USB sticks back and forth, it was chaos).

This was of course a bad idea, especially after I got a Galaxy S4 phone, which came with a 50GB Dropbox upgrade, and I started using my own account for personal stuff a lot more.

So I disconnected my Dropbox account from the work computers, and I'm now actively looking for a solution that is not Dropbox. The main reason is this Condoleezza Rice thing, and the fact that we need a bit more than the default 2GB storage (my old acct was already 4.5GB due to referrals), and getting a paid Dropbox account is really the last thing I want to do (before it was because their pricing scheme is kind of steep, but Condoleezza Rice gives me an extra reason).

Problem is what are the proper alternatives. I'm open to suggestions!

We're using Google Drive now for a bit, but it's soon going to be replaced. It's got sufficient space, but it's got some weird problems with making duplicates, duplicates(1) duplicates(2), and it seems it doesn't always sync up the latest version either, and you still have to try and remember which was the PC you worked on to get the file. This again causes chaos and mess, if you have many different children all working in their own little folder on 7 different computers. Additionally, Google Drive seems noticeably a lot heavier load on the computers than the Dropbox client. And this is a big deal, because these are donated PCs, so they're not the fastest to start with.

Currently I'm looking into SyncThing, see how that performs. But I've only set it up on two computers yet (sharing the computer IDs for initial sync is quite cumbersome, they should add some simple feature to help with that or something). We wanted to try BitTorrent Sync, but it's not open source, and I figure as long as I'm trying to do the right thing, I might as well to it right and open source.

SyncThing doesn't upload to a "cloud" storage, but we don't really need that. We just need something that syncs up all the little folders and tidbits between all seven computers, so everything is available everywhere. Maybe we should instead just set up a shared network folder thing? (this is not at all my line of expertise, I'm a comp.sci/math/code guy that likes working with kids, if any of the people here have some solid advice to go with one solution or the other, greatly appreciated) (the computers are partly Win7 partly Linux Mint).

Finally, while finding alternatives for the above has my priority, if I happen to stumble upon something that'll allow me to easily drop my personal Dropbox account, I'll do it in a heartbleed. I'll probably have to, at some point or other, since the 50GB bonus only lasts a year or so.

Re: Poll: Did you “drop Dropbox”?

#235
post #2

I switched to Syncthing for everything apart from photo syncing. Haven't looked back. http://syncthing.net/

This looks great. Do you have a server or are you just syncing between PCs?

I'm wanting to set up a backup server for music and such, but most virtual server providers (like Linode, DigitalOcean) don't seem optimized toward hard drive space. Could you point me in the right direction?

Re: Poll: Did you “drop Dropbox”?

#236

I kept Dropbox because they appointed Rice. Dropbox is forced to navigate complicated political, regulatory waters. To do that successfully you need someone who knows how they works. People move from the public to private sector all the time to do exactly that. (edit: why would you downvote this? that's crazyballs!)

Um sorry I am confused. Are you saying that C. Rice is going to help dropbox "navigate political regulatory waters"... in favor of their users?

Am I understanding this correctly? C. Rice watches out for me?

Re: Poll: Did you “drop Dropbox”?

#237

I support Condoleeza Rice and GOP, but that wasn't enough for me to start using Dropbox — Google Drive is fine for me. Not everybody is left-leaning here.

I'm not sure I consider myself "left leaning" per se -- I guess it depends on the issue. Before Bush Jr. my nomination for best president of the last hundred years would have been Dwight Eisenhower (R) and my worst would have been Lyndon Johnson (D). Bush has likely edged out Johnson for worst.

Interestingly both Lyndon Johnson and Bush Jr. were Southern Democrats. Most of the craziness about today's GOP can be traced to the fact that they were overrun with former Dixiecrats. Bush was basically a Dixiecrat who ran as a Republican.

The Southern Democrat position combines everything bad about the Democrats (big government, high taxes, etc.) with everything bad about the Republicans (fundamentalism, warmongering). (Bush did raise taxes, just indirectly. Taxation equals spending as per simple double-entry accounting, and Bush raised spending and increased the size of government considerably.)

Re: Poll: Did you “drop Dropbox”?

#238
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Awesome - is there a decent sync client for Tahoe-LAFS though? I'm currently an OwnCloud user but I'd really like to try this option as I have several servers I could use for storage and mirroring, but they'd have to have encrypted storage.

You mean something like Dropbox autosync? There is a drop_upload option in the tahoe.cfg file. I believe it works fine on GNU/Linux. Not sure about other OSes. You could always use 'tahoe backup' command.

Interesting, but not really what I'm talking about. On https://leastauthority.com/ there's mention of development of a "Magic Folder" tool that seems to do more of the sort of thing I'm looking at.
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