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Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?

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Re: Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?

#101

Post by fauigerzigerk »

zzleeper wrote: post #31

Independently of whether DB reads/uploads all the files or not, I've arrived at a difficult position about Dropbox: I'm looking for alternatives. No, it's unrelated with politics or pricing; it's just that in many cases Dropbox sucks . Why? Well, I mostly don't care about all the new features (mobile, Carousel, etc.). What I care the most is that i) it syncs files and ii) acts as a quasi-backup. However, I see the sa…

I use spideroak. It has been very reliable and fast, but you have to actually want its main feature, which is secure (client encrypted) versioned backup. Keeping versions saves you from data loss by overwriting but it also needs more storage space. However, spideroak does it in a pretty smart way. I am surprised how little space it actually needs.

Re: Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?

#102

Post by TheMiller »

zzleeper wrote: post #31

Independently of whether DB reads/uploads all the files or not, I've arrived at a difficult position about Dropbox: I'm looking for alternatives. No, it's unrelated with politics or pricing; it's just that in many cases Dropbox sucks . Why? Well, I mostly don't care about all the new features (mobile, Carousel, etc.). What I care the most is that i) it syncs files and ii) acts as a quasi-backup. However, I see the sa…

SpiderOak. When I decided I wanted auto-syncing cloud storage, I chose them exactly because of the temp file issue. I ended up also liking their security policies and pricing quite a bit. https://spideroak.com/

Re: Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?

#103

Post by SpaceInvader »

tallanvor wrote: post #91

In Windows, even with a filter limiting which directories to process, a FileSystemWatcher object has to examine each event and decide whether or not to call the event handler or let it pass without action. That means it would have to read the file information and compare it against the filters that have been defined. These actions will show up as at least 4 or 5 entries in Process Monitor (and maybe more, I'm not sur…

Why it is scanning files outside of the agreed location?

Re: Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?

#104

Post by logicallee »

yc1010 wrote: post #72
bobofettfett wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe not. Your speculation is as good as mine. Or the op. Or everyone else. The point was Dropbox is accessing files outside the folder, something I would not want or expect. "It is incredibly hard for me to believe that Dropbox has sneakily transferred >1TB" Did they transfer hashes? name+type+size for fingerprinting? Searching for credit numbers or SSNs? Who knows. I don't. And don't do evil is no longer the ba…

They could look for bitcoin wallet files, thats what typical malware does nowadays. Could theorethically only takes the infection of one computer to strike it rich.

all of bitcoins, including every lost bitcoin, have a market cap of $3.8 billion combined, a valuation set based on worldwide trading volume of only $40m over 24h.

Dropbox has already closed hundreds of millions of venture capital money at a valuation of $10 billion. I think it's safe to say Dropbox has found some wallets that are much easier to open than bitcoin wallet files. :)

Re: Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?

#105

Post by mahouse »

onderkalaci wrote: post #43
psk wrote: post #24

Synchronizing all your files sounds like space-waste. It would be trivial to determine if dropbox does that, simply by monitoring the number of bytes sent to dropbox (Create a new file of size x, determine if the stream to dropbox transmits at least x amount of bytes) or by replacing the SSL certificate in the program with your own and then set up a fake server (This would be harder) to determine exactly what is bein…

Dropbox does not allow SSL interception of its traffic. It immediately errors out saying host is not trusted or smth else.

Probably cert pinning.

Re: Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?

#106

Post by pmontra »

zzleeper wrote: post #31

Independently of whether DB reads/uploads all the files or not, I've arrived at a difficult position about Dropbox: I'm looking for alternatives. No, it's unrelated with politics or pricing; it's just that in many cases Dropbox sucks . Why? Well, I mostly don't care about all the new features (mobile, Carousel, etc.). What I care the most is that i) it syncs files and ii) acts as a quasi-backup. However, I see the sa…

Everything in the other replies plus Syncthing.

Re: Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?

#107

Post by mahouse »

aram wrote: post #59
pearjuice wrote: post #17

In a while, this will be disregarded as a bug, might be fixed and maybe Dropbox will even state that they apology and will be deleting all mistakenly uploaded files from their server(s). But you don't know. The lesson to be learned here is that proprietary software cannot be trusted. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.en.html

I'm curious - why is this downvoted?

I can't downvote anything, but I can only guess it's being downvoted for being propaganda.

Re: Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?

#109

Post by yohui »

SpaceInvader wrote: post #103
tallanvor wrote: post #91

In Windows, even with a filter limiting which directories to process, a FileSystemWatcher object has to examine each event and decide whether or not to call the event handler or let it pass without action. That means it would have to read the file information and compare it against the filters that have been defined. These actions will show up as at least 4 or 5 entries in Process Monitor (and maybe more, I'm not sur…

Why it is scanning files outside of the agreed location?

Doesn't tallavor address this in the first sentence?

> In Windows, even with a filter limiting which directories to process, a FileSystemWatcher object has to examine each event and decide whether or not to call the event handler or let it pass without action.

Sounds like the very act of checking whether the file falls within the "agreed location" is what caught the author's attention. I can't say whether that's true, but it doesn't seem unreasonable.

Re: Dropbox accesses all the files in your PC?

#110

Post by pmontra »

blergh123 wrote: post #79

I didn't really think about it before, but I now feel very uncomfortable that Dropbox has copies of my unencrypted files. I would feel much better if the files were encrypted before being synched. Is there a service that does this? I don't want Dropbox to be able to see the contents of my file system at their end.

If you don't trust Dropbox you should encrypt your files before copying them to the Dropbox folder because you can't trust the client too. You should encrypt them with a key the client cannot read from fs. Basically you're going to use it as a backup service because you won't be able to work on files in the DB folder. Maybe one of those file systems that work in user space and store only encrypted data will do. Check this http://www.howtogeek.com/121737/how-to-encrypt-cloud-storage...
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