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Why I Dropped Dropbox and got OwnCloud

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Re: Why I Dropped Dropbox and got OwnCloud

#23

Post by zeidrich »

orjan wrote: post #6

One aspect that is overlooked here is the actual safety of your data. If you feel that your own server has the safety and backup resources of e.g. Amazon (which Dropbox uses), you're probably deluding yourself.

You can manage your own backups, and then you don't have to feel how safe your data is, you can know it.

If you aren't worrying about petabytes of data, you can run your own scheduled backup, take a copy off site, and test it regularly.

With Dropbox, you're right that they have more overall resources, but you also have no way to audit their processes. Other cloud services have lost people data. If you want to be secure in your data, you need a way to audit those processes, so you would need to do it yourself anyways.

If I know I have a known good backup in a fire resistant box off site, I know I'll have access to that data later. If I have data in Dropbox and then the next day it's gone and they don't return my inquiries, that's a possibility. Maybe they get shut down without warning for hosting copyrighted materials like megaupload. Maybe they have been cutting costs by gambling on the safety of your data. Maybe they get attacked and all of their online backups get destroyed, and they don't have an offline copy.

When I look at Dropbox's backup policy they tell me what is backed up, but they don't tell me how. I just have to trust them. But I really know nothing about them.

Re: Why I Dropped Dropbox and got OwnCloud

#26

Post by minimaxir »

mokkol wrote: post #15

Next post: Why I dropped HostGator.com and got

Hitting #3 on Hacker News will murder any website which uses shared hosting. It happened to me with Dreamhost, and it got so bad that my website was irrevocably corrupted.

Needless to say, I switched away.

Re: Why I Dropped Dropbox and got OwnCloud

#28

Post by orjan »

icebraining wrote: post #14
orjan wrote: post #6

One aspect that is overlooked here is the actual safety of your data. If you feel that your own server has the safety and backup resources of e.g. Amazon (which Dropbox uses), you're probably deluding yourself.

Backup is irrelevant, you can always encrypt it and send to S3. As for safety, well, at least you're a considerably less visible and worthy target than Dropbox. And you can implement systems (e.g., stronger authentication) that Dropbox might disregard since they're targeting a less technical user base. Personally, I use git-annex as my sync server, and all non-local transmissions are done over SSH using public key au…

I'm not arguing that you can't have a private server that's secure. I'm arguing that setting up an OwnCloud box is probably more insecure than using Dropbox.

Re: Why I Dropped Dropbox and got OwnCloud

#29

Post by sz4kerto »

runjake wrote: post #19

> OwnCloud is basically Dropbox, without the data limits and pricing restrictions. There's some pretty huge caveats in the above statement from the article. I switched to ownCloud for a while and then switched back to Dropbox. I switched back to Dropbox for a couple reasons. First, ownCloud is written in PHP and the code (and the plugins you could add on) looked pretty janky. The UI was better than the usual open sou…

OwnCloud + DO or Linode, and your backup problems are solved (more or less).

Re: Why I Dropped Dropbox and got OwnCloud

#30

Post by acomjean »

I use owncloud, as a document repository for a non-profit. It replaces google drive for us. It doesn't see a ton of use but has worked well for us as a simple document archive.

I did like the fact that you can go into linux and find where the files are stored and back them up.

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