Try out F-Secure’s Younited (http://www.younited.com/). I’m not particularly fond of their Win client, but at least their servers are beyond NSA’s reach.
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Hands down the best service out there is from the people who invented Cloud Computing, Citrix. They have been doing this for 25 years… If you’re talking about using any of the above services for a business, the choice is clear.
ShareFile.
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Been bouncing around figuring this out for a few days.
Ended up mostly with Google Drive. Price was a factor – $2/month for 100G. Integration with the Chrome browser is a plus. A minus, but not (yet?) a big problem is less than wonderful “communication” between Mac and the Google cloud. I wouldn’t say I’m happy, but I’m content.
And for backup, I have OneDrive. Through some promo, I have 25G free. Extra storage is relatively inexpensive, but not Google cheap. Almost signed up for an extra 50G. But for now, GDrive is better for me. Not perfect, but mostly good enough.
Haha, yeah, a dossier on me. Right. Add some hay to the already unmanageably enormous stack they pretend to be looking for needles in. They can do that whether I use Dropbox or not, of course.
I’m slightly doubtful of the value of “selling your metadata” for broadly the same reason: who’s even buying? What is it even plausibly worth? Big data is not necessarily big information. It sort of sounds like there should be something valuable about it, you know, “with all this shit there must be a pony somewhere”, but I wouldn’t bet my own business on it.
Haha, yeah, a dossier on me. Right.
Absolutely, unless you’ve been living in a cave.
I’m slightly doubtful of the value of “selling your metadata” for broadly the same reason: who’s even buying?
To be fair, Dropbox claims they don’t sell your data to third parties. But Dropbox also has a solid, well-documented history of outright lying to the public as well.
What is it even plausibly worth?
I’ll put it this way, there’s businesses that get more money from selling your personal info than they do from the products and services they sell to you.
I haven’t been too thrilled with 60 minutes in the last few years, but this segment was actually done quite well:
Watch that segment and/or read the transcripts at the link above and it may give you a better idea of what they can (and do) gather for huge profits.
I depend utterly on DropBox for sharing with my colleagues, but have recently started using WeTransfer to allow our clients access to their data. Many of them found the blindingly easy DropBox process to be, er, not blindingly easy. A virtual machine in a farm run by an ethical company in the UK is probably my best bet as I don’t want some my data to be held in another country and at present I can’t even use DropBox for it (or any of the other big names). Sigh.
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What about Google’s business? Would you bet that Google was valued at hundreds of billions of dollars? Or Facebook - would you bet that Facebook has a market capitalisation of $117,792,916,701 today?
Because they are. And they’re that valuable because their business model is exactly what you’re so doubtful about.
Others have already suggested ownCloud. I’ve used it here and there, but haven’t yet made the leap to that vs dropbox for my primary solution. (Mostly because my previous hosting service had potentially limiting data transfer limits) Based on the topics here on Boing Boing it’s probably be within your expertise level. If not, surely Doctorow or one of the others could help you out. The best part of it over other options is that since you run it, you’ll never have to worry about Condolizza Rice. Unless you become her. And that’s a whole other bag of worms.
If you want it to be truly cloud, you can run it on Amazon EC2. Otherwise there’s the home hosting option or the internet hosting option.
edited for clarity and spelling
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You miss my point about the dossier, I think. For all I know, every government, corporation and supervillain with a lair inside a volcano has a dossier on me. But if they do, all that dossier is doing is slowing down their search algorithms by giving them irrelevant crap to trawl through. So fuck 'em. The correct response to terrorists is to refuse to be terrorised. The correct response to sinister government-sponsored peeping toms is approximately the same.
As for businesses somehow making money selling each other my data: same answer. I’m never seeing a share of that money, but neither are they picking my pocket. I personally think anyone buying most metadata is investing in snake-oil, and I wish them all the benefit they deserve from being that snaky and that oily.
I acknowledge that I may be speaking from privilege, since I currently have little to fear from them, and I know that’s not true of everyone. But look at it this way: they are wasting time on my data that they would otherwise spend on the secrets of people whom they could harm.
GoodSync is the closest thing to Live Mesh there is for local sync, yet more powerful in many ways. It is better / more configurable than BitTorrent Sync, but has a steeper learning curve (it has options).
It compares MD5 hashes on important files that don’t change metadata or size sometimes (like photos). And it works with / without the cloud. You should use it in combination with a cloud provider of your choice. But they do offer online storage.
So there are a lot of suggestions, but if you want something that works offline like Live Mesh used to, and you don’t want to pay LogMeIn money to use offline sync for Cubbies, try out GoodSync… they have so many recipes to do stuff, it’s pretty neat.
It costs money, but quality software often does. They give steep discounts.
http://www.goodsync.com
For other stuff I use OneDrive. But it doesn’t handle local syncing situations that would blow up ISPs.
Meocloud http://meocloud.pt/ from Portugal. 16GB for free, clients for Mac, Windows, Linux, Firefox, Windows Phone, iOS and Android.
Rui Carmo (Tao of Mac) is a big fan of it. Only downside: As far as I can see the website is only in Portuguese. I can get by with what I know from Spanish.
If you want to gift me 512MB, please use this link for sign-up: https://meocloud.pt/?referral_code=IQHzvoXLW4HsB8xdnrRdQv4j2
irrelevant crap
Like I said, one person’s crap is another organization’s treasure. Knowing where you go, who you communicate with and where, what you purchase, covet, amuses you, etc.
I have a feeling your Dropbox contents isn’t just random files that can’t tell people something about you. Then again, at least you’ve already said you don’t keep anything seemingly important in there like business plans and such.
The correct response to terrorists is to refuse to be terrorised. The correct response to sinister government-sponsored peeping toms is approximately the same.
The former is discouraging to terrorists, the latter is encouraging to the corrupt within government and within quasi-governmental entities.
Just don’t plan on doing anything beyond the norm when it comes to activism (don’t bother trying to organize others, etc.), politics and especially business. Be mediocre in your life’s impact on the status quo and you should be fine.
I acknowledge that I may be speaking from privilege, since I currently have little to fear
Sure, just blend in and don’t try to impact the world around you through unauthorized channels and you should be fine.
I personally think anyone buying most metadata is investing in snake-oil
Perhaps, but I wouldn’t count on it. I’m not sure you’re including all the unethical things that corporations can do with “innocent” personal data. I get the feeling you didn’t watch nor throughly read the 60 minutes link I offered you above.
Just hope you don’t have mental health problems, etc. (perceived or otherwise) that a future employer or business partner doesn’t like… etc, etc…
But look at it this way: they are wasting time on my data that they would otherwise spend on the secrets of people whom they could harm.
I agree with that in principle as far as priorities go. But, they aren’t wasting their time by spying on you. It serves a lot of purposes just beyond trying to find if you’re specifically doing anything illegal or not. And, it has very little to do with terrorism or public safety at all.
Yet the two most popular platforms are based on *nix systems - and *nix systems have had large scale network file system implementations for decades.
DropBox, Box.Net, etc. are all solutions to a deliberately limited platform.
For my laptops, I use NFS over a VPN back to my basement fileserver. Discovery of the basement fileserver is accomplished through dynamic DNS. And as I own the spinning rust, any legal government attempts to seize my data will be known to me.
Of course, this is a solution for syncing my own devices (when I want to sync them - I don’t sync certain data because I’d rather certain information be kept limited.) This isn’t a scalable solution for sharing (or collaborating) with other people.
Thanks.
I chose Copy, though I expect them to disappoint me in the future. I bookmarked Owncloud so that I could try to do that when my health improves.
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I’m reading this thread because I am interested in alternatives for my own use. However, no matter how many alternatives I use, I still have to maintain a Dropbox account due to other people: a couple of organizations which happen to prefer this system to disseminate files (no, I’m not in a position to tell them to change it), and quite a few friends and family members around the world, including my dad who still uses an AOL account (so I have some influence, but I’m not a miracle worker).
It is perfectly reasonable to be interested in and learn about new options while simultaneously bemoaning the fact that other people make it necessary to maintain the status quo.
Your link at the end, in fact, shows that you do understand the position I’m in. That’s exactly what I’m here to learn about: what my options are so that I can separate my usage.
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Are we all not nerd enough to set up our own NAS??
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I use several services’ free accounts at once. Not ideal though. Light on the wallet, heavy on the system. Besides Dropbox I use these others.
Is anyone using Cubby? I’ve been eyeing this up as an alternative to both Dropbox and Sharefile (which is horrible from a multiple project management standpoint). Just curious if anyone had experience with that software, because the price seems pretty competitive and the feature list is impressive.
If you are looking for a self hosted solution, Tonido Personal Cloud is a very good choice. Tonido has mobile apps for all the platforms (iOS, Android, Windows 8, Windows 8 Phone) and the user experience rivals dropbox or any other public cloud services.
iOS App: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tonido-file-access-music-video/id388726418?mt=8
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