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Comment by bitexploder | Hacker News Reader

Every so often someone is like, Dropbox isn’t that hard. Look at this amazing ZFS/whatever! So simple. Yeah, I keep paying Dropbox every year so I don’t have to think about it. I shoot a sync off to backblaze every once in a while.

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I dislike Dropbox for reasons that aren't technical, but the big thing for me is that I want either E2EE, or control/ownership of where my data is stored. These are my personal files (no, not that kind of personal), I'm not just going to scatter them on the internet.

My solution so far has been NextCloud, but I'm getting pretty fed up with it. But not enough to actually do anything about it... yet.

> I dislike Dropbox for reasons that aren't technical, but the big thing for me is that I want either E2EE, or control/ownership of where my data is stored.

You could run something like Cryptomator on top of Dropbox:

https://cryptomator.org/

It even has (paid) iOS and Android apps for mobile access.

Boxcryptor used to be amazing for this till they got acquired by Dropbox. Last I checked cryptomator couple years ago it still hand random file corruption risk, is that still true?

For now I just use hetzner storage share.

I do agree with you at a philosophical level. I have worked in infosec long enough to know. I am pretty careful with what I upload. It’s just hard. Every little home hosted thing. They eat your time. Take effort. Even the “easiest” solutions have a real human cost if you are hosting it yourself.

My solution is… I have no fucks left to give about it. I haven’t for a long time. It works. My family will have all our photos and valuable sentimental data preserved. I keep a local backup. I spend my time on other stuff more valuable to me. If dropbox and backblaze disappear tomorrow oh well. If all my data is leaked? Knock yourself out. All the good stuff is in encrypted volumes.

My data has been breached 12 times by my count. /Twice/ by the OPM itself as I had a security clearance. DOGE goons have all our data and walked out with USB drives with all of it.

Equifax and credit agencies are a joke. My threat model is simple, nothing you can blackmail me with goes to the cloud. And that’s that. Breach me, try to hack my finances, try to steal my crypto. I have had my SIM transferred and someone unsuccessfully attacked my crypto accounts with it.

Good luck to everyone with my data :)

I love Dropbox, I pay annually. I use the open source client https://maestral.app/ on the Mac for workstation use, but also integrate other systems with my Dropbox account using their API. If someone built an open source Dropbox server that sat on top of S3 compatible storage, I would not only use it, but pay to have that optionality to get out of Dropbox if they ever enshittify. I can recognize form and function worth paying for ("value"), but still want an exit plan. It's not about the spend, it is about data sovereignty. This is colloquially referred to as “vendor and third party risk management.”

lol if your data sovereignty still depends on someone else's control plane, it isn't sovereignty. same landlord. lower in the stack

I keep multiple copies across systems.

(25+ years in tech, ymmv)

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