Drop Box

[Donki]

Anybody got any experience of using this?
Work is (understandably) thinking of banning USB drives to transfer files between work and home (because of security). Drop box is the suggested alternative if we need to transfer files.

Is it reliable?
Any down sides?

Thankyou for any comments!

Anyone?

Well first of all your work IT are short sighted. Rather than banning them, why not use something like Truecrypt to encrypt the contents of USB sticks.

Dropbox is great. I use it a lot for my own personal files but I'm sure my company would take quite a dim view of storing sensitive work information on a server owned by someone else, outside of company control and which anyone can attempt to hack. Your company has absolutely no visibility or control of the security.

I use it so I can access files from my pc on my iPad. It's served it's purpose well so far although I would probably feel a bit wary of putting anything important on there as I don't know how secure it is.

"Well first of all your work IT are short sighted. Rather than banning them, why not use something like Truecrypt to encrypt the contents of USB sticks."

I guess it could be quite hard to make sure that everyone is using that with their USB sticks (or is it?) and it's just easier to issue a blanket flat out ban on USB sticks. That way they should never see anyone with one plugged in rather than see one connected and be unsure as to if it's being used securely.

"Dropbox is great. I use it a lot for my own personal files but I'm sure my company would take quite a dim view of storing sensitive work information on a server owned by someone else, outside of company control and which anyone can attempt to hack. Your company has absolutely no visibility or control of the security."

The lesser of two evils perhaps? No it's not ideal, but it's probably better than the current situation.

For the record I use DropBox to share files with team members and outside contractors and consultants and I've not had a problem with it, it does all seem to work pretty well. But, perhaps subconsciously, there's nothing on there that we don't have security worries about.

I use dropbox to transfer files of a non-sensitive nature and have an sftp server for transfering files which are more sensitive . I don't allow the use of USB sticks on my research computers at work, mainly because of repeated virus infections. I find dropbox works very well and has been quite handy to ensure I don't end up with multiple copies of documents I'm working on, all stored on different USB sticks.

Yes I can understand that Badgers but then that's why I think its a short sighted policy. Viruses are rarely nowadays transmitted by USB stick. Usually its downloaded via a dodgy website or more rarely a dodgy program/document.

The main fear nowadays is that if the stick is lost, sensitive files might be found by the wrong people. So it seems strange to me that you would ban the use of this in favour for handing over all your "sensitive data" to a faceless company on the Internet whom you have no control or visibility over.

Some interesting points. Thankyou all.

Dropbox does what it does outstandingly well. I use three computers to work on the same data and don't even think any more about whether I've got the most up-to-date version, and because it keeps backups of the last few changes I've not had that OMG NOOOOOOOOOOOO moment when I've saved over the wrong file since I started using it.

As for security, data is encrypted as it is sent over the network, and is encrypted on the DropBox server: it can only be decrypted with your password. All this happens automatically in the background. This is much safer than using a USB stick which can easily be lost, and even if you have bothered to save vulnerable files with a password, this password can easily be broken.

Nothing is totally secure of course, but DropBox is many times more secure than USB sticks. And probably more secure than UnseenAcademicalMums sftp server unless the files are being encrypted before uploading (anyone with root privileges or physical access to your sftp server, or backups from that server, can obtain the data).