Dropbox
 

Yup, Dropbox. I have quite a complex trip coming up involving multiple airlines, traveling to more than a handful of countries and stays at more than a few properties. I've put all the info on my Dropbox along with my visas and passports. My thought is to be able to access the info no matter if I lose my hard copies, laptop, or phone (as well as my wife having access). Any downside to this?

Not worried. I just asked if there was a downside. Couldn't see one myself but I'm not the techiest chap in the land. Seems an simple solution should something go terribly wrong.

As a non techy, I love Dropbox. It just works unlike so many of the other similar types of things which are too complicated. The one downside of which I am aware is that if you (or someone who has stolen your laptop) alter or delete a file, then it remains altered or deleted - you don't get the opportunity to get it back.

I would use Google Drive instead, particularly because you can keep current and previous versions of files, plus it has two-factor authentication option (I don't know if Dropbox does). But YMMV: I personally find Dropbox confusing to use especially when people want to "share" folders with me.

I've been doing this for about 10 years. To date I've never had to use it in anger, but I've yet to find a downside.
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Nope. 30 day history for all files (more with the paid versions), plus they now have the ability to "Rewind" back to a date to bulk-revert files in the case of something like you described.

It does. If you were just using it for an emergency repository then it would be an interesting decision as to whether to use 2FA (and thus make it harder to access in an emergency, when you might have also lost your phone/2FA backup codes/etc), or not to use 2FA (making it less secure).

Dropbox has version history for 30 days by default (I think it's more on the business tier). 2FA has been around for a few years.

I actually tried to move from Dropbox to Google Drive last year to save a bit of money. However, Google Drive was just too flaky, and I found it didn't actually synchronise properly a lot of the time (I was using the Mac version). Dropbox has been rock-solid for me,

If you have your own email details that you could log into from any device then you could also just save all the details as an email in "draft". Then you could log in and access it. Can be done with hotmail/gmail etc and others.

Dropbox also has offline access for files.

Do you have any references to back up that statement?

Completely agree with you.

To OP: just note that if your travel plans include China, dropbox is not accessible without VPN. This may be an important consideration if the raison-d'aitre is access to documents in an emergency.

tb

Dropbox is a banned site in our office due to numerous security problems they've had over the years.

Here's a quick, but nowhere near comprehensive list of problems they've had:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Dropbox

Our office hosts its own cloud-like setup in our own private off-site data center. No one's going to take care of your data like you would.

We DO have some multiple-encrypted (we encrypt it before it gets uploaded, and B2 also has encryption) data over at BackBlaze's B2, but it's encrypted with multiple, sequential ciphers. Paranoid? Not really given what our office works on from time to time. Our laptops aren't allowed to leave the country either. I also do keep my important docs over there, also with multiple ciphers, in case the worst happens. Medical history, important docs, etc.

The bold statement is only as good as the timely software patches provided by the 3rd parties to protect the office data. Recently Apple and Microsoft both had security issues discovered which existed for years. Apple issued a security patch for the iPhone 4S which has not been supported since September 2014. The Microsoft security issue covers all products from Windows XP to Windows 10.

With security, whether electronic/computer, personal/bodily, or physical/building, there's threats and risks. Threats are possible bad things that can happen. Risk is the probability of those things actually happening. I'm sure you've left a window open in a building or car at some point. That's a major security threat, as a prowler could just climb right in! BUT, I'm willing to bet that didn't happen. The risk was low enough that you decided you could open the window. Likewise, do you have a bodyguard with you 24/7? Most likely not. Why? Because the chances of something bad happening is so low that you can't justify the hassle and expense. Not every computer/software threat is a reality, or even a problem unless the computer's connected up to raw internet without a firewall.

If anything, your post underscores why we've done what we've done.

Dropbox is a much bigger target than our lowly IP block in a very quiet, almost completely unused larger IP block. I see the random IP drop by periodically, but we'll go days, sometimes weeks without someone trying the doorknob. We still use nice security -- The software we use is also used by companies like Cisco, airlines, airports, health insurance companies, hotel chains, automotive manufacturers. We use them as our shield/canary-in-the-coalmine of sorts, since they're much larger targets than us and have much larger and experienced IT departments. No reason for us to reinvent the wheel when these large companies have paid employees doing the work for us.

Has there been major security breaches with Google Drive? Seems like Google takes security seriously (since having sole access to your data is what makes the company valuable). Ideally you would encrypt the data you upload to whatever provider as well, to prevent the provider from snooping (although that might not be practical for many types of data).

I use
Tripit (free)- I have the pro. This is mostly for flights on code shares where I need to know 2 or more PNRs (looking at you IB/BA)
Dropbox 2 FA with a boxcryptor folder for sensitive stuff (early adopter- 2 accounts with 15 gb each)
I still have a little business on the side that I can do online so that goes in Onedrive
and for non sensitive things Google Drive. They have recently split Drive from Photos but I have not noticed a real difference. I have not seen a report of a google drive cloud account being compromised.

My wife the lawyer always takes hard copies of everything.

I have a free Dropbox account with 12GB of storage, but the one device limitation is very annoying. Now that I have a multi-year Office365 subscription with 1TB OneDrive storage, I was looking for a seamless way to migrate all the files in my Dropbox to OneDrive. That's when I stumbled upon mover.io. Instead of using your local computer as an intermediary, it just connects directly with whatever cloud service you're using and migrates all data to where you want it moved.

It used to cost $20, but it was bought by Microsoft just over a year ago and it's now a free service.

I'll save any super important documents on Dropbox, OneDrive, and Google Drive (and locally on my phone and laptop).

Oh nice, thanks for sharing.

Was hoping they had a Mega connector... but not atm. Oh well.

I went through this process last year. Why pay for DropBox when I get 1TB free with Office 365?

I'd not heard of mover.io, so I did it the manual way. I've got fast broadband, so it didn't too long - although I only use about 120GB anyway.

No regrets so far.

I was thinking about this as well.

I do find dropbox to be quite convenient... although I'm still trying to pare down my files so that I can simply use a free account.

My wife’s employer went from local servers for everything to some corporate Dropbox setup.

Its been a disaster for everyone, in more ways than one. It’s now keeping all computers from entering sleep mode because each laptop is constantly trying to sync thousands of files.

Her laptop ran so hot and wouldn’t sleep that it baked the battery so bad the computer no longer sat flat on the desk. IT sent a new battery and due to Covid it was going to weeks if not months for them to swap them. I said to hell with it and made the swap last night. Happy I did, the battery had doubled in thickness and surely must have been a fire hazard.

Dropbox has been a complete disaster for the thousands of employees she works with, although for individual use I’ve never had a problem with it.

I have an old PC which I run as my personal server. That's not for everyone but at least I control everything.

Do they know that there is the Smart Sync feature they can use to avoid this?

How strange. My company migrated from OneDrive to Dropbox. If all of your stuff was on OneDrive before the migration, it was done via cloud (probably with something similar to mover.io); they also recommended you upload anything and everything into OneDrive before the migration. That said, very little is synced to my Dropbox; the majority of my development work is "synced" via something like Github.

Sounds like your wife's corporate IT needs to figure out the sync settings for all employees. Does she really need those "thousands of files" on her laptop?

smart sync or select sync isn’t an option for the investigators or admin as they need access to all files. Even IT admits it’s a problem without a solution right now. As of right now their answer is to let the computers bake.
https://cimg0.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...49ecab94d.jpeg

Yikes.
Perhaps dropbox isn't the way to go then for them.

IT had her switch to selective. That computer still runs like a gaming machine hooked on Fortnite and will likely 'cook' this battery as well. I wish they would let her use a desktop pc from home at this point, as the fan noise from the Dell is maddening. Wearing noise cancelling headphones in the home office helps, but that is of course a joke on my part and not at all practical.:)

I wish Dropbox had a general 1TB product...

Or even something less than that. I'm after the syncing, not the cloud storage. The three device limit is somewhat annoying but it's not worth the $9.99/mo to avoid it.

Yeah, I think I could also do fine with 0.5TB too... I'm at around 300GB atm but it can fluctuate wildly at times.