Dropbox and Microsoft announce partnership focusing on Office integration. Big news, and surprising since Microsoft’s cloud service OneDrive will definitely take a hit from this. The new Microsoft definitely is more agile in their decisions. All that said, I can’t help but wonder if this is all about getting a Dropbox app for Windows Phone, a possible deal-breaker for some potential customers. Because yes, that’s part of the deal.
Tag: cloud
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OneDrive and NSA
Do you think your OneDrive files are safe from NSA and Prism? Think again. Scary stuff if true, and hopefully something Microsoft will address in the future, although I’m not holding my breath. It seems like Apple is the only cloud player that’s taking a firm stand against these sort of things.
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Dropbox lost some data
Bad news everyone, Dropbox confirms that some users of older desktop Dropbox clients using the Selective Sync feature have lost data. Most of it is said to be restored, but not all of it.
In light of all of this, we’ve taken the following steps to ensure the Selective Sync bug won’t affect anyone else going forward:
1) we’ve patched our desktop client so this issue doesn’t exist in Dropbox anymore; 2) we’ve made sure all our users are running an updated version of the Dropbox client; and 3) we’ve retired all affected versions of the Dropbox client so no one can use them.
We’ve also put additional testing in place to prevent this from happening in the future.
This is a good reminder that cloud sync isn’t the same as backing up.
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The importance of Dropbox
I’ve been a paying Dropbox user since forever, and I don’t intend to stop, despite some pretty serious competition. Assuming Dropbox won’t go all evil on us, it’s a resource I want to use. I’m trusting it with the bulk of my data right now, and I have for years.
That said, I trust Apple more than I trust Dropbox. Apple entering the cloud game with iCloud Drive is great news, and my initial reaction to the announcement was, literally, ABOUT FUCKING TIME!!! That still stands, but I think Dropbox is more important than ever. The recent iCloud outages notwithstanding, I’m just not sure if Apple is ready for this. Data is important, and while an online sync and storage service isn’t a backup (seriously, backup your stuff elsewhere), the nuisance of losing data because of weird things happening is bad enough. And while I’ve yet to lose data from iCloud in any way, I have had some pretty poor syncing experiences. Granted, most of those are in third-party apps and the developers might be to blame, but still. That rarely happens with Dropbox, and when shit hits the fan, Dropbox has its versioning safety net, which I’ve been forced to use on a few occassions.