

Why I switched from Dropbox to Windows Live Mesh - Garbage
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/why-i-switched-from-dropbox-to-windows-live-mesh/3512

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rfrey
"Author of more than 25 books on Microsoft Windows and Office, including the
recently released Windows 7 Inside Out"(from his bio) suggests a Microsoft
solution.

[edit: removed "tldr" tag because this was clearly not a summary but a mere
snark.]

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JonoW
Ad hominem

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rfrey
<blush> It's true, it is.

This is a tangent, but an honest question. The biases and agenda of an
argument's author are often essential to evaluating the argument. In the human
world, a person would be pretty naive to not "consider the source".

Is it always invalid in written discourse to raise the issue of the author's
background, or is there a way to do it that isn't ad hominem?

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JonoW
Of course it's valid to consider the source, but you need to back it up, show
that it's influencing his opinion unfairly. You may be right, maybe he is just
favouring MS products, but then show why his comparison is wrong, or why he is
ignoring better alternatives, something at least.

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Derbasti
In theory, yes. The recent news about Dropbox are not encouraging. The thing
is, here is a list of things I need from a syncing service:

* Reliability. No fucking up my files, please.

* Low Maintenance. It should _just work_ , basically.

* Cross Platform. I _need_ to work reliably on Win, Lin, OSX. And at the same time, too.

Anything else is just bonus. If you know a syncing service besides Dropbox
that satisfies all three of these, please let me know!

Oh, and bonus points for iOS/Android integration.

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soofaloofa
SpiderOak?

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stuff4ben
I installed SpiderOak on my Mac when the Dropbox security failures came to
light a couple weeks ago. SpiderOak is just plain confusing and hard to use. I
think I setup a folder to sync but with all of the options and "features" it
has, I really don't know what is being synced or not. I'm a software developer
by trade, and if I find it this confusing, I would definitely not recommend it
to regular people. I'm going to give Live Mesh a shot and see how it works.

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endtime
I used Live Mesh once. Then, out of the blue, after a reboot reboot it started
deleting all my files. I got in touch with the Live Mesh team and was told
that I should remove files with unsupported extensions (WTF?) from my synced
folders and see if my files came back. I think they were eventually able to
recover some, but not all, of the stuff that was lost. This was early 2009, so
maybe the client has improved since then, but I can't bring myself to trust
it.

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JamieEi
I used Live Mesh from launch up until about a year ago and had similar
experiences. Lots of sync errors, lots of pain upgrading when MS decided to
shuffle Live Mesh over to the Windows Live team.

On the other hand, Dropbox has been incredibly reliable and easy to use, plus
it works on Android and Linux.

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ern
He makes one very good suggestion:

 _At the very minimum, Dropbox needs to have a thorough security audit from an
independent group to ensure that it has the processes in place to back up
those promises._

Call it security theatre, a waste of time and resources, or whatever you want,
but I would find this very reassuring as a Dropbox user, and it would help me
to trust the service again. That, and an independent verification of their
claims about the number of users possibly affected by the no-password security
bug.

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eli
I would bet on this being one of the outcomes of the class action lawsuit
against them.

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stuff4ben
So I'm trying out LiveMesh on my Mac right now. Installation was easy and so
was setting up the sync folder. I copied about 100MB of source code into the
folder and it started syncing right away. However, it's just killing my CPU. I
have a Core i5 MBP and CPU utilization is 100%-130%. Memory usage is quite low
at ~70MB. I don't recall Dropbox killing my CPU like this when doing a simple
sync. I wonder if it's doing some sort of encryption?

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c4urself
It's interesting that my "emotional" reaction is to favor Dropbox to
Windows... I like the brand, the entrepreneur in me is naturally inclined to
cheer for the startup versus the corporate giant and I've been telling people
about Dropbox making me somewhat more vested in it. That said, security issues
_are_ affecting your image Dropbox. Please fix these and I'll keep loving you
and have no reason to switch.

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moozeek
As an alternative I have never seen Powerfolder (<http://www.powerfolder.com>)
mentioned here, and that's a pity. Powerfolder surely is not a nice and shiny
start up (German private company, since 2003), but it has worked for us for
over 3 or 4 years now. As I understand Powerfolder originally was a client to
just sync files and folders across computers but they added "cloud storage" a
few years ago, so your devices need not be connected at the same time. The
Java client works an Windows, Mac and Linux, it's "functionally" designed, to
say it politely (no shiny icons) You can sync backup or share any file or
folder on your computer. I've tested nearly all sync and backup services but
none of them made me switch, Powerfolder's sync speed and reliability is just
superior (they can LAN sync too). And heck if you don't trust "the cloud" you
can just buy their server software and set it up on your own hardware.

I still use Dropbox for easy private file sharing, just not professionally.

[Edit: ,just NOT professionally]

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__rkaup__
More technical people like us can just use Tarsnap.

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Derbasti
The thing is, Tarsnap in and of itself is only a backup, but does not sync.
And sync really is what makes Dropbox so great.

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Juniper
As suggested recently by 'How To Geek' I have installed Boxcryptor in my
dropbox folder.

Boxcryptor was obviously inspired by Dropbox's limitations and as far as I can
see solves them perfectly with encryption of every file at the client end.

Dropbox simply stores and syncs these encrypted files.

The linked article says : 'Ultimately, I’ve come to the conclusion that scale
matters in the cloud. Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have the experience and
the engineering depth to get operational and security issues right.'

Until a little while ago I wonder if the author would have objected to Sony
being added to that list?

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pragmatic
I don't think of Sony when I think of "the cloud".

However - Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are major players and most people do
think of these guys when it comes to cloud storage. Amazon is of course the
gold standard and Google is trusted. Microsoft is kinda sort there.

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radarsat1
It really kind of blows my mind that anyone is willing to use these kinds of
cloud-storage tools without their own personal layer of encryption in-between.
I've used Dropbox with encfs in the past, and didn't bat an eye when their
usage terms changed, because although they were storing my data, they do not
have my data. Without something like encfs, you're just literally giving other
people your personal files--I don't understand that on any level.

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sunchild
Don't you lose the key features of Dropbox as a service: de-dup, sync, share,
etc.? In that case, why not just store your stuff directly in S3 and cut out
the middle man?

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amitutk
I have used both Dropbox and Live Mesh, both work fine for me.

Advantages for Live Mesh: * Free quota is 5 Gb * I can choose the folder I
want to sync, so my existing folder structure need not be tweaked

Advantages for Dropbox: * It is more popular so it is easier to set up a
shared folder with someone.

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joejohnson
Why do people split articles into multiple pages like this? Does this increase
ad revenue somehow?

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greyman
Yes.

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m4tt
Shame Windows Live Mesh doesn't work on Lion. I would have liked to try it.

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mbesto
He just spent a whole page talking about security issues and then never
mentioned what security he is benefiting from by moving to Windows...

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upthedale
Simply put, I am not aware of any heavily publicised security breaches with
Live Mesh like there have been Dropbox.

The impression I've had in recent times (something presumably shared by the
article's author) is that security is something that Microsoft takes very
seriously these days. That has happened out of necessity, originally
precipitated by security flaws in the Windows line of OS. But at least they've
already learnt that security is a serious issue and tightened things up -
something dropbox (and other players from recent hacking scandals) are only
just learning.

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Kwpolska
Run it on my XP/Linux desktop.

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mattyohe
"Why I switched from Dropbox to Windows Live Mesh"

Because I am a Microsoft shill.

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rodh257
So you think his other reasons for swapping aren't valid? Or do you think that
there is a compelling reason not to use Live Mesh if you want to switch from
Dropbox?

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mattyohe
I got in dropbox very early and they initially gave out 5GB of space, so I
have that. His other points are not very interesting.

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canistr
LAN syncing and multiple folder support is fairly compelling. 25 GB web
storage sounds pretty good too considering it's free. Although personally I
wouldn't use the web storage and would stick to the 5 GB.

