Living in the Cloud

I'm a big fan of Dropbox in general and use it extensively to share files between my various machines; it's especially useful when I'm at work with my MacBook and I need documents from the desktop at home.

But there is one issue which is irritating; that is no selective sync and I really didn't want to sync my whole personal Dropbox with my work laptop; actually, my work laptop's hard drive is so small that my Dropbox account would fill it.

I recently P2Ved my work-laptop so that I could run a virtual instance of it at home on my big desktop and my MacBook; makes working at home much more comfortable and I don't actually have to lug my work-laptop around any more but this gave me an issue. I keep all my work-documents on my laptop and I didn't want to have to rely on flash-drives to carry my documents around on.

After a bit of googling and a plea on Twitter; I got my solution. Set-up a second free Dropbox account and share a folder between that and my personal account; it works great. So I now have all my documents in sync without having to lug my clunky work-laptop around.

And then the Twitter document leak story broke; how to cope with security in the cloud? Oh, easy; I just used TrueCrypt to create an encrypted file-container to store my documents in and moved that to my Dropbox folder. TrueCrypt is a great piece of free software, if you haven't got a copy; you should have!

I still wish that Dropbox had selective sync but with a tiny bit of fiddling about, I have a secure and robust way of sharing my stuff. This cloud stuff is great and with a little bit of thought; you can ensure that your files are safe.

Of course, you should also be ensuring you use strong passwords to try and prevent people gaining access to your accounts but people like Google could make life tougher for the hackers and certainly make password reclaim a lot more secure.