Introduction

I've been changing the way I work recently. Moving to full time development from a Windows 7 machine with Ubuntu and CentOSVM via Virtual Box to a OSX 2007 top of the range Macbook Pro that has 1/3 of the power my Winodws 7 machine has.

Part of the requirement meant I could no longer use my Wndows only security token. Which is a shame, but you know, I can live with the failure of securty companies to cater for xplatform developers.

Because of all those change I now need to move sensitive files to the cloud, which I would never do - unless I have Truecrypt encrypted with a secure key file and password. I used to use Dropbox, but heard how it was unsecure and the fact that there was an incident that left all Dropboxes exposed to the world for 4 hours at one point in the past meant I was curious to see what other alternatives there are...

What I tested

I haven't tested every single alternative there is to dropbox because that would be rediculous. There are so so so many alternatives now-a-days.

What I tested however was a number that has been around for a while and has fairly good reputation coming from people whom have recommended it after using Dropbox.

These are:

• Wuala
• SpiderOak
• Ubuntu One

I should mention right off the bat that while I did try Ubuntu One, however it does not have an OSX interface at this moment in time and thus I've ruled it out of contention for the moment even though they offer 5GB free space instead of the 2GB standard amongst all those I've tried.

Both Wuala and SpiderOak were reocommended to me because of their security features. i.e. the use of encryption by default that makes it so that not even the staff of the services can open the drive. Even so, I was looking to install a Truecrypt partition to these services to prevent unauthorized physical access.

Both services are interesting but Wuala comes out better than SpiderOak in general because of the ability for Wuala to be mounted on your filesystem. SpiderOak operates differently in that you can specify whichever folder you would like to backup/sync. But SpiderOaks' interface is sub-par and the syncronisation is hard to setup and doesn't work as advertised.

While they give you an impression that they deduplicate files and can store files incrementally, it is actually unable to store TrueCrypt files without re-uploadig the entire file every time they're changed. 

This problem also exist in Wuala. However, it has been said and rumored that block-level syncronisation will come to Wuala at some point in the future. So it is something to keep an eye on.

Dropbox however is able to sync Truecrypt files superbly well by just uploading parts that have changed. Even though it is insecure by nature. Dropbox remains my best choice as security features like encryption I would very much rather implement it the way I want.

Lastly, pricing, all of them actually offer competitive pricing, but rather than that, I think the primary consideration for any users of these services is wether it fits your purpose.

That's all for this round up review. Hope this is of use to somebody out there.

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