Droppedbox  

Dropbox added Condoleezza Rice to their Board of Directors, so I’m leaving Dropbox. Fundamentally, a company leadership that would overlook her part in the legalization of torture and of warrentless wiretaps is not a leadership I would trust with my data or to which I could give money.

So, as a work in progress, here’s what I’ve tried instead:

First, I expanded SpiderOak (which is just like Dropbox but waaaaaay less clearly designed) to 100GB and moved some things I need for computer/work/mobile to there. I was hoping to use SpiderOak for all the documents and folders and reference I kept on Dropbox. I set this up as a monthly plan and might bring it back down to 2GB because… I already locked myself out of the account. All the files are on my computer, but I can’t get into the website. and after getting locked out of their two-factor authentication, finally had that feature disabled by customer support.

So, instead, I made a Droppedbox folder to sync with BitTorrent Sync between computers. BitTorrent Sync is also good for group sharing. If you rely on Dropbox shared folders between two or more people, you can do the same sort of thing through BitTorrent Sync.

I signed up for iTunes Match ($25) to store MP3, since an 80GB (or whatever) Music folder is not something I need to fully sync to my laptop.

Anyway, it’s a work in progress. I’ll share whatever else I find that’s simple enough for me and for people I previously referred to Dropbox. Mea culpa.

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Strongsync was just suggested to me: it’s a $30/$50 app that works like Dropbox’s magic folder, but stores the data on S3, DreamObjects, or over SSH/SFTP. The benefit of that is that the remote storage serves as the always-on third computer for the sync.

SpiderOak as a service is always on, too, but if you’ve simply set up two computers to BitTorrent Sync, the changes only sync when both computers are on and online. One could set up a third computer (or second, if you’re basically backing up one machine) that’s always on. (A net-top or Rasberry Pi + a small hard drive would be a one-time cost.)

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Edit: I was casually calling BitTorrent Sync “btsync” but I see there is some other thing at btsync.com and don’t want to cause confusion.

switched to fastmail  

I switched to Fastmail from Google Apps email. It didn’t take too much effort.

Fastmail costs money. For the amount of email I have, it’s $40/year for fast IMAP with solid spam filtering. The search feels as fast as on Gmail. So far, I’m using it with iOS Mail and Postbox.

I was surprised by Fastmail’s terrific IMAP importer, which gobbled up 116,000 messages (and folders) from my existing account, without any duplicates. I’d expected to do a long, local transfer through Thunderbird, but instead I just made an app-specific password to the Google account and let Fastmail do the rest.

I kept the Google account, since it’s free-for-now. I just removed Gmail as one of the domain’s apps. Calendars and docs and Drive are all intact.

While I miss Boomerang, I’m going to give Followup.cc a try.

My address remains the same and I remain as unlikely to reply in a timely fashion.

cf: maxmasnick.com/2013/07/19/fastmail/