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digitalderbs writes:
"A perennial problem facing computer users is how to keep documents, pictures, music and other personal files synchronized between computers. Robust uni-directional solutions, like rsync, and bi-directional solutions, like unison, have existed for a long time. However, these tools require some degree of manual intervention on a periodic basis. Simplified tools like Dropbox and bittorrent sync have emerged as popular, useful and automated alternatives, but these rely on closed-source software, which could be subject to backdooring. Open source solutions, like OwnCloud, are gaining traction, but are these open source platform robust and easy enough to maintain for routine and daily use? Moreover, distributed and encrypted file systems, like Ceph, are increasingly easy to use, but many of these do not work between Linux and OS X or Windows operating systems. What are your experiences and thoughts?"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by chloride on Tuesday March 25 2014, @08:05AM
I'll admit to being a little confused whenever a vendor is described as "offering client-side encryption". If it's client-side, why is it "offered"? I've had some interest in online backup services, and would never consider one without encryption. But I'd never consider one where any part of the encryption process was provided by the vendor. It's not enough that "I have the keys", if any moving part of the encryption process is provided by the vendor it's a no-go for me. SpiderOak appears to fail that metric.
I'm using encryption on all my data at home, but don't claim to be an encryption expert. I lack the maths to verify any particular algorithm, so I go with what appears to be the community consensus. My local storage is all heavily encrypted (geli/AES-128, plus whatever Linux uses for home directory and whole disk encryption). If I were to sync remotely, I'd encrypt each file individually (probably openssl[1]), and the remote service would only ever see a stream of those encrypted blobs. My encrypted blobs.
[1] Just because I've used it before. Open to other commonly-used OSS suggestions, particularly ones which would be less of a headache when decided which files needed re-syncing.