On Friday, August 17, 2018 12:28, Rich Wales wrote > Hi. It appears that Dropbox is discontinuing support for Ecryptfs. <snip> > I received a notification last night (Thu. 8/14) identifying two of > my computers -- one hosting my Dropbox files in Ecryptfs on ext4, > and the other using ZFS on LUKS -- saying Dropbox would no > longer work on these systems after November 7. Gives you a deadline for abandoning Dropbox in my opinion... I would send a respectful and well thought out letter to their support and sales departments telling them that due to this change, you will be canceling your account and taking your business elsewhere were it me that received this notice. The more people vote with their wallets, the more readily businesses can see whether or not it is cost effective to make various changes. That the customers have no choice in the matter is an illusion that needs to be dispelled. The choices may not be easy, but they are there. (Personally, I use SpiderOak, specifically for their zero-knowledge policy). > When I wrote to request further technical details as to exactly > why they were no longer willing to support Ecryptfs, I got an > uninformative answer which simply repeated the above and > suggested LUKS as an alternative full disk encryption solution. Typical for 'lazy' first level support (been on both sides; from their side, they are heavily pressured to kick out responses as quickly as possible with minimal focus on completeness); to get a real answer, you will have to keep pressing for one and rejecting the boilerplates. > So I guess I'm faced with either converting to ext4-on-LUKS, > or else looking for an alternative to Dropbox. Unless someone > here feels up to the challenge of armtwisting Dropbox into > taking an expanded view of things? :-) Considering (in my experience) Dropbox has an unencrypted copy of your data, I would question using Dropbox for anything you would keep encrypted locally in the first place. As an alternate, I would sooner set up Ecryptfs to provide access to the files in the expected location and give Dropbox access to the encrypted copy only; this encrypted copy can be on the supported ext4 without issue, handling the backup of the encryption keys separately. The files/directories Dropbox has a copy of will appear to be nonsensical, thus protecting your data in the event of a Dropbox compromise. Two known drawbacks of that method are having two separate mount points for the same data rather than the easier to use in place remount (not sure if I have the terms correct) and the complete loss of the partial file upload for small changes within the file. -- Erik
