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I would like a solution for cloud storage with the following demand:

  • Secure, (only trust myself and not even the cloud storage provider)
  • Support for versioning
  • Compression

Is these combination the best or would you choose something else?

  • Storage, Dropbox
  • Security, TrueCrypt
  • Versioning Subversion
  • Compression Subversion
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Well, Dropbox has storage and versioning taken care of. From the website you can roll back to specific versions of a file and even un-delete them. – Wuffers Nov 6 '10 at 15:38
@Wuffers Yes, but you don't want to undo all the file changes when you undo entire encrypted file container. That’s why you need your own file versioning. You have also to download the entire container again. – Amir Rezaei Nov 18 '11 at 19:49
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3 Answers

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This combination works well, however one should configure TrueCrypt right. You have to uncheck "Preserve modification timestamp of file container" under TrueCrypt options. Otherwise DropBox will not detect changes too virtual drive file.

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Maybe create a TrueCrypt container in your dropbox and version the contents with subversion?

Let me know how that goes.

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TrueCrypt with Dropbox is probably the most secure way to store data encrypted. However, each time you change even one byte of what's in your encrypted container you'll have to re-upload the whole thing. That isn't very convenient unless you're storing a very small amount of highly encrypted data.

There are some secure alternatives to dropbox (see here: http://skeptu.com/secure-alternatives-to-dropbox) which use software to encrypt your files before they're sent to the servers, rendering them unreadable to the company you are storing them with.

The one advantage your proposed solution has over them is that they are mostly closed source, meaning that they theoretically COULD insert a back door in to their own code. That is less likely with truecrypt (it's open source + the code has been eyeballed a fair few times), although still conceivably possible. For the ULTRA paranoid I would advocate your solution.

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DropBox doesn’t upload the entire file/container to the server, it only uploads the changes! How that may be a potential security issue for the encrypted container. It may be easier to break the encryption. – Amir Rezaei Nov 18 '11 at 19:46
I haven't tried it myself, but it seems to be the experience of other users that the entire container gets resync-ed even if only a minor change is made: forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=14332 – Colm Nov 22 '11 at 8:27
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