[OSX-Users] The Personal Data Issue

[Hugh Davis]

The same had occurred to me, and this is exactly why I used aliases rather than making links.  I do have links all over the place in my folders and Dropbox definitely treats them differently to aliases.

Dropbox does not follow the Aliases and if you check this from the Dropbox web interface you get a deadend at the Alias.


Hugh Davis





On 6 Oct 2016, at 09:43, Chris Andrews <w at lfie.org<mailto:w at lfie.org>> wrote:

Have you checked how the folders appear in the Dropbox web interface? I seem to remember that Dropbox at one point followed certain pointers - think it was hard links rather than aliases, but might be worth a look regardless.

Cheers,

Chris

On Thursday, October 6, 2016, Hugh Davis <hcd at soton.ac.uk<mailto:hcd at soton.ac.uk>> wrote:
Of course, I have *never* committed the crime of keeping other peoples’ personal data in Dropbox, but the recent conversation on this list led me to thinking about how I could continue to use Dropbox as my main backup and sync mechanism for my entire Documents repository EXCEPT personal data, while at the same time keeping any legitimately retained personal data backed up and synched “within" the University (OneDrive).

So, I don’t know when people last looked at MS OneDrive?  Until recently the “OneDrive for Business” version constantly crashed on OS/X and when it occasionally didn't crash it didn’t seem to sync reliably. The latest version of OneDrive, available from the MAC AppStore (and the IOS AppStore) seems to work perfectly (I’m on Sierra). When you install it asks if you want to use your “School” account, and then redirects you to an iSolutions login. It asks you where you want the OneDrive folder installed, and I choose a place that is not backed up by Dropbox. It is all then set up just like Dropbox, with a folder that you can put in your Finder.  I can confirm that on my systems it works and syncs between systems (MacOS and IOS) just fine.

So now what I have done is moved all my sensitive folders into the Onedrive directory, and in my Dropbox directory, where I would like these folders to appear I have put Aliases, so the whole directory navigation is seamless, and your personal data is “safe” in that it is backed up within the approved university systems (Microsoft!).


Hope this might be helpful.

/h.

Hugh Davis
Professor of Learning Technologies
Web and Internet Science Group
Electronics and Computer Science
Building 32 Rm 3033
Highfield Campus, University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK
Tel:  +44 (0)2380 593669
Co-ordinates at http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/hcd/
My calendar is at http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/hcd/hcdcal.html