Google Drive sync instead of Dropbox sync to take advantage of 2-factor auth

srathi

First of all, thanks very much for the 1Password app. I'm in love with it.



One question:

Since Google Drive supports 2-factor authentication, it is harder for an adversary to get access to my G-drive data than to my Dropbox data. For this reason, I'd be more comfortable to put my Agile Keychian in G-drive instead of in Dropbox.

Is G-drive sync on radar for the 1Password team?

Thanks.

khad

The short answer to “Have you considered X as an alternative sync solution” is “Yes” for every value of X that people have asked about. We have considered them, and have had to reject them for various technical reasons.



Each item in your 1Password data is stored in its own, separate, file. This is great for syncing in that it means that only the changes need to sync and this can be done by file and folder syncing. This not only makes syncing faster and cheaper, it also makes it much more reliable and robust against potential data corruption. But this also means that 1Password needs to read lots of different files quickly as it runs. Dropbox does fast syncing while storing the local files on the native local file systems, allowing it to function properly.



As an illustration, an alternative such as WebDAV (which we worked on extensively but had to abandon before we moved to Dropbox) provides a file system abstraction layer that is just too slow for 1Password. It can hang when we try to access some file that it hasn’t cached properly. Also WebDAV isn’t designed for updating many files is quick succession. It’s not that WebDAV is bad, but it isn’t suitable for how we would use it.



Everything else we’ve looked at (and we have looked at many things) suffers not only from the same problems we saw with WebDAV, but they also lack usable APIs for all the platforms we need to support. It may be possible, for example, to sync data to an Android or iOS device using SugarSync, Wuala, SpiderOak, etc., but it isn’t possible to sync that data in a way that would make it available to 1Password on those devices.



We're just as excited as you are about Google (finally!) releasing Google Drive, its new cloud file storage and sync service. Since it's brand new, we're checking it out to see if it can be an option for syncing your 1Password data file, but we don't have anything we can announce just yet.



Both Google Drive and Microsoft's SkyDrive appear to meet a very important technical requirement we have of a syncing system, but it is far too early to tell if they satisfy other requirements.



As soon as we can announce whether Google Drive might be an option for 1Password sync, you'll hear about it first on our Agile Blog, the @1Password Twitter account, and our Facebook Page. Subscribe, follow, and like us to be the first to find out if Google Drive is a good fit for your 1Password data!

srathi

Khad:

Thank you for the detailed response. In the meantime, I've moved my keychain to the Google Drive folder on my computer. That way, I can use the 1PasswordAnywhere to access my passwords from the Google Drive web interface. However, I cannot access my data on a smartphone using this method.

khad

You are correct. That is the crux of the matter: mobile APIs. As I said above, "It may be possible, for example, to sync data to an Android or iOS device using SugarSync, Wuala, SpiderOak, etc., but it isn’t possible to sync that data in a way that would make it available to 1Password on those devices."



We're still investigating Google Drive.

unhandledexception

+1 request for SkyDrive. It seems to use a significantly less CPU cycles on my system... though maybe that is because 1Password isn't talking to it yet? <img src='http://forum.agilebits.com/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile.png' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' />

khad

Thanks for the feedback, unhandledexception! I'll pass your vote along to the developers. <img src='http://forum.agilebits.com/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/biggrin.png' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':D' />