Google Drive / iCloud support?

suckItTrebek

Any info on when, if ever, Google Drive and iCloud will be supported. Dropbox works, but I would prefer to have a larger company with a serious dedicated security team managing my data, and not one accidentally lets anyone log in without a password to anyone's account. I understand that the data is encrypted, but I would prefer not to have to bother keeping an account with Dropbox just to sync.



Thanks for any updates.

khad

Welcome to the forums, Trebek.



[color=#000000]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.[/color]



[color=#000000]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.[/color]



[color=#000000]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.[/color]



[color=#000000]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.[/color]



[color=#000000][b]We're just as excited as you are about Google (finally!) releasing [url="https://drive.google.com/"]Google Drive[/url], its new cloud file storage and sync service. 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.[/b][/color]



[color=#000000]Both Google Drive and Microsoft's [/color][url="http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/skydrive/home"]SkyDrive[/url][color=#000000] 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.[/color]



[color=#000000][b]iCloud is definitely on our radar[/b], but we don't give time frames for unreleased products or features. We prefer to let the features speak for themselves when they are released rather than stringing people along with a bunch of promises.[/color]



[color=#000000]As soon as we can announce whether Google Drive might be an option for 1Password sync, you'll hear about it first on our [url="http://blog.agilebits.com/"]Agile Blog[/url], the [url="http://twitter.com/1password"]@1Password[/url] Twitter account, and our [url="http://facebook.com/1password"]Facebook Page[/url]. Subscribe, follow, and like us to be the first to find out if Google Drive is a good fit for your 1Password data![/color]