DropBox Paranoia

drtimhill

No, I'm not paranoid about security .. i understand AES and am not worried about people cracking open my keychain.



What I *am* worried about though is DropBox sync colliding with normal 1P operation. This probably IS just me being paranoid but as a software developer for 25 years I'm worried about how these two can collide.



Scenario:

1. As recommended, I place my 1P keychain in my DropBox. I watch it sync, works great, I'm all happy.

2. I open my keychain in 1P and make some changes. I'm not done yet, and 1P is still open, but the phone rings, so I pause.

3. DropBox sees that my local (disk) copy of my keychain is changed, and starts to sync it to the cloud. (This can take some time if upload is slow or keychain big)

4. I now make further changes to my keychain in 1P, WHILE DropBox is syncing to the cloud.

5. What happens?



Now, as I said, I might be being paranoid here, but unless DropBox and 1P are cooperating correctly, then if I change my keychain while it's being synced to the cloud, the cloud copy is gunna be in a big mess (corrupt). There are, of course, ways to handle this (locking the file during sync, when 1P has it open, or transacting changes etc), but I'd sleep better at night knowing from Agile if/how they have handled this scenario.



The alternate of course is to keep my "master" keychain outside DropBox and then copy it to DropBox manually after I make changes, but this defeats many of the advantages of DropBox.



Comments anyone?



--Tim

thightower

Hi Tim,



If you have 1P open and are in edit mode, the change to the keychain is not really changed till you select save. At that point Dropbox syncs it. So if you are in edit mode and answer the phone nothing bad will happen.



The Agilekeychain is actually a collection of many many smaller files, so if you make a change to one item then Dropbox starts to sync, and then you change another file Dropbox will then sync the next change. Basically its comprised of so many small files its almost impossible to mess up when syncing with dropbox. Agile designed and specifically crafted the keychain to prevent such problems. It was crafted to specifically work with Dropbox.





Here is a link about the design of agilekeychain [url="http://help.agile.ws/1Password/agile_keychain_design.html"]http://help.agile.ws...ain_design.html[/url]

khad

[quote]…I'd sleep better at night knowing [b]from Agile[/b] if/how they have handled this scenario.[/quote]

Just posting to give an "official seal of approval" on what Tommy wrote. <img src='http://forum.agile.ws/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/skype_smile.png' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':-)' />



Please let us know if you have any further questions!

drtimhill

[quote name='khad' timestamp='1298259384' post='21028']

Just posting to give an "official seal of approval" on what Tommy wrote. <img src='http://forum.agile.ws/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/skype_smile.png' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':-)' />



Please let us know if you have any further questions!

[/quote]



Brilliant and thanks to both of you.



The more I use this program the more I like it. Just tried the 1passwordAnywhere feature .. awesome. I also love the way it's smart enough to pull up the current version number for software as i create serial number entries. Smart and helpful.



--Tim

khad

Thanks for the kind words, Tim. We are really glad to hear how much you are loving 1Password.



We really never get tired of hearing that. <img src='http://forum.agile.ws/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/skype_bigsmile.png' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':-D' />