@Flyer59, I migrate between three countries (two of which are outside the EU) on a regular basis and often work elsewhere while travelling, and this is precisely why I don’t use Dropbox and the like – it’s just too slow and unreliable to use them via 3G.
I have no idea between which countries you travel .. but I use Dropbox via 3 G all the time, 4 years now and it always works. But it’s even more important that i have all data at every desk I work at
Ultranomad wrote:
even the most secure Internet cloud compromises your privacy in some way
What makes you so sure that your local computer is more secure?
Ultranomad wrote:
cloud services, again, I just don’t need them
You use them all the time, when you use email, maps, traffic, schedule a meeting with friends using you calendar app.
The scenarios are just getting more sophisticated over time.
Old way of determining the time to leave to arrive for a meeting on time?
1. Opening favorite calendar app to see whether I have an appointment/event/meeting
2. Figure out address of current and destination location
2. Opening favorite map app to figure our best route.
4. Opening up traffic app, to check whether you have to account additional driving time
New way with Cortana
1. Not necessary
2. Not necessary
3. Not necessary
4. Not necessary
Relax until you get a message pushed to you telling you to leave now. No need to talk to Cortant (or Siri). You focus on task completion, which in this case is driving the car. With trillions (yes this is the right scale) of events ingested by massive machine learning clusters in the not so distant future, these scenarios are growing quickly in sophistication. Siri does not have the same level of sophistication, mostly because of Apple’s lack of machine learning and datacenter capacity.
You can only imagine the infinite number of scenarios solved machine reasoning. “Mow lawn now, because it will rain in 20 minutes from now”. Predicting winds aloft using machine learning, etc…
All of that will stop working over about 90% of the UK’s land area, which has no mobile data coverage 
Well, there is a lot of GPRS (like where I live) but it is so slow as to be useless for any data.
The other problem with cloud apps is that you pay for them all the time and for ever. Whereas if e.g. a particular version of photoshop works for me, I will never change it.
It works in every OFFICE and that’s what counts for me, mostly. But it also works along all major highways (parking lots ..) and at every place ith WIFI .. which is millions of places.
I pay $ 99 for 1 TB of Dropbox, yearly. I think that’s a good deal.
Lucius wrote:
What makes you so sure that your local computer is more secure?
You use them all the time, when you use email, maps, traffic, schedule a meeting with friends using you calendar app.
Wrong on all four counts. My e-mail is on dedicated servers, and the server for one of my accounts is right by my desk at this moment. The maps I use for driving are on an SD card. I don’t use traffic apps because on a motorcycle I can filter through anyway. I don’t use calendar apps, even offline ones, I don’t even have a paper-based organizer – everything is in my head or on a sticky note at the most, as I can’t really plan my life for more than a few days ahead. And as to “trillions of events”, even on a much simpler task – predicting my search queries from the first letters typed – Google is failing miserably thus far.
Peter wrote:
The other problem with cloud apps is that you pay for them all the time and for ever. Whereas if e.g. a particular version of photoshop works for me, I will never change it.
Flyer59 wrote:
I pay $ 99 for 1 TB of Dropbox, yearly. I think that’s a good deal.
Haha! Now that is really funny! And then? You think I will save all my projects on an extrernal HDD and carry it around? That’s really very old school :-)
Other than that Dropbox guarantees the integrity of all data, I can share folders with my (2 different) teams and much more …
Other than that Dropbox guarantees the integrity of all data
I can de-integrate the integrity of your dropbox data fairly easily… just let me post a dropbox URL containing some highly desirable object, say 100MB in size, on the open internet, and see how long it is before they pull your account 
(happened to me too – they have an interesting fair usage policy)
I could come to your house and destroy the integrity of your HDD with a simple hammer :-)
I use my Dropbox since 2010, and I never had the smallest problem with it. And Dropbox does backups of everything and guarantees that it can recover everything.
PS. You shouldn’t store illegal stuff in your Dropbox. But I don’t do that ;-)
By the way: Dropbox employees have no acccess to your files.
