--- layout: default tabtitle: Bye Bye Dropbox ---

Dropbox or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Use Web Apps

Like a good nerd, the day I heard about Dropbox I installed it. I made use of it's free storage, it's painless sync'ing. Funny pictures, apps, books, music: it all went in, it all got sync'd. This was extremely helpful when I started working. Install Dropbox on work machine, wait for it to sync, and there are all my NES/SNES games and emulators waiting for some quality procrastination to sink in. Or that picture I really wanted to use as my background. Or that music I wanted to listen to. All sync'd, all in one place. Organized, efficient, localized; Dropbox.

Then a change of mind: why do I keep all this stuff that I find online on my local machine? I'm basically just duplicating files which already exist in locations online, offline for ease of access. There are websites which already tackle this problem. Thus, my quest began, to migrate from Dropbox to existing services, and remove another program from my machine.

Rationale

A quick aside: I'm a pretty silly guy. Not in the comedic sense, though I have been known to bring the funny. No, more in a principles way; I have silly concepts of things. Philosophical quandries and quagmires aside, some of these silly ideas pertain to my computer and related maintenance. See, I like having control of my environment. That's tough in life, but easy on a computer. It's part of the reason I love Linux so much.

From One to Many

There are many places that the previously all centralized content of my Dropbox is heading.

From Apps to Applications

Most of the apps in Dropbox were Windows-specific. Putty, for example, I kept around in case I needed to ssh from Windows. However, with Windows being phased out of my day-to-day, I won't need that anymore. Others are a bit more difficult to replace.

Keypass

Keypass was my password store of choice, and for the longest time I kept it sync'd between my machines via Dropbox. However, due to a few concerns, I've decided to use a different approach.