I'm on the road a lot, working at many different locations. Those locations have substantially different technical infrastructure - one place leaves you all your freedom (aka full LAN and Internet access, no closed ports, no MAC security, etc), another place gives you no leverage what-so-ever (no network access with a laptop, Internet access with your own equipment only via smartphone tethering, etc.)
Thus I rely on some sort of online storage to have relieable access to important work documents, apps and programs.
For many years, my requirements were ideally fulfilled by Dropbox: cross-platform client with great UX integration, quick syncing, history feature, BoxCryptor support.
As of now: no more.
Why?
Because their support of extended file attributes is completely out of control!
Around beginning of November 2014, "com.dropbox.attributes"-files began to show up at random in my Dropbox.
Sometimes for a file, sometimes for a folder.
And always composed of the format $file:com.dropbox.attributes or $folder:com.dropbox.attributes.
It got to the point where I had com.dropbox.attributes-files in the six figures. Deleting them on the command-line became an awkward yet necessary task. Necessary, because I rely on cloud storage - see above.
Mind you, there was no change to my working environment: same laptops (Win 8.1, NTFS; OS X, HFS), no re-installations, no moving of Dropbox location, no nada.
Dropbox support kept insisting that the cause is a Dropbox folder residing on an incompatible file system. Which simply isn't the case (see paragraph above).
To prove my point, I even recorded screen casts showing how those pesky "com.dropbox.attributes"-files appear the moment I create or modify a file in the Dropbox, no matter whether it's on Win 8.1 or OS X.
But still: Dropbox support: no believe.
And no, my Dropbox wasn't compromised. Logs show the expected devices. I have two-factor authentication on.
And no no, reinstalling the Dropbox client on both OS didn't change a thing.
So I had to bite the bullet and give up Dropbox.
"com.dropbox.attributes"-files cluttering my cloud storage, rendering it unusable for me for every day work.
Hello Google Drive.
A day of testing proved, that Google Drive can do all of the things that I rely on for cloud storage.
I loose Dropbox inegration in many iOS apps.
Sigh.
But at least, I can store files the way it should be. Uncluttered.
