Storing Quicken data in Dropbox?

Hardware and technical stuff
1

I’ve used Quicken for home finances since, oh, 1989 or so. I currently have the program on a desktop at home, with the accounts password protected of course. I back up the data files regularly to a separate hard drive. I was thinking though of backing up to my Dropbox folder. Of course my Dropbox account is password protected, but that’s thin protection.

So – would storing Quicken data in the cloud be “safe”? Someone would need to get into my dropbox account, and then get my quicken password in order to access it. Or is this ill-advised?

2

No reason you couldn’t true crypt a container drive within your dropbox account.

Interesting question. I’m curious what other replies you get.

3

Yeah, I wouldn’t rely on Quicken’s “protection’s”, they probably dont’ know what they’re doing. Truecrypt it is.

4

Thanks. Had never heard of truecrypt, but I just read through the tutorial and it seems like a perfect additional level of security.

5

7zip using aes 256 encryption is probably another viable solution (if you don’t want to mess with mounting volumes).

6

Truecrypt is better, because you can store other crap in the container too.

7

Just be careful that it’s actually the container file that you’re putting in Dropbox, and not the directory its mounted as, or you won’t actually be protected. E.g., if you create a container file my_stuff.dat and mount it as C:\MyStuff, it’s the .dat file you share in Dropbox, not the C:\MyStuff directory.

(Apologies if that’s “well duh”-obvious, but it’s the kind of thing you don’t want to realize after it’s too late.)

Edit: You might also have to be careful about not opening it on more than one computer at the same time: http://www.truecrypt.org/docs/?s=sharing-over-network

8

Dropbox has had a couple of major security lapses in the past that have exposed user data to the public without the need for the corresponding password. I would highly disrecommend storing sensitive info on Dropbox if it isn’t encrypted.

But as already mentioned, if you store the data encrypted (make sure you read Fugitive’s post and understand it), this shouldn’t really matter and you should still be about as safe as you are already.