Dropbox Bug?

UPDATE: This is an expected behavior of dropbox. See relevant discussion at Dropbox Forums.

It seems that there is a dropbox bug which may affect the recovery of deleted files and folders in this specific situation. I will try to document and elaborate my observations in this post. In short, dropbox seems to be not able to recover a deleted folder if a new file with exact same name is replaced at the exact same location as the deleted folder. I am a free user of dropbox and I am not sure whether this is one of the free features. I found this particular problem 7-8 months back & I could recover the files from my personal backup, which is separate and independent from dropbox.

Here are the steps to reproduce the results. (I did backup all the data, so nothing was lost in reality. This is just a demonstration.) Here, I am going to delete a folder named 'Image Fun' from my dropbox which has some more files and folders in it. The goal is to check, if I can recover those files and folders inside the folder Image Fun.

1. Make sure Dropbox is running. (I am using Linux Mint 13)
2. Delete the folder Image Fun, with some files and folders.
3. Create a file with name Image Fun (no extensions) somewhere outside the Dropbox folder and then copy the file to the location of original Image Fun folder.
4. Log on to dropbox.com website and hit "Show deleted files". I can not see any folder which has been deleted & has name Image Fun. Though, I can see the file I created with the exact same name (among normal files, not deleted files).
5. Navigate to "Events" link on the left on dropbox website. This is the part where it gets interesting. I could see the notification which says that I deleted Image Fun and other 45 files in that folder. See the screenshot below. Now when I click on Image Fun, I am taken to home page where it highlighted the new Image Fun file.


6. Clicking on "output" link in events page (output was a folder inside the delete folder) showed a message in red saying "The folder /Image Fun/output is deleted" (screenshot below).


7. When I clicked on "45 more files" in the events page, it showed me a page where all the files were listed, but I could not click on any of them in order to recover. 


8. But, when I clicked on link "a1.jpg" in events page (where it said "You deleted a1.jpg and 45 more files"), I was taken to a page where I can actually see the older version of that particular file - a1.jpg. Clicking on version 0 shows the correct original file. 

9. You must have noticed the "Restore" button on a1.jpg link (above screenshot). When I clicked on it, something unexpected happened. The file which I created, with name Image Fun, was actually removed with the folder Image Fun and a1.jpg was restored in the folder. Now I could navigate to the folder and even see deleted files. This could be one way to recover the file. But I would count it as very unreliable method. It relies on finding and clicking on one particular file's deleted link and then recovering it. That particular link may actually get lost if many other files in other locations were also deleted. Events page after the recovery looks like this:

Hopefully, this will help to fix or address the issue I mentioned. It is probably an expected behavior. See relevant discussion at Dropbox Forums.

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Encryption + Dropbox + Android

Dropbox is a great application which syncs data across different computers and devices. This makes Dropbox ideal for syncing important, & often sensitive, information across devices. Saving sensitive information on cloud makes me feel uncomfortable and cranky. This is log of softwares/apps required for encrypting data. Explicit goals are:

1. Data should never be saved to disk unencrypted.
2. Encrypted data should be readable, even without internet access, on Windows, Linux, & Android devices.
3. Encryption algorithm should be well known standard algorithm. Open source programs are preferable.

Following are some of the possible solutions with some notes. Not all of them achieve all the goals mentioned above.

EncFS provides encrypted filesystem in user space. It allows mounting an encrypted folder to a user defined location. Cryptonite is an android app which supports mounting of encrypted EncFS. Unfortunately, I found Cryponite to be buggy and the android app did not work out well for me. EncFS is definitely among perfect solutions for "desktop-only" systems.

BoxCryptor comes very close (and probably is heavily inspired by EncFS). It has been developed with tight integration with dropbox. It uses very popular AES-256 standard. Unfortunately its Android app requires internet connection to read the encrypted folder. Another drawback is the tight integration with dropbox. The Android app requires dropbox credentials to access data. I feel uncomfortable to give the dropbox credentials to any place other than dropbox itself.

enotes is the perfect solution for individual text files. So, each encrypted file is an independent text file and hence each individual file has to be encrypted/decrypted seperately. This can be advantage or disadvantage depending on the purpose. It also has an Android app: Encrypted Notepad. It uses AES-128 encryption and is good enough for me. The software is written in Java and hence is cross platform. Similar apps: Secret safe Lite, NoteCipher, OpenNoteSecure.

APG is an Android app which aims to provide a OpenPGP implementation. It uses public-private key or pass-phrase for encryption. But it saves unencrypted data to disk. Another app Encryption Manager Lite works in very similar fashion but with AES encryption. Similar apps: File Encrypter, Pattern Encrypt (Cool idea to use patterns for passwords).

PS: There are numerous desktop applications which can be used to encrypt/decrypt data using standard algorithms like AES. When accessing files on android device is not an issue, then any of these can be a solution. TrueCrypt is worth a mention in this category for its simple interface and powerful features. EncFS, as mentioned above, may also be suitable for some systems.

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