I love my Nextcloud so much. I use it all day every day and it just works. It's missing a few tiny things on my wish list, but it's crazy to me how I don't miss Dropbox at all.
I can't speak for what it's like to administer Nextcloud for a large org, but for my personal work sync it is a godsend. Easily my favorite software of the last three years.
I just switched back to dropbox after switching to Nextcloud.
For some reason I constantly got a'... could not be downloaded because of a local file clash' error with 6 files. 2*3 files have the same name but are in different subfolders.
I've searched for this error, deleted the filed locally and in the cloud. Every time I add them again, I get the same error.
Not to mention that I get reminded of this error every 30 minutes or so...
Whats also annoying was that there are different versions in the Ubuntu software store. Some are deprecated and don't work anymore. Somehow the Appimage from their website didn't work either. I imagine this can be frustrating for new users.
This is why I went back to Dropbox. My usecase is exactly what the top rated comment says. I need a folder that syncs. Without any problems.
I imagine that icloud would also be a viable option for casual users like me. However, they don't have a linux client..
In my own experience, mysterious conflicts were either caused by unusual filenames or case-sensitivity conflicts between Windows and Linux. In every case they were resolved by renaming the file, deselecting the parent folder in the sync config (removing it from the local synced files) and then adding it again for a fresh sync. It's only happened for me a few time, with moderate to heavy daily use. I'm not sure if your conflicts were unresolvable for some other reason, but the "deselect/select for sync" method always worked for me.
It didn't do anything bad to me while I used it. I finally got round to replacing it with Nextcloud though, so now I only use Dropbox very occasionally, and via the web.
I saw Nextcloud (https://nextcloud.com/) mentioned above but I'm not seeing anything that looks like a personal (or SMB) solution. Where should I be looking? What product/page? tia
You can either host it on your own server or find a free public server. I self-host it for just me (one user) and it works. It's PHP so the setup should be pretty easy.
I run my Nextcloud instance (for me and family) on a Raspberry Pi 3. The web interface is fairly slow because of the hardware (and likely my configuration :p), but it serves nicely as a Dropbox replacement.
This seems like a good time to resurface the worlds best Quora answer, by Michael Wolfe. Answering “Why is Dropbox more popular than other tools with similar functionality?”:
Well, let's take a step back and think about the sync problem and what the ideal solution for it would do:
There would be a folder.
You'd put your stuff in it.
It would sync.
They built that.
Why didn't anyone else build that? I have no idea.
"But," you may ask, "so much more you could do! What about task management, calendaring, customized dashboards, virtual white boarding. More than just folders and files!"
No, shut up. People don't use that crap. They just want a folder. A folder that syncs.
"But," you may say, "this is valuable data...certainly users will feel more comfortable tying their data to Windows Live, Apple Mobile Me, or a name they already know."
No, shut up. Not a single person on Earth wakes up in the morning worried about deriving more value from their Windows Live login. People already trust folders. And Dropbox looks just like a folder. One that syncs.
"But," you may say, "folders are so 1995. why not leverage the full power of the web? With HTML 5 you can drag and drop files, you can build intergalactic dashboards of stats showing how much storage you are using, you can publish your files as RSS feeds and tweets, and you can add your company logo!"
No, shut up. Most of the world doesn't sit in front of their browser all day. If they do, it is IE 6 at work that they are not allowed to upgrade. Browsers suck for these kinds of things. Their stuff is already in folders. They just want a folder. That syncs.
I still think this is 100% true and that's still exactly what I want, as a paying Dropbox customer. What they're trying to build now are all things I'll never use.
That's a nice example of why "voting with your wallet" doesn't work.
I've been a paying Dropbox customers for years now, and not on the lowest tier either. How much more money and to whom can you or me give, for Dropbox to stop doing the shit they're doing, and forever just remain a folder that syncs on every platform?
Just like in politics, you need the majority to vote with you. Voting in elections can work, and so can voting with your wallet. Neither work unless you have enough people though.
> No, shut up. People don't use that crap. They just want a folder. A folder that syncs.
Even though I agree with the conclusion, because I think files & folders is one of the very few computing interface metaphors that has proven itself, I disagree with the reasoning here. Maybe that's too many years of hearing similar language in arguments from Linux Desktop evangelists.
I think the real reason it works so well is not that people don't want that other stuff, but that it is straight-forward for users to architect solutions to a lot of those other things on top of a simple folder-wat-syncs because they can very easily wrap their head around how a folder-wat-syncs will behave. Case in point: many people, like myself, use Dropbox as a password store by keeping a KeePass database in it. For a short time when a buddy and I had the fool notion to start a business, we coordinated and kept track of things through documents on Dropbox. Simple tools one can combine to perform complex tasks; sound familiar?
Based on anecdata I'd say that a bigger and bigger chunk of people do in fact sit at Chrome all day long:
- At Google everyone had linux, and non-developers effectively only used web-apps.
- My girlfriend is at a startup but has a similar workflow on a Mac.
- I recently rejoined a gym I was a member of in '14, at that time they had some native windows CRM type app that their employees used, when I glanced at the screen recently it was just a web app in Chrome.
> "But," you may ask, "so much more you could do! What about task management, calendaring, customized dashboards, virtual white boarding. More than just folders and files!"
>
> No, shut up. People don't use that crap. They just want a folder. A folder that syncs.
This argument is a good one but it only covers the rise of Dropbox. We are now in a different era.
Dropbox's functionality is now table stakes and not something new. Windows by default has cloud sync, macOS does as well. We switched at our company from Dropbox to Google Drive Stream. Box is really focused on enterprise solutions -- lots of permissions, probably too much in my opinion but C-suite like that shit.
This quora answer is irrelevant in the current context. Dropbox needs to figure out how to stay in a commoditized market where their special sauce is being integrated into OSes and larger offerings (G-Suite.)
Maybe a return to simplicity is it? But we moved away from the simple solution because it wasn't sufficent for our needs. And others are just never adopting it in the first place because it is built into their OS or their app suite. Dropbox has a long-term relevancy problem here that they have not cracked.
We're in a different era, but the issue is still the same. Lots of competitors have popped up in file syncing, but they all want to link in with additional services and other crap that people don't want.
There's still a lot of value to be had in providing a folder that syncs quickly and effortlessly.
Strongly agreed. "A folder that syncs" is the only thing I ever wanted from Dropbox, it's still the only thing that I want, and it's the only reason I pay them. Everything they've been adding for the past years is pure, useless bloat to me.
(Well, what I really want is a folder that syncs and which lets me get URLs to raw files in the cloud to share. They used to have this, then they dropped it for some silly business reasons. Tough luck, I learned to live without it. Still, throughout the decade or so I've been using their service, they added exactly zero useful things for me, and managed to lose one feature I cared about.)
This is 100% anecdata but it seems like among my friends, family, coworkers Google Drive has eaten Dropbox's lunch for casual file syncing and remote storage. I mean it used to be that everyone had a Dropbox account, it was basically synonymous with file storage, but now people talk about their "Drive".
"A folder that syncs" was never the killer feature, it was the ability to download and upload files from any machine connected to the internet and get sharing links.
Dropbox can handle a LOT of files. I haven't seen any other service that doesn't just break.
OneDrive cannot handle tons of files. It just doesn't work. It ends up freezing, you have no idea what's going on. Can't speak to macOS related stuff.
We finally were able to migrate off of this.. but we had a VERY file hefty folder structure. Instead of databases we chose to keep things in individual files for various reasons. Needless to say this didn't scale well, and there were about 750k files on the structure. Most of this was archival, but we simply didn't have the time or care enough to reduce the number of files.. we just wanted to be able to sync this to cloud data as is. Many files were super small, so never an absolute size thing just a LOT of files. And a chunk would keep changing throughout the day.
Dropbox was able to handle this for years- never an issue. Yeah it was fairly CPU intensive, but it worked very well.
I tried OneDrive on this.. what a nightmare. I tried owncloud, bittorrent sync, some others I can't even recall. Granted this has been about 3-4 years since I really tried some other ones with lots of files, but I was so annoyed every time I did.
We just had to switch from Box to OneDrive at work, and it's caused massive headaches. Most days no one can log in, and some Excel sheets uploaded have been corrupted or have missing sheets - I don't know how that happens unless Microsoft is scanning our files.
OneDrive is an abomination. We use it at work and I have to manage it for everyone on top of my other duties (medium non-profit). It's not the panacea everyone thought it would be. I inherited it upon coming here. I've tried to see this as more or less a devops experiment. I try to control as much as I can with PowerShell, but some things don't lend themselves well to that method. Oddly enough, the lion's share of all end users are on Macs that are on a Windows domain. It proved interesting to get everything working.
What I've done is tell people to create documents from the "cloud" and edit them there within the Office365 ecosystem. Documentation needs where I work are fairly simple, with very few people needing much beyond the basic functionality. No one is doing amortization tables or complicated formulas. Word use is also fairly basic.
It seems that every week almost Microsoft changes the admin page for Office365 and adds or removes a feature or changes the way things look. Because of our basic Office needs, I'm seeing growing success with getting people to start and stay in the cloud. Prevents nonsense to a great degree. SharePoint to share between departments.
Oddly enough, I've had great success in "rescuing" Office files using LibreOffice running on Linux. Office files just add so much crufty proprietary stuff.
Gonna try it... tried OneDrive but oddly enough, Microsoft Office documents and files are a complete pain in the rear to open/save there because the microsoft apps treats it differently than just a storage device.
Personally, I think rsync.net is the best if you're in IT, particularly if you're a *nix user. Nothing better yet unless you wanted to roll your own. And the fact they use ZFS makes it great. You can choose where your data resides and it's fairly inexpensive all things considered. And to the best of my knowledge, I don't recall them being involved in anything overtly political. I like tech companies doing what they do best. Tech.
I hope that it will be useful and interesting to note that we have added 'rclone'[1] to our platform[2] which means that your rsync.net account is truly a swiss army knife for cloud storage organization.
This is very much like our 'borg' support - we actually have the binary executable installed on our end so you can run it properly. There is also a discounted signup for these two use-cases.[3][4]
Just two, I think, the Drive applet was named Backup and Sync, while the Drive cloud-thing is still Drive. And DFS is a beefier, enterprisier, version of Backup and Sync.
Drive stream pretends to be a network drive and hides syncing. It locally caches files on demand and uploads and deleted local copies in the background. From my perspective it is just always up to date and let's me have tbs of files on a small computer.
It is a game changer because it is simple. It is a virtual drive in the cloud that is fast and seamless and behaves as if it is local.
I don't know. I had ten of thousands of files once and wanted to delete them. Dropbox client hangs and then gives an error. API doesn't work with that many files, web version doesn't work either. I ended up writing a script that uses API call for every separate file and it took like 3 days to delete them all. I really don't think they handle many files well after that experience and wouldn't trust them if I needed really a lot of files in the future.
Yesterday OneDrive asked if I wanted to sync Documents. I replied 'yes', expecting to find my Documents folder appear in my OneDrive account.
When I came by a few minutes later, all my laptop's docs had been moved into `C:/Users/<user>/OneDrive - <company>/Documents` and the Documents library adjusted to point there. And then all my non-Windows applications stopped working.
I mean, backup up is one thing. Relocating them is totally different. WTF Microsoft!
Dropbox needs to figure out how to stay in a commoditized market where their special sauce is being integrated into OSes and larger offerings (G-Suite.)
With respect, that is Dropbox's problem. Dropbox needs to do that, But I don't need Dropbox to do that.
The same is true of music-playing apps. Once they cost money and added value. Then platforms all started making "play this music file" free. The purveyors all tried to add more value. And there are a few specialized music players kicking around.
But most went away, the business model was no longer viable, and the move into adding lots of functionality pushed them into a niche.
I agree that Dropbox is facing an existential crisis. If Apple delivers on some of its promised new iCloud folder sharing functionality, I will end my Dropbox subscription, and no amount of "We're a collaboration platform" will change that.
Dropbox knows that, and is going in the direction of getting money from someone else. Will they succeed? Maybe, maybe not. But either way, most of their existing user base is finding their less useful and less valuable as they make this transition.
Shrug.
I have witnessed this so many times over the last thirty-five years. One set of forces acts to take something that was originally just for companies, and "Consumerizes" it. Spreadsheets are common for people to track all kinds of personal things. Kids use them in school.
In the opposite direction, companies chasing the money "Enterprise" their consumer offerings, abandoning the users that built them in the first place.
Not everyone needs any-platform syncing; you only need a solution that covers the devices you actually have. For instance, the only thing I really need Dropbox for at this point is one shared folder with friends who use both Mac and Windows (which could likely be handled by Google Drive, and might even be able to be handled by iCloud Drive by the end of the year) -- and Scrivener, because its developer apparently can't figure out how to make syncing between Mac and iOS work reliably on anything else. (One can argue he hasn't really figured out how to make it work reliably on Dropbox, actually, but that's a different thread.)
There may be some people for whom Dropbox will always remain the best solution, to be sure, but it feels like Dropbox is going out of their way to reduce that set of people in favor of extracting more money from those that remain.
There may be some people for whom Dropbox will always remain the best solution, to be sure, but it feels like Dropbox is going out of their way to reduce that set of people in favor of extracting more money from those that remain.
For many companies, that is the terminal phase of their existence: They are driven to extract more and more revenue from a set of shrinking customers, many of whom are hostage to the company's product and have insanely high switching costs.
The end-game for such companies is when they stop as they almost entirely cease selling the product and transform into a company with licensing and service revenues.
It isn't always terminal, but it requires an almost superhuman effort to jolt such a company out of its trajectory. Apple was in that phase in the 1990s under Gil Amelio: They focused on margins at the expense of product quality and market share.
IBM bragged about becoming a service company in the 1990s, a tacit admission that they had relinquished any claim to being a participant, much less a leader, in personal computers.
Neither company is dead today, but they illustrate the two paths. Apple turned things around with a combination of luck and a maverick CEO.
IBM isn't technically dead, but it is dead in a sense that pg once described: Nobody fears them, and they don't influence anyone's choices.
> Not everyone needs any-platform syncing; you only need a solution that covers the devices you actually have.
You still have the vendor lock-in problem though. Somebody might only have Apple devices now, but 5 years from now the fact that all their data is in Apple's cloud (and maybe they got their whole family to put it in there too) makes it that much harder to switch away when you realize that Apple still hasn't fixed its keyboards.
> Not everyone needs any-platform syncing; you only need a solution that covers the devices you actually have.
Not if you want to sync with other people, or with work. There are three major types of desktop OSes and two mobile ones; even if you just one of each, you probably know and interact with people using a different set.
Well, that was intended to be implied by the "not everyone" part, but re-reading, I should have say "you may only need a solution that covers the devices you actually have."
Personally, I only need Dropbox for Scrivener syncing at this point, because my current workplace (and my previous one, IIRC) is standardized on Google Drive for document sharing -- and I don't share work documents to my personal devices.
OneDrive has iOS, MacOS and Android clients. iCloud has Windows and Android clients. As far as I know the only way to access either on Linux is to use a browser.
Every time I get a new OS upgrade with even more iCloud functionality I question why I still have Dropbox. Luckily for Dropbox they don't charge much so I don't cancel. I don't move new data to dropbox any more and I would never sign up for it today.
> Maybe a return to simplicity is it? But we moved away from the simple solution because it wasn't sufficent for our needs.
Or maybe the simple solution worked well enough but they still moved away because of some obligation to keep growing, which would be impractical without needing to add many more monetized features. When I see extensive rebrandings and additions of features that I would never have started using the service for in the beginning, I can't help but think this. In this case it doesn't help that the only useful feature of Dropbox is being integrated into all these other products either.
I don't think the argument is irrelevant. For most utilities, people use your software because it is the best at doing one core thing. I don't think this changes just because OS vendors start bundling half-assed versions of your idea. Pour your resources into focus rather than de-focus. Spend your development effort on fixing bugs, best-in-class cross-platform support, and other things that the OS vendors won't do.
Instead, everyone succumbs to the urge to feature-cram their way to differentiation, so we get chat functionality in your navigation software, location sharing in your music app, and team management in your paint program.
Sync to where? To other Windows or macs? Limited usability. Dropbox was the first to offer true seamless sync at scale, across ALL common OS/devices.
Dropbox has a relevancy problem
That's like saying email is dead because FB can embed videos on posts. Like the Quora guy said, we don't want crap. Email will still be around 10y from now, and Dropbox has, at a minimum, another 5.
Steve Jobs may have been right when he said something to the effect of Dropbox isn't a product, it's a feature. If all you want is a folder that syncs, then don't we get that from every commercial operating system?
The remote storage and availability combined with the feature is the product.
They sell this and it is important for it to be seamless as well.
(Unlike say current iteration of Google Drive which sells both of the above but is not seamless.)
Note that it is very easy to compete with them for any of the big players.
What killed SBlaster was not motherboards having sound cards.
It was movie studios convincing microsoft to ban from Windows the best featuresof SBlaster cards (those features are STILL banned by the way) because they were afraid of people using them to pirate movies.
It is a reaaaaally long story, but to make it short: MS changed radically how windows drivers worked, and what a driver could do, during the transition to DVDs, it killed sound cards (because no more advanced 3D sound rendering that sound blaster could do), CRTs (no more funky resolutions, no more overlay mode, and other fancy CRT features), and initiated the slow death of VGA (that also happened for other reasons but this contributed a lot).
Say you could run an experiment where in one universe motherboards were developed with integrated audio and Microsoft never cooperated with Hollywood and then in a second universe motherboards never included audio but Microsoft did cooperate with Hollywood. Clearly sound card makers have a big future in only one of those.
Back in the early 2000s, our company phased out the huge 21" Sun boat anchor monitors for another smaller unit also with a 21" screen. They were put on the loading dock and we were told they were up for grabs. A colleague and I took several and the following weekend we took them to his private land where we proceeded to ascertain which handgun and rifle calibers were best at destroying them up close and at a distance. Up close .45 ACP was the winner. At a distance .308 was the winner. We also learned that a 6.5x55 Swedish will completely pass through one and lodge itself into a tree so deep we could not retrieve the projectile. Contrary to popular belief, monitors (at least these) did not explode when struck. Interestingly enough, the 6.5x55 will also handily pass through a HDD with no worries. All standard FMJ rounds.
The vast majority of people didn't buy Sound Blaster cards for their advanced 3D sound rendering, though. They bought them to play sound at a level more advanced than a PC speaker, which is what most had at the time.
Once motherboards integrated that there was no need for most people to buy a separate sound card. I know I didn't, especially when working out what you're spending your money on - video cards were far more important. But those, too, have become less important as integrated graphics have improved.
> Once motherboards integrated that there was no need for most people to buy a separate sound card.
Sure, if you mean a strict majority of people, but what about gamers? There's no reason "most" people need to buy a separate videocard but it is still a huge market. For a time, a good soundcard was with advanced features for 3D sound rendering was looking like it was going to be just as important to PC gaming as good videocards.
Also because built-in cards had shitty Realtek chips. I remember fetching a Sound Blaster on my third PC just so that I could use custom drivers to bypass the Realtek chip and use a proper card with advanced DSP support.
> They bought them to play sound at a level more advanced than a PC speaker, which is what most had at the time.
Yes, but why were they buying Sound Blaster cards instead of the much cheaper audio cards that were also on the market at the same time, but just didn’t have the same advanced feature set? The SoundBlaster, when it came out, was the “premium, workstation-tier” product of the audio-card world!
Are you suggesting the SoundBlaster’s rise was entirely down to 1. Brand recognition, or 2. even the top-of-market cards still being cheap enough that a strategy of “satisficing with the most expensive thing you can easily afford” would have led people to the SoundBlaster; and not at all to its differentiating feature-set from other audio cards?
I think a ton of people bought them because they weren't that much more expensive and compatibility was such a headache in those days, it was worth it for the peace of mind alone.
I don't think this is the case. I remember seeing something about 3D sound in the card settings, thinking "that's not going to work with my 2.1 speaker system, must be just a useless gimmiky DSP" -- and never using it again. Most of my friends had the same experience.
Later on, I got a new computer and a much better speakers, and spent some time getting digital output to work. I used my motherboard for that, because at this stage, I wanted soundcard to be just a simple, stupid data sender. No DSP, no "advanced 3D sound rendering" -- the ideal sound card takes data from input (DVD) and sends them to speakers, acting as a dumb data pipe.
Same goes for "fancy CRT features" -- what is that exactly that CRTs can do that flat-screens can not? Other than duck hunt-style controllers, I don't think there is anything.
Microsoft made dramatic changes to how sound drivers worked that caused problems for SoundBlaster's advanced features, but the explanation at the time was that SoundBlaster's garbage drivers were responsible for a sizeable portion of Windows' BSODs, and redesigning the driver model was a critical part of making the OS stable. I've never seen a reason to doubt that narrative.
Overlay mode wasn't a CRT feature, and worked fine with flat panel displays with XP. The introduction of GPU compositing in Vista was what killed it, but it still continued to work in 7 if you turned compositing off. The death of funky resolutions was entirely a result of switching to hardware which has a native resolution, and not anything software side.
Wow you are messing up timelines and your projecting your experience/reason/hobbies on the market.
DVD drives weren’t even a thing when people stopped buying soundcards. Yeah a small selection wanted 3d sound for a gaming edge, and that was available on low cost cards pretty soon.
Before that they a place, but all features were available through software. The mixer, sampler, channels.
So... modern audio drivers, used by a 3D game, can’t generate the same kind of environmental 8.1-channel signal that you’d find on a Blu-Ray?
If so, I’m surprised nobody’s hacked around that by now by just e.g. using the GPU in GPGPU mode as an pseudo-FPGA, dropping audio DSP logic onto it, and generating their “HD 3D” audio using that.
Steve Jobs was right and Dropbox is having problems as a result. They are trying to differentiate but it hasn't been working out, it seems to be muddling in various different directions.
I don't think so. He specifically called out the fact that their entire product is eventually going to be a single feature in every consumer OS. And now it is. That hardly applies to every product/service out there.
The problem here is that the biggest value of that product is that there is one of it. We have three major desktop OSes and two major phone OSes, people have multiple devices - usually at least one running a desktop OS and one running a mobile OS. File syncing as an OS feature has significantly less utility, because OS vendors can't get their shit together and agree on a standard, cross-platform solution.
This is very much a "we're all dead in the end" observation. Any good enough product is gonna get killed by turning it into multiple instances of mutually incompatible features, in a war for market share that claims user's time and patience as collateral damage.
>We have three major desktop OSes and two major phone OSes, people have multiple devices - usually at least one running a desktop OS and one running a mobile OS.
Sure... Kinda. How many people spend a lot of time on desktop these days? I see two large camps; windows + Android and... Well, Mac (e.g. iPad + iPhone). Those combos already work (MS client runs on android.) How many people run android + iPad/MacBook, windows + iPhone, or Linux? I imagine not too many, which is perhaps why DB is so focused on Enterprise.
I stopped using it because I run an old computer on Mac 10.6.8 for development purposes, and I'd been using Dropbox as my communications protocol. It stopped supporting 10.6 and I stopped supporting it. Mind you, it'd been losing favor with me for changing the interface around and adding annoying stuff: the github desktop app has been doing similar things after being acquired by Microsoft, so I anticipate one day moving to full terminal git no matter how cumbersome that might be, just to get away from the 'helpfulness'.
Same here. I moved up to Mountain Lion about a year ago (yeah, I know, but I have good reasons for using old Apple operating systems) and then Dropbox stopped supporting Mountain Lion. Which does not mean that the product stops getting updated. It means THE PRODUCT STOPS WORKING. There was no good technical reason for this; it was just arbitrary Dropbox fuckery. Yet another reason I'm leaving.
Effectively Dropbox is no longer the universal solution guaranteed to work everywhere, which was the reason I chose them before. They deliberately killed off their unique selling point.
These days I run Nextcloud on iOS, Windows and Linux and it doesn't complain about ZFS.
Make that re-added after pointlessly, explicitly and intentionally breaking setups which people/customers relied on and which had been working flawlessly for years.
That lost them a shit-ton of goodwill. Too little, too late.
I think there’s a strong case to be made for companies that do one thing and do it extremely well. A feature can be cut. It can be abandoned. It can be the thing no one wants to work with because it gets the reputation of being the department where careers go to die.
Whereas a feature as product means it’s more likely to stick around. They have nothing to do but build and maintain this feature. They have the luxury of working out the edgiest of edge cases.
But I guess the pointless file manager shows the downside of features as product. One the product is complete and largely bug free, marketing and engineers get itchy in their unique ways.
Spotify vs Google Play Music is the perfect showcase for this. They both get the job done but Spotify is better in so many small ways. Meanwhile, instead of being improved, GPM is in the process of being abandoned for the new shiny thing, Youtube Music.
I've been looking for an alternative to Google Play Music. I only use it to sync my albums from my pc to my phone and play them offline in the car. Does Spotify have a feature like that?
Edit: It looks like you have to pay for it and the music has to be in playlists. Not quite what I'd like.
> Spotify vs Google Play Music is the perfect showcase for this. They both get the job done but Spotify is better in so many small ways. Meanwhile, instead of being improved, GPM is in the process of being abandoned for the new shiny thing, Youtube Music.
What degredation have you noticed that makes you think it is being abandoned?
When they shut down the artist portal they said this:
> With the launch of YouTube Music last year, we eventually plan to replace Google Play Music with YouTube Music. In anticipation of this change, we are shutting down the Artist Hub.
If OneDrive was as good as dropbox then yes it would be awesome. But it's not.. as I've written in other posts here, onedrive just cannot handle tons of files. When you get over like 50-100k it just shits the bed and can't handle anything.
So yeah for people that don't have much and just want to keep some data synced across some machines.. yup onedrive is great and there's no reason to use a third party service when you can just log into your windows with your live account and it's all synced. But if you've ever run into the problems with onedrive then it's a complete killer. You can't use a file syncing service that doesn't work perfectly all the time.
It does more than that. It's quite good for selectivly sharing files and the versioning portion is well done. But those features also really stay out of your way more than competitors.
I've tested all of the major file sync tools and nothing compares to Dropbox's ability to simply sync files very well (merge conflicts, offline vs online, etc).
This surprises me. I tried Dropbox a few years ago and found it's conflict resolution, even with just 2 machines, to be shockingly bad - it was constantly notifying about conflicts, even when there really shouldn't have been one. Going from the Dropbox forums at the time, a lot of people were having similar issues.
The performance on Windows was also ridiculous - it literally rendered my PC useless for 1h on every boot. I poked around and discovered that the Dropbox client was basically some Python scripts that enumerated and hashed every.single.file on startup, then used an unreliable Windows API to check for realtime changes after that - how a company the size of Dropbox thinks that is a good idea truely boggles the mind! NTFS change journal? File system minifilter driver? Nah, let's hash every file on startup and use a the easiest realtime change detection available, just to ensure we miss some changes - oh, and we'll do it all in Python, just to make sure performance is as bad as possible!
Anyway, the final straw was when it deleted a lot of data because of a "conflict". At the time, the restore mechanism was terrible if you wanted to restore more than a handful of files - you basically had to restore files one-by-one, paging through hundreds of pages of files (I don't know if it's still like that). There was also some data that was permanently gone.
Dropbox support was also a joke - you had to post on a public forum and hope they replied. And if they did reply, they always shut you down with "no, Dropbox wouldn't delete your files", "no, Dropbox wouldn't raise a conflict for that" or whatever. Again, I don't know if it's still like that, but it really left a sour taste in my mouth, and coupled with the comedy Windows client, I won't be touching it ever again.
I ended up building my own solution using Seafile, using Azure blob storage as a backend. I run Seafile and Minio in Docker containers on a cheap Azure VM, and the whole thing "just worked" from the get-go - it's much easier than it sounds. Haven't looked back since!
That was maybe true before, but in that era for me it's pretty clear that they are chasing the bulk of new internet users for which the folder/files metaphor is not intuitive. They use social media websites and apps and have photos/videos that they access through an app, not from a file explorer (desktop OS are moving in the same direction of abstracting the filesystem too). That's why they (and Google Drive and others) are moving from "a folder that sync" to "let's auto detect and sync media".
Good luck organizing. “Search” is not an archiving mechanism. And I don’t like containers per app. It makes no sense. You have something, could be a project, event, a library and there is data associated with this. The data are files.
If I’m looking at scans of of receipts, I do not want and currently I’m not able to search for all receipts in a given period.
I don’t want my photos to be in one big folder. I have my own mental model of how it should be organized.
There’s a reason gmail supports “folders” these days
That quoted Quora answer sounds comically tone deaf and deeply inconsistent with the way users of even very simplistic products like this demand features of growing complexity, let alone how companies make money off this by cost effectively reaching use cases in the long, weird tail not addressed by the basic version (especially when eventually selling to enterprise).
Lol, it's sad to see how far Dropbox has gone from the idea of a folder that syncs.
I recently had the unhappy experience of trying to share a picture that I'd saved to Dropbox from my Android phone. After noticing that I can now leave comments on my files (?), I discovered that the "Share" button, which on every other app on Android means I can just choose the App to share with, does not operate like that.
No, from the special snowflake Dropbox app you need to choose an email address to which it will presumably email a link url to the file. No, Dropbox, I want to share a file using another app, just like any other file in a folder on my phone.
Eventually I figured out that "Export" is what you need - deliberately hidden to force lock-in for unsavvy users. I understand why they do it, but the quora answer you quoted is now hilariously dated.
So, shut up. The Dropbox app on Android does not operate like a folder on Android.
Run it in daemon mode on a server as well. It even has an encryption option so that the server can't read or write to the files, just keep them available for your clients.
I have used Syncthing for projects at work and can attest that it is a solid and simple Dropbox replacement. Though I'm not sure they support Android/iOS yet.
Edit: it is clear from the comments that there is at least an Android client.
Dropbox's cheapest plan that I see on their website is €11.99. My VPS costs me $5 per month and runs Nextcloud with no arbitrary usage limits, as well as tons of other shit I need for different things. I assume it's the same for OP.
My VPS (Digital Ocean) gives me a whopping 25GB for $5/month. Are you saying you can get a TB or more of storage included with your VPS for $5? Please tell me where!
I've been using a Google cloud free-tier VPS with Syncthing and it works great; I imagine Nextcloud would be similar. I do backup my instance with snapshots, which aren't free, but so far cost me about $.01 per month. Note, Syncthing doesn't actually require a server, but I still find it useful for offsite backup.
For me Nextcould seemed overcomplicated. It's whole platform for multiple users with multiple features (e.g. calendars, contacts). It did not seem to be solution for single user who just wants dropbox alternative. But the biggest issue I had with it, I couldn't find instructions for backing it up and restoring.
How this should look like, in a more perfect world:
- The "unobtrusive folder-that-sync app" is produced by multiple parties following a standardized protocol.
- The cloud storage server is handled and secured by different businesses, all following a standardized protocol.
- The user buys an app, and a cloud storage service, and they talk together.
I wonder what are the steps - cultural, technological, perhaps legal - to force SaaS vendors to cut their bullshit, unbundle distinct features, and start competing on merit instead of marketing budgets and control over user data?
NextCloud is great if you don't mind managing your own VPS. I run a NextCloud instance for some personal projects.
That said, if you're looking for a Dropbox alternative that functions much like Dropbox (but with better privacy and better pricing), feel free to try Sync.com (full disclosure, I work at Sync).
Your prices are good, and you have mobile clients with automatic photo upload, which I want. But you still don't support Linux, which I also want. When you add that, I'll probably become a customer.
I don't think this was a mistake. The mistake is that they were automatically switched but I'm sure they intended to download and install it in the background. I know several people who clicked "try the new dropbox" and it was instantly installed/available.
I'm not sure this is a problem because I/they asked to try it, but it still felt a bit odd that it was already installed. Uncanny Valley.
I don't think the uncanny valley concept is really applicable here, unless the file manager resembles a human. It's certainly a departure from the expected behavior, though.
Anything that looks almost like what you expect, but is not quite what you expect, can qualify as falling into the uncanny valley. That term doesn't exclude definitions outside of robotics / AI but really applies to any UI.
A good example of this is trying to emulate OS UI (like a file manager that looks like Windows or MacOS) in a browser using Java - this used to happen more than it does now. But whenever you interacted with it, it wasn't quite web UI and it wasn't quite OS ui - even though it was trying to be.... It was really terrible UX and has since fallen out of favor and been replaced by UI that is clearly web - Dropbox's website is a great example. That's because it fell into the uncanny valley.
TLDR; if it almost does what you expect, but not quite, it could be uncanny valley.
About the time dropbox limited me to 3 devices and obsoleted itself on half the OS's I needed it to shlep files to anyway, I relegated it to a docker container that also ties into Nextcloud and exports a samba share.
Its pretty much empty now, I just needed to maintain it for some folders I share with other users.
Dropbox is two things: Cheap cloud file storage with an API, and a desktop app.
The desktop app used to be a glorified FUSE app that worked well (except on ARM Linux for some reason) and got out of your way. Now Dropbox has decided it's time to ruin the desktop app in an effort to chase conversions. This strategy will fail.
Fortunately their cloud storage backend still works (unless it bugs you that they just increased the price a little bit while doubling the storage). There are several third-party clients that seem to work as replacements for the Dropbox client app. I'll probably move to Expandrive, which now supports Linux (it didn't before). Other suggestions welcome.
I just installed Dropbox after few years because I need to sync some folders. The new application is terrible! It took me a long time to find the selective sync options, instead it's showing me some features that I am not interested in at all.
My biggest complaint of the new dropbox app (for Windows) is that every other day the tray icon routinely pops up alerts (or warning badges over the icon) that look alarming. But they're just ads for other Dropbox features. I already pay for it — stop pretending my non-use of Paper is an "alert" worth interrupting me for. If you can't sync my folders, yes, alert me! Otherwise, shut up and do your job (sync my folders).
As an Apple ecosystem user (not evangelist), I stopped using Dropbox completely in favor of iCloud. I mainly only used DB for syncing 1Password keychains but randomly other stuff too. I do trust apple in terms of security and their offering is affordable, painless and works well for my needs. May not fit well for more power-user types and for people who need cross-platform compatibility but it’s worth a look if you happen to be in the ecosystem and haven’t taken a gander as yet.
Same here. I even had premium (or whatever they called it) plan, but moved everything to the iCloud drive and went back to basic, though most likely I don't even have Dropbox running on my machine right now.
I use Mega and MegaSync. It "just works" and stays out of your way. I guess they have a couple useless features (encrypted proprietary chat? do people in NZ use this?), but you don't really have to deal with them as part of the user experience.
Maybe the NZ government is spying on me that way, but the US government is probably spying on me through Dropbox. So I went with the one that offered the better user experience.
What other services like Mega are missing is third party developer support. I use a bunch of apps that work with Dropbox, Google Drive, or iCloud but I've never seen an option to link to a MegaSync account.
When I switched from Linux to Mac for a while some years ago, I felt the lack of easily mounting sftp as gnome does. So I found Expandrive did that very well. $39.95 seemed a bit steep for such a simple thing, but whatever, it was working great and I paid that. Few months later came out the next version and it turned out upgrades were not included, and now it's $49.95. I thought - whatever, I'll just keep using the old version because it was working quickly and flawlessly. Then all of a sudden previous version had minor update and it started lagging and randomly disconnecting. Meanwhile they kept spamming my email about sales and offers, ~20 times since then, pitching how it's dramatically faster now etc. I can't prove they purposely fucked up the old version, but it seemed really weird when it started to have problems right after new and more expensive one came out, and I'm not planning to use it ever again.
We only email a couple times a year. And we definitely don’t silently update to a new major version. Ping support and link this thread and we can upgrade you free. Sorry for the trouble.
Glad to hear this. Dropbox is silently updating their app, and there's no way to turn this "feature" off. Yet another reason I'm looking to leave them.
I struggled with file management for a long time - balancing accessibility from phone, highly effective programming environments, backing up large quantities of not-small photos, that stuff. So I sat down one afternoon, drafted a directory structure, subbed to Dropbox and...it worked so well. Synced my configs between machines, got an Android app which could preview lot's of filetypes, rarely thinking about the whole thing. I always thought of Dropbox quite UNIX-like in a sense, do one thing, but really well.
And then things just kept getting worse. "Checking for changes" on my old shitty VAIO running Ubuntu went from taking 5 minutes to taking half an hour to taking 3 hours and never finishing syncing. Time sensitive file accessing got harder and harder because of continuous UI changes. I tried doing stuff with Smart Sync (or Selective Sync?) but got lost in the complex matrix of which feature does what on what OS with what plan. Webapp keeps nagging me about upgrading, even though I'm literally using less than 5% of my (paid) plan. Come on, show me some valuation as customer, or better, nothing at all.
This got long, so I guess what I'm saying is: Please go back to being a folder that syncs, and I'll be just be ok with your nonchalant mail that you're randomly raising prices.
I've paid for Dropbox for years, but recently cancelled, because I'm uncertain of the direction they're heading in. It's like Evernote of yore.. in fact, I sarcastically think Evernote and Dropbox should merge so I can simplify what I nostalgically ignore to just one entity.
That said, I get Google Drive File Stream with my G Suite company account, and I get Microsoft OneDrive with my Office 365 subscription, and I get 2TB in iCloud with my iCloud subscription. This supports the "feature" idea.
I wasn't thinking about dropping Dropbox until this latest round of product news.
I would have paid for something which worked properly on linux but back when I tried it it didn't. Now I just use google drive or gitlab depending on whether or not I care if anyone else can see it. It's not really worth a lot of my time, money or effort. I'm pretty sure that for many people just doing the same (giving people access by sending them a link via whatsapp/email) is enough.
From the money they burned on Paper, multiple UI changes and that disastrous site redesign of a year or two ago, they'd probably be able to cover the cost of most of users on free plan. Storage isn't that expensive.
Still, I pay. I get increasingly bad service. The only reason I didn't switch yet is that all competitors are strictly worse, and I'm too lazy to set up Syncthing.
The problem isn't that Dropbox users won't pay, clearly they will. Or at least they would when it was simply a useful utility. The problem is that cloud storage is a commodity now, and Dropbox has to meet investor expectations which has been the death of many a perfectly good app.
Which is Dropbox’s fault with their terrible pricing. The next level up is super expensive. Instead of making it a good value and easy they did the opposite.
Right? I feel like you could build a million karma quoting the original poster and saying "Well, duh" on Reddit. Probably lots of bots doing it already.
Which is funny because, if you ask any investor who's been around a few decades, they'll say utilities are the best investment because it's the last thing any person would cut from their budget. (ie. I'd cut my cable subscription before I'd cut my water or power)
That is the real issue, but the symptom of it for Dropbox is that in order for the economics to scale, they have to break out of the commodity space. And cloud storage is now a commodity. That's why they're now willing to risk ruining what used to be a perfectly good app.
I had the same experience with dropbox. I first started to balk at them when the agent kept sucking more and more memory as updates came, then everything you describe. I ultimately just went all-in with icloud. The pricing is (now) better than dropbox, but I'm also all-in on the Apple ecosystem.
> you are not permitted and will not get permission to list iCloud Control or any derivative work on software catalogue websites like Mac Informer or MacUpdate.
that’s not a legal or enforceable license restriction.
I'm not at all a techie - but I have a question. I'm switching from a Windows + Apple world to just Apple. So I got scared when I read that using Dropbox can mess up your photos when using Apple's "Photos" program which I have always avoided. https://www.fatcatsoftware.com/comments/dont_store_your_phot...
Anyway, I love Selective Sync - esp for photos. So there is not a solution to the iCloud problem?
You really should opt in to try the new client. I have. It’s identical to before unless you want to use the new file browser for search or something else it can remain closed.
> For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
That comment was written in 2007 when the original suggestion would have been somewhat more acceptable. In 2019, please do not use plaintext FTP for anything at all if you can help it, especially for a setup involving personal documents or other data you care about keeping private. Every single syncing solution worth anything today, open or proprietary – including Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Syncthing, et al. – uses TLS or another strong form of transport encryption, and that should also be the absolute minimum bar for anything self-hosted, too.
There are many other better ways of building a Dropbox-like system on Linux these days than that advice, including the aforementioned Syncthing[1], but the appropriate update to that comment alone would be "getting a SSH account, mounting it locally with sshfs[2], and then using Git on the mounted filesystem".
I recently stopped using Dropbox and switched to iCloud Drive as well. I had exceeded the 3 machine limit and was ready to pay for upgraded Dropbox but decided to compare options first. In addition to costing the same as Dropbox, iCloud drive allows me to do full system backups and restores to/from iCloud for iPhone. I don't know if this is unique but I like it and need to figure out how to get my two MacBooks to do the same thing.
Has anyone clicked the link at all? Dropbox says this was a feature in testing that got accidentally deployed, not an intended update.
> Update 4:06pm ET: Dropbox says this was a mistake. "We recently announced a new desktop app experience that is now currently available in Early Access. Due to an error, some users were accidentally exposed to the new app for a short period of time. The issue has been resolved, though there might be a short lag for some users to see resolution. We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused."
Well, Dropbox have accomplished one thing: I now see it is time to have a look at my use of cloud storage and have another look at where the alternatives are.
I actually use several cloud storage services. I should probably stop using one or two of them. If nothing else then to save a bit of money and simplify things.
I've been meaning to move off of Dropbox and Google drive, does anyone have any recommendations? I know there are some Torrent related syncs out there. I just want something that is not centralized and controlled by an entity. I want full control of it and I sync between desktop/laptop and Android
Syncthing is open source continuous file syncing software. No account needed, no third-party data storage and can be configured not to use any of the project's discovery or relaying infrastructure.
Resilio Sync is the torrent one you're thinking of and it is great. The killer feature for me is the IgnoreList file in the root of the shared folder, so you can tell it not to sync "node_modules" in your source code folder.
Ever since they killed public folder hosting I've mostly stopped using Dropbox and moved to Imgur. I want to be able to drag pictures into a folder and then right click them and get a url to give to people. It was also nice for various types of small files.
I haven't found anything else that has that level of convenience. The windows context menus on right click were very good and now they are gone.
I use NextCloud and it has this feature on the desktop. Though it may be a dialog box first to configure expiration date, and password, I don't fully recall.
Agreed about the public folder hosting. I remember memorizing my Dropbox user ID just so I could send people a public URL within seconds.
I switched to OneDrive and it's great. It works everywhere (iOS, Mac, too) and it's a first-class citizen on Windows.
And for the same price as DropBox, I get online Office365, two installable desktop licences of Office, the iOS versions of the office apps, and an Outlook account, in addition to the 1 TB of storage.
It would be really, really hard for DropBox to come up with an application suite and bundle it along with their "folder that syncs." So they scramble and try things like their alternate file manager, that nobody in his right mind would use!
I've worked for a major Dropbox competitor for almost a decade. Shenanigans like this don't surprise me.
This happens because product managers, developers, designers, ect, like to get creative. They think that they need to invent something new; AND, we (in the industry) see how a certain group of users is constantly confused by the files and folders concept.
Usually, cooler heads prevail and remind everyone why our customers use our products: They just want basic file synchronization, sharing, and backup. That's it!
Fortunately, in our case, we have very vocal major customers, so it's "easy" for us to plan features and changes that they will like.
That being said: An important subset of users is extremely confused by files and folders. Figuring out a UI that works for everyone, (power users, normal users, and non-savy users,) is a bit of a holy grail, and a very important problem to solve.
My guess is people don't organise their folders well and then struggle to navigate and search properly. Which shouldn't mean the rest should get punished, but here we are.
Which effectively mean that a modern iPhone probably has 100x the computing power of a 10 year old laptop and a 100th of the utility, because it’s based on this limited philosophy.
I have a friend who is in his 70s who is otherwise quite competent but he cannot comprehend the fact that the Finder represents a tree. Some nodes (files and applications) are leaves; others (folders) are not. That's on him. The other thing he has trouble with is that Save and Open dialog boxes in applications present a different view of the tree than the Finder does. That's on Apple for not defaulting the Save and Open dialogs to the last window you opened in the Finder, and vice-versa.
The upshot is that he can never find anything on his computer, and if I'm not around he just drags everything to the desktop, because at least there he can find it.
> This happens because product managers, developers, designers, ect, like to get creative. They think that they need to invent something new
Capitalism is supposed to be about efficient allocation of resources. Cutting down the fat. Taking away materiel and capital from people who squander it and giving it to people who can put it to good work.
How come that those product managers, developers, designers, etc. all have jobs? Why weren't they trimmed away as the fat they are? Why does this keep happening to almost every SaaS company out there?
Capitalism's prime directive is growth. Efficiency matters only when two conditions are met:
1. There is sufficient competition
2. There is resource scarcity
In the current context, the first condition holds true for Dropbox, but the second does not. There was a commenter here on HN a few months ago who works in VC, and he/she was saying that VCs currently have too much money and they are desperately looking for things to throw that money at. That is the opposite of resource scarcity.
Make no mistake though: if and when we get the next economic crash, I think we will see a drastic shift in how tech companies operate. I suspect that a _lot_ of fat will be cut, then.
The world is not planned like you think. All this is emergent behavior, motivated by the views and interests of the many players.
If you're a developer, you might try implementing a new feature. If you're a manager, you might encourage the developer because of his initiative and put it in. Some managers try to differentiate themselves think stuff up and have their folks do it. Marketing folks might come up with some hidden reason (learn more about our customers) and implement something extra just to collect more usage data.
The only place I've seen that discourages wild features is defense contractors. They strictly develop specifications for what will be created, then have requirement documents, then design documents tracking the requirements, then these are followed all the way through to delivery.
I've been feeling the same as many people in this thread - DropBox keep adding all these weird features I don't want or need (document editor? file manager? notification this and that?) while not doing what I expected (better file masking for sharing, less resources).
I've heard of pCloud and have been considering testing them since /I simply want a folder to sync/. Curious if anyone has tried it before and can compare it directly.
I needed a tool to sync my files across different platforms.
I learned that I don't need that.
You can say lessions learned.
I now use a proper backup tool, and don't spread my digital life through every cloud thats there and not here.
Does not look so bad. It's similar to web interface on dropbox.com, but packaged as "electron-like" app. Its functionality is related only to Dropbox, and it can be considered a part of main application. If it was third-party crapware, like free-to-play game or antivirus, I might be concerned, but it's just a piece of new bad UI and not worse than that.
If I do "apt-get upgrade" and "gnome" metapackage installs me another new picture viewer/calculator/text editor appeared in new version, does it mean "Gnome silently installs unwanted software on users computers"?
> If I do "apt-get upgrade" and "gnome" metapackage installs me another new picture viewer/calculator/text editor appeared in new version, does it mean "Gnome silently installs unwanted software on users computers"
The difference is that when I choose my operating system (in this example Ubuntu/Debian), I trust it's native package manager and repos to install what they need more than some 3rd party provider shipping new proprietary blobs without my asking for it.
Also note that when you do `apt upgrade` it prompts for permission if it sees any new packages/dependencies are being pulled in.
No one comment about the actual substance of the change or why they don’t like it. Just lots of emotions ! And the author seems to have left out the most critical thing about this update, the main interphase is still the OS and the tiny badge in the system tray. The new file browser thing can remain closed and unused unless you want to use Dropbox search natively or one of their upcoming 3rd party integrations. It’s a very simple file browser that you need to click to open, that you don’t need to use, not a bloody crypto miner or an opt in to sell your data.
It would be awesome if folks would actually criticize the design and technical implementation!
Yeah, I had this new interface popup yesterday at random, same time as I got a notification that a file had been uploaded. I didn't click on the notification, Dropbox seems to have used this as a hook to launch the preloaded new application. WTF, Dropbox?
I've recently unsubscribed from Dropbox Pro, in part because I was no longer using it that much and, mostly, because of the non-stop, incessant, annoying pleas for me to upgrade to Dropbox Business. I'm a paying customer, stop advertising upsells to me! I actually get less advertising now that I'm on a free Dropbox account.
Anyway, depressing to see a service I once counted on go so far wrong.
Reminds me of Evernote and the "Upgrade to business and share your personal notes and journals with co-workers. And we have chat!!! Did we mention we have chat? You should check out chat."
I'll never understand this impulse to hard sell your already-paying customers on more shit. It's like once these companies start facing adversity, they just can't help themselves from trying to squeeze things from people who are already giving them money. It lends this sort of 'captive-audience' vibe to the whole affair.
Like, sure, publicize your higher tiers, make their value propositions such that I might say, "Huh, actually I could use that stuff." But if that stuff is appropriately displayed at the time I originally signed up, I've generally already completed that value evaluation when I made whatever initial purchase I made. I already went through and decided what features I needed or didn't need, and selected appropriately. If I didn't want the extra upload bandwidth (or whatever) when I originally signed up, I probably don't want it two weeks later.
Getting hard sells from a product you already use is almost insulting in a way. I'm already giving you money -- with today's subscription models, I'm probably giving you money every month. But that's not enough for you? It totally changes my opinion of a thing from "useful product that does what I want" to "merely a means for its owners to make money." Those are two very different outlooks. The first is collaborative: they create a product that I find useful and provide it, thereby making my life better in some small way, and I benefit them by paying for it. The second feels almost manipulative, like I have to be on guard for potential marketing tactics that don't actually benefit me in any way.
Honestly, the only thing that these sort of 'push-notification upsells' do for me is they act as small prompts for me to reconsider my attachment to the product. Each time I get one, it makes me go, "Wow, this just keeps annoying me more. Do I really use this thing enough to justify this ongoing annoyance?"
I contrast 1Password, which sent me an email on their opted in Channel telling me about their new Team feature, with Evernote which added a “chat” button and had it constantly pop up along with a request to upgrade to business. Worse, I hide the button in settings and it reappeared at least twice now.
With DropBox, when ever I logged in on the web interface, they would redirect me to a business upgrade landing page, in the best dark pattern tradition it took a bit to figure out how to get back to my folders.
They’re building a new tool to complement they base offering. Nothing has changed about that or the way you can use it. You can close this new app and forget it exists. You want rsync and they’re building a UI for it.
Perhaps I dont fully understand the value of something like DropBox, when it comes to syncing my files the only thing I've ever needed has been github (or other online repo). Among syncing it has all the other version control goodness, and I will likely use it until I can setup some kind of home server
From the users perspective git is an application which you use to actively maintain a repo. Whereas Dropbox is more or less just a magic folder. Entirely different levels of convenience.
I definitely understand why "normal" users wouldn't use an online repo (especially if they've never used git itself), but I can't really buy `git add ., git commit -m "sync", git push -u` being too inconvenient, especially when you can just alias all of those. Now if mobile phones are the main reason I can definately understand a bit more, but I do my best to minimize my usage of it anyway, it's mainly a messenger + hn device.
Movies and music I get, but I have all my schoolwork and related stuff, like all my org-mode files, in there, not just code, it 100% beats emailing myself some work I did on my desktop just so I can print it out on a school computer/work on it using a laptop.
That's still one action more than is required for using a synchronization service. The killer feature is not having to do anything at all. I save my file on one computer, and it's available on all my other machines, my phone and anything with a web browser without a conscious thought at all.
I wonder how hard it would be to make a folder that automatically pushes itself to a git repo whenever it detects a change in its contents, I've actually been thinking about that for a bit now. The optimist in me thinks it can't be too hard, could be a nice project to do someday.
You could do it easily with a service which just indexes the files and periodically looks at most recently modified timestamps and then pushes if any of them are later than the most recent sync.
I work remotely with my colleagues. We constantly are doing stuff like creating/updating excel files and all sorts of other stuff that has nothing to do with source code.
With dropbox (or equivalents) I update something in the file, and it's updated right away everywhere no matter where my co-workers are.
Dropbox also has good enough built-in version history (especially on business), it will keep the changes of any file for like 6 months. So if I want to look how this excel file looked an hour ago, I just click "version history" and it pulls up all the different files and I can restore any one.
So for people who work remotely and just want to sync files / have some ability to restore previous versions dropbox is a life changer.
Yeah, of course this could all be setup to have each person on a VPN and using a shared folder on a server where we are logged into the domain or we setup a ZFS filesystem which takes snapshots and I can restore etc etc. In a small company, F that. I've done all that bullshit, it isn't worth the time and maintenance when you just want a damn synced filesystem among co-workers.
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[ 5.6 ms ] story [ 293 ms ] threadI won’t install it on any of my personal computers. If I have to share a document, I’ll just upload it via the web.
I can't speak for what it's like to administer Nextcloud for a large org, but for my personal work sync it is a godsend. Easily my favorite software of the last three years.
For some reason I constantly got a'... could not be downloaded because of a local file clash' error with 6 files. 2*3 files have the same name but are in different subfolders. I've searched for this error, deleted the filed locally and in the cloud. Every time I add them again, I get the same error.
Not to mention that I get reminded of this error every 30 minutes or so...
Whats also annoying was that there are different versions in the Ubuntu software store. Some are deprecated and don't work anymore. Somehow the Appimage from their website didn't work either. I imagine this can be frustrating for new users.
This is why I went back to Dropbox. My usecase is exactly what the top rated comment says. I need a folder that syncs. Without any problems.
I imagine that icloud would also be a viable option for casual users like me. However, they don't have a linux client..
iCloud once Apple introduces folder sharing in iOS 13.
OneDrive - $9.99 a month full Office Suite including on mobile/web and 6TB of storage. There is a third party Linux client (https://www.expandrive.com/onedrive-for-linux/)
https://nextcloud.com/install/#install-clients
I've installed it for personal use before but now use Hetzner:
https://www.hetzner.com/storage/nextcloud
Well, let's take a step back and think about the sync problem and what the ideal solution for it would do:
There would be a folder. You'd put your stuff in it. It would sync. They built that.
Why didn't anyone else build that? I have no idea.
"But," you may ask, "so much more you could do! What about task management, calendaring, customized dashboards, virtual white boarding. More than just folders and files!"
No, shut up. People don't use that crap. They just want a folder. A folder that syncs.
"But," you may say, "this is valuable data...certainly users will feel more comfortable tying their data to Windows Live, Apple Mobile Me, or a name they already know."
No, shut up. Not a single person on Earth wakes up in the morning worried about deriving more value from their Windows Live login. People already trust folders. And Dropbox looks just like a folder. One that syncs.
"But," you may say, "folders are so 1995. why not leverage the full power of the web? With HTML 5 you can drag and drop files, you can build intergalactic dashboards of stats showing how much storage you are using, you can publish your files as RSS feeds and tweets, and you can add your company logo!"
No, shut up. Most of the world doesn't sit in front of their browser all day. If they do, it is IE 6 at work that they are not allowed to upgrade. Browsers suck for these kinds of things. Their stuff is already in folders. They just want a folder. That syncs.
That is what it does.
http://www.quora.com/Dropbox/Why-is-Dropbox-more-popular-tha...
Oh well.
I've been a paying Dropbox customers for years now, and not on the lowest tier either. How much more money and to whom can you or me give, for Dropbox to stop doing the shit they're doing, and forever just remain a folder that syncs on every platform?
Even though I agree with the conclusion, because I think files & folders is one of the very few computing interface metaphors that has proven itself, I disagree with the reasoning here. Maybe that's too many years of hearing similar language in arguments from Linux Desktop evangelists.
I think the real reason it works so well is not that people don't want that other stuff, but that it is straight-forward for users to architect solutions to a lot of those other things on top of a simple folder-wat-syncs because they can very easily wrap their head around how a folder-wat-syncs will behave. Case in point: many people, like myself, use Dropbox as a password store by keeping a KeePass database in it. For a short time when a buddy and I had the fool notion to start a business, we coordinated and kept track of things through documents on Dropbox. Simple tools one can combine to perform complex tasks; sound familiar?
- At Google everyone had linux, and non-developers effectively only used web-apps.
- My girlfriend is at a startup but has a similar workflow on a Mac.
- I recently rejoined a gym I was a member of in '14, at that time they had some native windows CRM type app that their employees used, when I glanced at the screen recently it was just a web app in Chrome.
This argument is a good one but it only covers the rise of Dropbox. We are now in a different era.
Dropbox's functionality is now table stakes and not something new. Windows by default has cloud sync, macOS does as well. We switched at our company from Dropbox to Google Drive Stream. Box is really focused on enterprise solutions -- lots of permissions, probably too much in my opinion but C-suite like that shit.
This quora answer is irrelevant in the current context. Dropbox needs to figure out how to stay in a commoditized market where their special sauce is being integrated into OSes and larger offerings (G-Suite.)
Maybe a return to simplicity is it? But we moved away from the simple solution because it wasn't sufficent for our needs. And others are just never adopting it in the first place because it is built into their OS or their app suite. Dropbox has a long-term relevancy problem here that they have not cracked.
There's still a lot of value to be had in providing a folder that syncs quickly and effortlessly.
(Well, what I really want is a folder that syncs and which lets me get URLs to raw files in the cloud to share. They used to have this, then they dropped it for some silly business reasons. Tough luck, I learned to live without it. Still, throughout the decade or so I've been using their service, they added exactly zero useful things for me, and managed to lose one feature I cared about.)
"A folder that syncs" was never the killer feature, it was the ability to download and upload files from any machine connected to the internet and get sharing links.
I gave up on Dropbox for many of the reasons mentioned in this thread (and lacking ZFS on Linux being the final straw).
Nextcloud fills this niche for me now. And it offers practically unlimited storage, is free and even open-source.
I’m not coming back, Dropbox.
OneDrive cannot handle tons of files. It just doesn't work. It ends up freezing, you have no idea what's going on. Can't speak to macOS related stuff.
We finally were able to migrate off of this.. but we had a VERY file hefty folder structure. Instead of databases we chose to keep things in individual files for various reasons. Needless to say this didn't scale well, and there were about 750k files on the structure. Most of this was archival, but we simply didn't have the time or care enough to reduce the number of files.. we just wanted to be able to sync this to cloud data as is. Many files were super small, so never an absolute size thing just a LOT of files. And a chunk would keep changing throughout the day.
Dropbox was able to handle this for years- never an issue. Yeah it was fairly CPU intensive, but it worked very well.
I tried OneDrive on this.. what a nightmare. I tried owncloud, bittorrent sync, some others I can't even recall. Granted this has been about 3-4 years since I really tried some other ones with lots of files, but I was so annoyed every time I did.
What I've done is tell people to create documents from the "cloud" and edit them there within the Office365 ecosystem. Documentation needs where I work are fairly simple, with very few people needing much beyond the basic functionality. No one is doing amortization tables or complicated formulas. Word use is also fairly basic.
It seems that every week almost Microsoft changes the admin page for Office365 and adds or removes a feature or changes the way things look. Because of our basic Office needs, I'm seeing growing success with getting people to start and stay in the cloud. Prevents nonsense to a great degree. SharePoint to share between departments.
Oddly enough, I've had great success in "rescuing" Office files using LibreOffice running on Linux. Office files just add so much crufty proprietary stuff.
If you haven't tried it, you do not know what you are missing.
I've kept using Dropbox for all these years because they never confused people like this. There was a single app that gave you a folder that synced.
Google might drop any of their file syncing solutions, possibly even all three!
I hope that it will be useful and interesting to note that we have added 'rclone'[1] to our platform[2] which means that your rsync.net account is truly a swiss army knife for cloud storage organization.
This is very much like our 'borg' support - we actually have the binary executable installed on our end so you can run it properly. There is also a discounted signup for these two use-cases.[3][4]
[1] https://rclone.org/
[2] https://github.com/ncw/rclone/issues/3254
[3] https://www.rsync.net/products/borg.html
[4] https://www.rsync.net/products/rclone.html
I think?
It is a game changer because it is simple. It is a virtual drive in the cloud that is fast and seamless and behaves as if it is local.
When I came by a few minutes later, all my laptop's docs had been moved into `C:/Users/<user>/OneDrive - <company>/Documents` and the Documents library adjusted to point there. And then all my non-Windows applications stopped working.
I mean, backup up is one thing. Relocating them is totally different. WTF Microsoft!
With respect, that is Dropbox's problem. Dropbox needs to do that, But I don't need Dropbox to do that.
The same is true of music-playing apps. Once they cost money and added value. Then platforms all started making "play this music file" free. The purveyors all tried to add more value. And there are a few specialized music players kicking around.
But most went away, the business model was no longer viable, and the move into adding lots of functionality pushed them into a niche.
I agree that Dropbox is facing an existential crisis. If Apple delivers on some of its promised new iCloud folder sharing functionality, I will end my Dropbox subscription, and no amount of "We're a collaboration platform" will change that.
Dropbox knows that, and is going in the direction of getting money from someone else. Will they succeed? Maybe, maybe not. But either way, most of their existing user base is finding their less useful and less valuable as they make this transition.
Shrug.
I have witnessed this so many times over the last thirty-five years. One set of forces acts to take something that was originally just for companies, and "Consumerizes" it. Spreadsheets are common for people to track all kinds of personal things. Kids use them in school.
In the opposite direction, companies chasing the money "Enterprise" their consumer offerings, abandoning the users that built them in the first place.
Same as it ever was.
https://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=775098
on Mac and iOS and Linux and Android?
> macOS does as well.
On Windows and Linux and Android?
There may be some people for whom Dropbox will always remain the best solution, to be sure, but it feels like Dropbox is going out of their way to reduce that set of people in favor of extracting more money from those that remain.
For many companies, that is the terminal phase of their existence: They are driven to extract more and more revenue from a set of shrinking customers, many of whom are hostage to the company's product and have insanely high switching costs.
The end-game for such companies is when they stop as they almost entirely cease selling the product and transform into a company with licensing and service revenues.
It isn't always terminal, but it requires an almost superhuman effort to jolt such a company out of its trajectory. Apple was in that phase in the 1990s under Gil Amelio: They focused on margins at the expense of product quality and market share.
IBM bragged about becoming a service company in the 1990s, a tacit admission that they had relinquished any claim to being a participant, much less a leader, in personal computers.
Neither company is dead today, but they illustrate the two paths. Apple turned things around with a combination of luck and a maverick CEO.
IBM isn't technically dead, but it is dead in a sense that pg once described: Nobody fears them, and they don't influence anyone's choices.
You still have the vendor lock-in problem though. Somebody might only have Apple devices now, but 5 years from now the fact that all their data is in Apple's cloud (and maybe they got their whole family to put it in there too) makes it that much harder to switch away when you realize that Apple still hasn't fixed its keyboards.
Not if you want to sync with other people, or with work. There are three major types of desktop OSes and two mobile ones; even if you just one of each, you probably know and interact with people using a different set.
Personally, I only need Dropbox for Scrivener syncing at this point, because my current workplace (and my previous one, IIRC) is standardized on Google Drive for document sharing -- and I don't share work documents to my personal devices.
Or maybe the simple solution worked well enough but they still moved away because of some obligation to keep growing, which would be impractical without needing to add many more monetized features. When I see extensive rebrandings and additions of features that I would never have started using the service for in the beginning, I can't help but think this. In this case it doesn't help that the only useful feature of Dropbox is being integrated into all these other products either.
Instead, everyone succumbs to the urge to feature-cram their way to differentiation, so we get chat functionality in your navigation software, location sharing in your music app, and team management in your paint program.
I think the whole premise of files and folders are far from dead, just gotta look from different angles.
Sync to where? To other Windows or macs? Limited usability. Dropbox was the first to offer true seamless sync at scale, across ALL common OS/devices.
Dropbox has a relevancy problem
That's like saying email is dead because FB can embed videos on posts. Like the Quora guy said, we don't want crap. Email will still be around 10y from now, and Dropbox has, at a minimum, another 5.
They sell this and it is important for it to be seamless as well. (Unlike say current iteration of Google Drive which sells both of the above but is not seamless.)
Note that it is very easy to compete with them for any of the big players.
It was movie studios convincing microsoft to ban from Windows the best featuresof SBlaster cards (those features are STILL banned by the way) because they were afraid of people using them to pirate movies.
It is a reaaaaally long story, but to make it short: MS changed radically how windows drivers worked, and what a driver could do, during the transition to DVDs, it killed sound cards (because no more advanced 3D sound rendering that sound blaster could do), CRTs (no more funky resolutions, no more overlay mode, and other fancy CRT features), and initiated the slow death of VGA (that also happened for other reasons but this contributed a lot).
Once motherboards integrated that there was no need for most people to buy a separate sound card. I know I didn't, especially when working out what you're spending your money on - video cards were far more important. But those, too, have become less important as integrated graphics have improved.
Sure, if you mean a strict majority of people, but what about gamers? There's no reason "most" people need to buy a separate videocard but it is still a huge market. For a time, a good soundcard was with advanced features for 3D sound rendering was looking like it was going to be just as important to PC gaming as good videocards.
Yes, but why were they buying Sound Blaster cards instead of the much cheaper audio cards that were also on the market at the same time, but just didn’t have the same advanced feature set? The SoundBlaster, when it came out, was the “premium, workstation-tier” product of the audio-card world!
Are you suggesting the SoundBlaster’s rise was entirely down to 1. Brand recognition, or 2. even the top-of-market cards still being cheap enough that a strategy of “satisficing with the most expensive thing you can easily afford” would have led people to the SoundBlaster; and not at all to its differentiating feature-set from other audio cards?
Later on, I got a new computer and a much better speakers, and spent some time getting digital output to work. I used my motherboard for that, because at this stage, I wanted soundcard to be just a simple, stupid data sender. No DSP, no "advanced 3D sound rendering" -- the ideal sound card takes data from input (DVD) and sends them to speakers, acting as a dumb data pipe.
Same goes for "fancy CRT features" -- what is that exactly that CRTs can do that flat-screens can not? Other than duck hunt-style controllers, I don't think there is anything.
Overlay mode wasn't a CRT feature, and worked fine with flat panel displays with XP. The introduction of GPU compositing in Vista was what killed it, but it still continued to work in 7 if you turned compositing off. The death of funky resolutions was entirely a result of switching to hardware which has a native resolution, and not anything software side.
DVD drives weren’t even a thing when people stopped buying soundcards. Yeah a small selection wanted 3d sound for a gaming edge, and that was available on low cost cards pretty soon.
Before that they a place, but all features were available through software. The mixer, sampler, channels.
pretty sure these happened at around the same time. Single data point:
my 486-era machine (92):
- bolt on sb16+cdrom as part of 'multimedia upgrade' (MPC II)
my pentium-I era machine (96):
- came with sb16+cdrom (MPC III)
my pentium-II era machine (98):
- came with integrated DVD-ROM + ac97 audio
none of these were particularly 'special' as far as 'what people were buying then'
If so, I’m surprised nobody’s hacked around that by now by just e.g. using the GPU in GPGPU mode as an pseudo-FPGA, dropping audio DSP logic onto it, and generating their “HD 3D” audio using that.
This is very much a "we're all dead in the end" observation. Any good enough product is gonna get killed by turning it into multiple instances of mutually incompatible features, in a war for market share that claims user's time and patience as collateral damage.
Sure... Kinda. How many people spend a lot of time on desktop these days? I see two large camps; windows + Android and... Well, Mac (e.g. iPad + iPhone). Those combos already work (MS client runs on android.) How many people run android + iPad/MacBook, windows + iPhone, or Linux? I imagine not too many, which is perhaps why DB is so focused on Enterprise.
(At work we use Google Drive, it it just sucks. File Stream is super buggy and the web UI lacks a lot of productivity features.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17732912
Effectively Dropbox is no longer the universal solution guaranteed to work everywhere, which was the reason I chose them before. They deliberately killed off their unique selling point.
These days I run Nextcloud on iOS, Windows and Linux and it doesn't complain about ZFS.
That lost them a shit-ton of goodwill. Too little, too late.
Whereas a feature as product means it’s more likely to stick around. They have nothing to do but build and maintain this feature. They have the luxury of working out the edgiest of edge cases.
But I guess the pointless file manager shows the downside of features as product. One the product is complete and largely bug free, marketing and engineers get itchy in their unique ways.
Edit: It looks like you have to pay for it and the music has to be in playlists. Not quite what I'd like.
What degredation have you noticed that makes you think it is being abandoned?
> With the launch of YouTube Music last year, we eventually plan to replace Google Play Music with YouTube Music. In anticipation of this change, we are shutting down the Artist Hub.
Source:
https://9to5google.com/2019/04/03/google-play-music-shutdown...
So yeah for people that don't have much and just want to keep some data synced across some machines.. yup onedrive is great and there's no reason to use a third party service when you can just log into your windows with your live account and it's all synced. But if you've ever run into the problems with onedrive then it's a complete killer. You can't use a file syncing service that doesn't work perfectly all the time.
The performance on Windows was also ridiculous - it literally rendered my PC useless for 1h on every boot. I poked around and discovered that the Dropbox client was basically some Python scripts that enumerated and hashed every.single.file on startup, then used an unreliable Windows API to check for realtime changes after that - how a company the size of Dropbox thinks that is a good idea truely boggles the mind! NTFS change journal? File system minifilter driver? Nah, let's hash every file on startup and use a the easiest realtime change detection available, just to ensure we miss some changes - oh, and we'll do it all in Python, just to make sure performance is as bad as possible!
Anyway, the final straw was when it deleted a lot of data because of a "conflict". At the time, the restore mechanism was terrible if you wanted to restore more than a handful of files - you basically had to restore files one-by-one, paging through hundreds of pages of files (I don't know if it's still like that). There was also some data that was permanently gone.
Dropbox support was also a joke - you had to post on a public forum and hope they replied. And if they did reply, they always shut you down with "no, Dropbox wouldn't delete your files", "no, Dropbox wouldn't raise a conflict for that" or whatever. Again, I don't know if it's still like that, but it really left a sour taste in my mouth, and coupled with the comedy Windows client, I won't be touching it ever again.
I ended up building my own solution using Seafile, using Azure blob storage as a backend. I run Seafile and Minio in Docker containers on a cheap Azure VM, and the whole thing "just worked" from the get-go - it's much easier than it sounds. Haven't looked back since!
If I’m looking at scans of of receipts, I do not want and currently I’m not able to search for all receipts in a given period.
I don’t want my photos to be in one big folder. I have my own mental model of how it should be organized.
There’s a reason gmail supports “folders” these days
What a monumental lack of imagination.
I recently had the unhappy experience of trying to share a picture that I'd saved to Dropbox from my Android phone. After noticing that I can now leave comments on my files (?), I discovered that the "Share" button, which on every other app on Android means I can just choose the App to share with, does not operate like that.
No, from the special snowflake Dropbox app you need to choose an email address to which it will presumably email a link url to the file. No, Dropbox, I want to share a file using another app, just like any other file in a folder on my phone.
Eventually I figured out that "Export" is what you need - deliberately hidden to force lock-in for unsavvy users. I understand why they do it, but the quora answer you quoted is now hilariously dated.
So, shut up. The Dropbox app on Android does not operate like a folder on Android.
The migration was easy:
1. Setup a directory on my VPS for storing files
2. Install Nextcloud
3. Configure security
4. Install clients on (Mac/ Windows and Androd phone)
5. Starting adding files
https://nextcloud.com/
https://syncthing.net/
Edit: it is clear from the comments that there is at least an Android client.
[0]: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fsync/id964427882?mt=8
Backup: https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/stable/admin_manual/mainte... I haven't found it documented, but there are also a few occ commands to do the backup and restore that were added this year some time.
Security: https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/stable/admin_manual/instal...
>on my VPS
Well, your VPS is not free I presume?
https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/16/admin_manual/maintenanc...
(This is my not-stealthy way of saying that Nextcloud is a rather impossible alternative to Dropbox for its typical user)
- The "unobtrusive folder-that-sync app" is produced by multiple parties following a standardized protocol.
- The cloud storage server is handled and secured by different businesses, all following a standardized protocol.
- The user buys an app, and a cloud storage service, and they talk together.
I wonder what are the steps - cultural, technological, perhaps legal - to force SaaS vendors to cut their bullshit, unbundle distinct features, and start competing on merit instead of marketing budgets and control over user data?
That said, if you're looking for a Dropbox alternative that functions much like Dropbox (but with better privacy and better pricing), feel free to try Sync.com (full disclosure, I work at Sync).
Choice is good!
I'm not sure this is a problem because I/they asked to try it, but it still felt a bit odd that it was already installed. Uncanny Valley.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley
For example: https://medium.com/s/user-friendly/the-ux-uncanny-valley-cf3...
A good example of this is trying to emulate OS UI (like a file manager that looks like Windows or MacOS) in a browser using Java - this used to happen more than it does now. But whenever you interacted with it, it wasn't quite web UI and it wasn't quite OS ui - even though it was trying to be.... It was really terrible UX and has since fallen out of favor and been replaced by UI that is clearly web - Dropbox's website is a great example. That's because it fell into the uncanny valley.
TLDR; if it almost does what you expect, but not quite, it could be uncanny valley.
Its pretty much empty now, I just needed to maintain it for some folders I share with other users.
The desktop app used to be a glorified FUSE app that worked well (except on ARM Linux for some reason) and got out of your way. Now Dropbox has decided it's time to ruin the desktop app in an effort to chase conversions. This strategy will fail.
Fortunately their cloud storage backend still works (unless it bugs you that they just increased the price a little bit while doubling the storage). There are several third-party clients that seem to work as replacements for the Dropbox client app. I'll probably move to Expandrive, which now supports Linux (it didn't before). Other suggestions welcome.
Maybe the NZ government is spying on me that way, but the US government is probably spying on me through Dropbox. So I went with the one that offered the better user experience.
How does ExpanDrive compare to AirExplorer¹? The ExpanDrive UI looks cleaner.
¹https://airexplorer.net/
When I switched from Linux to Mac for a while some years ago, I felt the lack of easily mounting sftp as gnome does. So I found Expandrive did that very well. $39.95 seemed a bit steep for such a simple thing, but whatever, it was working great and I paid that. Few months later came out the next version and it turned out upgrades were not included, and now it's $49.95. I thought - whatever, I'll just keep using the old version because it was working quickly and flawlessly. Then all of a sudden previous version had minor update and it started lagging and randomly disconnecting. Meanwhile they kept spamming my email about sales and offers, ~20 times since then, pitching how it's dramatically faster now etc. I can't prove they purposely fucked up the old version, but it seemed really weird when it started to have problems right after new and more expensive one came out, and I'm not planning to use it ever again.
I struggled with file management for a long time - balancing accessibility from phone, highly effective programming environments, backing up large quantities of not-small photos, that stuff. So I sat down one afternoon, drafted a directory structure, subbed to Dropbox and...it worked so well. Synced my configs between machines, got an Android app which could preview lot's of filetypes, rarely thinking about the whole thing. I always thought of Dropbox quite UNIX-like in a sense, do one thing, but really well.
And then things just kept getting worse. "Checking for changes" on my old shitty VAIO running Ubuntu went from taking 5 minutes to taking half an hour to taking 3 hours and never finishing syncing. Time sensitive file accessing got harder and harder because of continuous UI changes. I tried doing stuff with Smart Sync (or Selective Sync?) but got lost in the complex matrix of which feature does what on what OS with what plan. Webapp keeps nagging me about upgrading, even though I'm literally using less than 5% of my (paid) plan. Come on, show me some valuation as customer, or better, nothing at all.
This got long, so I guess what I'm saying is: Please go back to being a folder that syncs, and I'll be just be ok with your nonchalant mail that you're randomly raising prices.
A simple, effective utility can't support a multi-billion valuation. Where else will the VC Ponzi dollars go?
That said, I get Google Drive File Stream with my G Suite company account, and I get Microsoft OneDrive with my Office 365 subscription, and I get 2TB in iCloud with my iCloud subscription. This supports the "feature" idea.
I wasn't thinking about dropping Dropbox until this latest round of product news.
Still, I pay. I get increasingly bad service. The only reason I didn't switch yet is that all competitors are strictly worse, and I'm too lazy to set up Syncthing.
This is the real issue: everyone wants to be a unicorn and no one wants to be a utility.
Somewhere, Steve Jobs is smiling.
They even do automatic backups of other cloud providers like OneDrive, Dropbox, Facebook, Instagram and Google Drive.
Lately there's a plugin to backup an entire Wordpress site, directly to pCloud.
that’s not a legal or enforceable license restriction.
From our platform page[1]:
"We believe in the UNIX philosophy and we want rsync.net to be a simple primitive that you can quickly plug into your workflow."
We would be very happy to have you.
[1] https://www.rsync.net/platform.html
(See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 )
There are many other better ways of building a Dropbox-like system on Linux these days than that advice, including the aforementioned Syncthing[1], but the appropriate update to that comment alone would be "getting a SSH account, mounting it locally with sshfs[2], and then using Git on the mounted filesystem".
[1]: https://syncthing.net
[2]: https://github.com/libfuse/sshfs
> Update 4:06pm ET: Dropbox says this was a mistake. "We recently announced a new desktop app experience that is now currently available in Early Access. Due to an error, some users were accidentally exposed to the new app for a short period of time. The issue has been resolved, though there might be a short lag for some users to see resolution. We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused."
ah yes, happens all the time
I actually use several cloud storage services. I should probably stop using one or two of them. If nothing else then to save a bit of money and simplify things.
Congratulations Dropbox.
https://syncthing.net/
I haven't found anything else that has that level of convenience. The windows context menus on right click were very good and now they are gone.
Agreed about the public folder hosting. I remember memorizing my Dropbox user ID just so I could send people a public URL within seconds.
And for the same price as DropBox, I get online Office365, two installable desktop licences of Office, the iOS versions of the office apps, and an Outlook account, in addition to the 1 TB of storage.
It would be really, really hard for DropBox to come up with an application suite and bundle it along with their "folder that syncs." So they scramble and try things like their alternate file manager, that nobody in his right mind would use!
This happens because product managers, developers, designers, ect, like to get creative. They think that they need to invent something new; AND, we (in the industry) see how a certain group of users is constantly confused by the files and folders concept.
Usually, cooler heads prevail and remind everyone why our customers use our products: They just want basic file synchronization, sharing, and backup. That's it!
Fortunately, in our case, we have very vocal major customers, so it's "easy" for us to plan features and changes that they will like.
That being said: An important subset of users is extremely confused by files and folders. Figuring out a UI that works for everyone, (power users, normal users, and non-savy users,) is a bit of a holy grail, and a very important problem to solve.
What a waste.
The upshot is that he can never find anything on his computer, and if I'm not around he just drags everything to the desktop, because at least there he can find it.
Capitalism is supposed to be about efficient allocation of resources. Cutting down the fat. Taking away materiel and capital from people who squander it and giving it to people who can put it to good work.
How come that those product managers, developers, designers, etc. all have jobs? Why weren't they trimmed away as the fat they are? Why does this keep happening to almost every SaaS company out there?
1. There is sufficient competition
2. There is resource scarcity
In the current context, the first condition holds true for Dropbox, but the second does not. There was a commenter here on HN a few months ago who works in VC, and he/she was saying that VCs currently have too much money and they are desperately looking for things to throw that money at. That is the opposite of resource scarcity.
Make no mistake though: if and when we get the next economic crash, I think we will see a drastic shift in how tech companies operate. I suspect that a _lot_ of fat will be cut, then.
[1]: https://www.wired.com/story/reddit-redesign/?mbid=synd_digg
If you're a developer, you might try implementing a new feature. If you're a manager, you might encourage the developer because of his initiative and put it in. Some managers try to differentiate themselves think stuff up and have their folks do it. Marketing folks might come up with some hidden reason (learn more about our customers) and implement something extra just to collect more usage data.
The only place I've seen that discourages wild features is defense contractors. They strictly develop specifications for what will be created, then have requirement documents, then design documents tracking the requirements, then these are followed all the way through to delivery.
I've heard of pCloud and have been considering testing them since /I simply want a folder to sync/. Curious if anyone has tried it before and can compare it directly.
If I do "apt-get upgrade" and "gnome" metapackage installs me another new picture viewer/calculator/text editor appeared in new version, does it mean "Gnome silently installs unwanted software on users computers"?
The difference is that when I choose my operating system (in this example Ubuntu/Debian), I trust it's native package manager and repos to install what they need more than some 3rd party provider shipping new proprietary blobs without my asking for it.
Also note that when you do `apt upgrade` it prompts for permission if it sees any new packages/dependencies are being pulled in.
I really dislike this type of FUD based reporting https://twitter.com/ronamadeo/status/1151947264149131265?s=2...
I've recently unsubscribed from Dropbox Pro, in part because I was no longer using it that much and, mostly, because of the non-stop, incessant, annoying pleas for me to upgrade to Dropbox Business. I'm a paying customer, stop advertising upsells to me! I actually get less advertising now that I'm on a free Dropbox account.
Anyway, depressing to see a service I once counted on go so far wrong.
Reminds me of Evernote and the "Upgrade to business and share your personal notes and journals with co-workers. And we have chat!!! Did we mention we have chat? You should check out chat."
Like, sure, publicize your higher tiers, make their value propositions such that I might say, "Huh, actually I could use that stuff." But if that stuff is appropriately displayed at the time I originally signed up, I've generally already completed that value evaluation when I made whatever initial purchase I made. I already went through and decided what features I needed or didn't need, and selected appropriately. If I didn't want the extra upload bandwidth (or whatever) when I originally signed up, I probably don't want it two weeks later.
Getting hard sells from a product you already use is almost insulting in a way. I'm already giving you money -- with today's subscription models, I'm probably giving you money every month. But that's not enough for you? It totally changes my opinion of a thing from "useful product that does what I want" to "merely a means for its owners to make money." Those are two very different outlooks. The first is collaborative: they create a product that I find useful and provide it, thereby making my life better in some small way, and I benefit them by paying for it. The second feels almost manipulative, like I have to be on guard for potential marketing tactics that don't actually benefit me in any way.
Honestly, the only thing that these sort of 'push-notification upsells' do for me is they act as small prompts for me to reconsider my attachment to the product. Each time I get one, it makes me go, "Wow, this just keeps annoying me more. Do I really use this thing enough to justify this ongoing annoyance?"
With DropBox, when ever I logged in on the web interface, they would redirect me to a business upgrade landing page, in the best dark pattern tradition it took a bit to figure out how to get back to my folders.
I work remotely with my colleagues. We constantly are doing stuff like creating/updating excel files and all sorts of other stuff that has nothing to do with source code.
With dropbox (or equivalents) I update something in the file, and it's updated right away everywhere no matter where my co-workers are.
Dropbox also has good enough built-in version history (especially on business), it will keep the changes of any file for like 6 months. So if I want to look how this excel file looked an hour ago, I just click "version history" and it pulls up all the different files and I can restore any one.
So for people who work remotely and just want to sync files / have some ability to restore previous versions dropbox is a life changer.
Yeah, of course this could all be setup to have each person on a VPN and using a shared folder on a server where we are logged into the domain or we setup a ZFS filesystem which takes snapshots and I can restore etc etc. In a small company, F that. I've done all that bullshit, it isn't worth the time and maintenance when you just want a damn synced filesystem among co-workers.
So there is the value proposition!