Dropbox silently installed new file manager app on users’ systems
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
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.
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.
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]
[2] https://github.com/ncw/rclone/issues/3254
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.
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.)
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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
Edit: it is clear from the comments that there is at least an Android client.
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!
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.
- can be used as cloud backup destination - I use Arq[0] to backup a huge music library close to 1TB in daily intervals to my Dropbox. I have never used Dropbox‘ official app.
- since my music is located in a place of my , an external drive which might as well be an NAS at some point, I‘d need to be able to set the source folder for that backup/sync workflow. Moving my library to a special sync folder, like the Dropbox folder, isn‘t an option.
- I‘d also need be able to use that storage to upload and share large files for public download occasionally. S3 could certainly do that but I‘d prefer a simpler approach that allows me to quickly upload and share files from monile and desktop environments alike. Dropbox‘ mobile app and website work quite well in that regard. I don‘t want separate services for my backup and file sharing.
- preferably cross-platform, but macOS support and good browser UX is required at the very least.
- should be affordable, certainly not more than 10 bucks monthly for at least 1 TB. S3 pricing structure is too variable. It should be a flat fee.
Is there any worthwhile alternative to Dropbox that ticks all those boxes?
I run it on a cheap Azure VM, backed with with Azure blob storage. It's $15/m for "cool" tier storage (not too far off your target), or $1/m for the "archive" tier.
Unlike Dropbox etc, you can also sync files from anywhere on any disk - you're not limited to a single "Dropbox" folder.
You get a nice web UI that let's you upload/download from there if you want, and you can also stuff with others if you want.
Due to using Arq I‘m not limited to using the special Dropbox folder. I just tell Arq which folder to backup to Dropbox. I don‘t use the official client at all.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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:
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.
This new stuff, however, is irrelevant. I just don't care, all I need from Dropbox is to keep syncing a folder between my devices, that's it.
They could have spent money on innovating in their core field of competence: syncing. Hey Dropbox, how about seamless syncing with S3 for one? Remote NAS access? Distributed cross-provider virtual filesystems?
But no, instead we have this silly file manager.
I set up Syncthing, and it completely and flawlessly replaced the Dropbox folder syncing. (It's actually way better, because the sync part is as reliable, but unlike Dropbox it also supports symlinks, meaning I can sync my active ongoing work, including stuff like git repos with uncommitted changes — no need to commit some unfinished work-in-progress before moving to a new location. Plus, since I'm not sharing my data with Dropbox employees and thus by extension the US government plus whoever hacks them, I can store even private data in the folders I sync.)
But the "share with link" feature of Dropbox works really, really well. Want to paste a video into a bug report, but not deal with horridly slow JIRA? Just paste the Dropbox link. Want to share a 500MB cute video of your kids? Dropbox link. Want to paste an image into an HN discussion? You can't, but you can easily paste a Dropbox link. Giving a talk at a conference and want a few friends to critique your delivery beforehand? Record yourself practicing and email/text/whatever them the Dropbox link.
I suspect (without evidence) that lots of Dropbox users are like me. I've shared hundreds of things that way over the years, and although it isn't mission-critical or anything, I don't want those links to go dark.
So I keep paying. That's why I think their tiny 2GB free plan is important. If the stuff you've shared includes even a handful of videos, you quickly exceed that limit.
In my case, if they upped the free limit to 25GB, I would cancel my paid service immediately.
I've been inspired lately by the people who do Pinboard and Arq - both seem to be doing the one-man-band software thing, making something small and niche yet making a living out of it.
Background info: Arq is a one-off purchase app that backs up to your cloud storage account (eg you have an AWS account with an S3 bucket, and Arq backs up to there).
I was thinking of making a native Mac app Dropbox clone that would be much like arq (as in, BYO storage account).
Eg it does automatic two-way sync of a folder to S3.
Eg a company could have an AWS S3 account, and buy a copy of this app for each staff member, and they could all sync to the same S3 account.
I'd charge like $30 for it, which is vs $120/year for dropbox, and your S3 / Backblaze B2 pricing would be tiny.
Do you think this is crazy? Would you use it if I made it?
Do you think it's a good enough idea to put on indiegogo / kickstarter / producthunt and see if there's any traction before starting on this?
Thanks peeps
With the recent price increase I've moved most of my DB stuff elsewhere and now can get by with the free plan, only for reading things others share with me.
Its pretty much empty now, I just needed to maintain it for some folders I share with other users.
At a few hundred thousand files I found OneDrive just stalls.. sometimes it might work, other times not. Usually it just sits there and you have no idea what it's doing.
Also, for linux users:
> On Linux, well, Dropbox doesn't care enough about Linux to port the file manager app over. Lucky penguins.
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 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!
I really dislike this type of FUD based reporting https://twitter.com/ronamadeo/status/1151947264149131265?s=2...