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Comment by UnpossibleJim | Hacker News Reader

So, if I might ask, what people are looking for (in simplest terms):

a cloud synching platform that is cross platform, with a decent (or better) UI and a good indicator, that has end to end encryption.

To be honest, given the proper team, that doesn't seem like the hardest bill to fill. I will admit, though, finding a tech company that is willing to spend money decent interface and graphic designers is sometimes difficult, but not impossible.

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> with a decent (or better) UI

I want no UI. It should transparently work like any other filesystem.

I believe this already exists in the form of 'rclone'[1] and I believe that we[2] are the only cloud storage provider that explicitly supports it[3].

Which is to say, we built the 'rclone' binary into our environment such that you can run it remotely:

  ssh user@rsync.net rclone s3:/bucket/blah /rsync/dir

[1] https://rclone.org/

[2] https://www.rsync.net/products/universal.html

[3] https://www.rsync.net/products/rclone.html

I use rclone to sync a onedrive with an ubuntu host and it works. It is also a single binary, with one configuration file, which allows you to sync on your terms.

Either no UI, or using system standard frameworks and APIs (no custom UI stuff, and absolutely no Electron garbage).

If Dropbox had remained the same as it did back in the early days and focused on continuing to only update the product to be faster and more reliable and not adding additional features, it would have still been great. (Unrealistic considering that the investors need to get their ROI.)

I mean, they used to be about the only game in town. Now you have monsters like MS and Google and Apple in the game. Cloud storage used to be value in and of itself, that's less so the case now, especially when there isn't system integration the way there is with OneDrive, GDrive or iCloud.

Google's offer of free 15GB is also pretty ridiculously generous compared to the competition (Dropbox 2GB, OneDrive/iCloud 5GB). MS and Apple have some ecosystem stuff to drive sales, but Dropbox, eh...

I think features like smart sync and ignore are actually really useful. There’s stuff I don’t need (like Paper), but I don’t feel it is getting on my way.

And seems to be they have been also working with the core product. On the blog they mention rewriting the sync engine (with Rust): https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/rewriting-the-heart-of-o...

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