Hacker News Reader

Comment by ativzzz | Hacker News Reader

Never understood Dropbox, because as 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.

...

Not mine, but a HN classic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

View on HN

Somehow I am doubtful that you can trivially build what dropbox does. I am on their pro plan, I have tried running Syncthing on my own servers but the cost is quite prohibitive.

I have about 300GB of photos there. Some of the files change, sometimes generating quite a lot of space - e.g. I think calculating the deleted files it is quite possible that I have few terabytes of data at any given moment. I looked into getting that space on Digital ocean and it would be way more expensive.

That is not including the price of my own labor, how much time would I spend on managing my own solution? Can I guarantee the same level of safety as Dropbox does? They have people thinking about security, I don't even have time upgrade my servers - beyond automatic update..

We did not even get into weird corner cases... Couple of months ago I was running some machine learning experiments and misconfigured the logging process and ended up with about 15m small log files in my dropbox folder. I had contacted the support and it was dealt with. Had I been using something like SVN I would have to manually purge the history or something like that.

IDK, I am very happy for the value I am getting out of my money. For me the biggest value is that it works and I don't have to do anything about it.

Whenever someone quotes the old HN comment that GP linked, you can be sure that they are pointing out the absurdity of thinking you could "build such a system yourself quite trivially".

> Can I guarantee the same level of safety as Dropbox does?

Isn't Dropbox infamous for deleting your files?

I have not experienced this in the last 8 years, care to elaborate?

The people who can and are willing to do that aren't really Dropbox's target audience.

The people who can do it are still their target audience, once they try it and realize how much of a pain it is to maintain.

In case you or others missed it, the parent commenter is quoting a comment that was posted on HN's original thread announcing Dropbox in 2007, where the poster questioned if Dropbox would ever generate income.

Hindsight is of course 20/20, but this comment is often laughed at because it was so terribly bad at predicting Dropbox's success.

Should really use quote marks I guess.

Dropbox is successful because 90% of their users have no idea of what you just said and the other ~9% can't be bothered with all that stuff and just want to pass files around.

Yeah, this isn’t true at all. The Dropbox 2TB plan is cheaper than any cloud provider per-GB, and the sync algorithm gracefully handles a dozen+ edge cases that a naive pile of shell scripts would not.

I say this as a Linux user and paying Dropbox customer.

I guess I could do all of that...or I could not. And utilize a far superior system without the effort and for a redicilously low price.

> Never understood Dropbox

Dropbox is a result of Google and Microsoft breaking email attachments. It was clear that was the problem even back then.

There's no bloody technical reason why you can't send a couple hundred megabyte attachment nowadays.

E-mail attachments are one of the worst ways to share large documents. For one, it pushes the hosting requirements for the files to their e-mail provider/recipient. Large attachments will count against a user's mailbox storage limits and can DoS their inbox. The management of that space then falls to the recipient. I also don't know if any e-mail servers that actively dedup attachments. So unless the underlying file system is doing block level dedup a large attachment lives in each recipient's inbox on the server(s). These are reasons pretty much every ISP and e-mail provider has pretty strict limits on attachment sizes.

I certainly do not want anyone sending me attachments that are a couple hundred megabytes. I don't want to have to prune my mailbox or choke my mail client downloading the attachment. IMAP and POP3 suck for downloading a lot of data. I'd much rather have a resumable HTTPS link I can download whenever I want. Better yet would be a service that let me preview the document before downloading it. Some sort of dropbox-like service maybe.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com