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Comment by colesantiago | Hacker News Reader

Why use Dropbox Backup when one can just use Google Drive, Backblaze or even S3?

Does anyone even use Dropbox anymore? Last time I checked they restricted tons of features and kept nagging me to upgrade. Hugely annoying.

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Is this a reprise of the original HN comment on Dropbox?

"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."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

If it was then it could be a closer imitation. Let me try:

"For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting a Backblaze B2 account, and scheduling a cron job to backup to it via RClone. From Windows or Mac, this Backblaze account could be access through built-in browser software"

Nah. Note they mentioned Google Drive as an alternative. If you compare Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive, and iCloud Drive, you’ll quickly find out that Dropbox is the most expensive of the bunch, is the least flexible (their only paid plan is 2000 GB, which is more than most people need) and doesn’t give you any other fetures that aren’t file storage. The free plan of Dropbox also enforces a 3-device limit, and the space is a whopping 2 GB.

Dropbox used to be the only game in town, and they had a great no-frills experience. But now, the giants are doing it better, cheaper, while Dropbox is stuck in its old ways and is adding new “features” nobody needs (such as this selling-files thing, and their new resource-hog client). There is no point in using Dropbox these days, other than being too lazy to switch or shop around.

Dropbox will be the one service I’ll keep paying after I stop paying for every other tech service. It has effectively made me not need a single central backup location, all I need is a hundred bucks a year and I have full access to all my files , all 2 TB of it, from anywhere. It also ocrs and indexes scanned pdfs so my life is fully digitized across continents.

I am semi annoyed with some of their choices but I’ll still depend on them before i do Microsoft or google where cloud storage isn’t even in their top ten money making categories and can be axed any day.

Me, because I've been a user for about a decade and it works well for me, why change it?

They're still one of the only two companies who do differential sync (Dropbox & Microsoft), and the first ones offering that feature. If your upload speed is tiny and you're editing a big file, it's great to upload just a few KBs instead of the entire 100MB.

I agree their nagging is annoying, but they're still (IMO) the most stable sync client out there.

Dropbox for sharing with others rapidly is still superior to other alternatives.

The delay in syncing up across multiple users is least noticeable with Dropbox.

I agree backup seems not to be the niche of Dropbox, because there it is not about fast and reliable syncing.

I don't know what the issues have been, but last couple of times I've sent large files with Dropbox I've ended up using GDrive/OneDrive, respectively, to send the files again because the recipient couldn't get the files for some reason. Might just be familiarity.

I've never personally had a problem with any of these, they all seem much of a muchness (ie about the same from a UX perspective)?

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