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Comment by behnamoh | Hacker News Reader

I know some people still use Dropbox, but tbh it never clicked for me. It went from being a simple cloud solution to a bloated crapware. To my surprise, MS OneDrive performs better than DB, but it's kinda slow at times. Google Drive otoh, is fast but I'd never put all my data there. iCloud is "ecosystem-ware"—you can access it from Android and Windows, for sure, but the UI treats you like a child (maybe it was made for kids). On top of that, Apple is anal in terms of authentication. I don't want to own an iDevice just to login to my cloud. I wonder if there are genuinely decent cloud platforms out there...

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At some point, I'm going to really buckle down and try out Seafile (https://www.seafile.com/en/home/). It looks like it's just the good parts of Dropbox, and I can run it on my own hardware/systems.

I would assume most of Dropbox's appeal lies in its cross-platform nature, but for me that's turned out to not add much actual value. I find that I don't really need everything to be everywhere and accessible at all times… no point in most of the things on my daily driver Mac to be accessible from from my gaming desktop or ultrabook used mostly for studying.

On the odd occasion I need something to be mobile-accessible, iCloud does the trick (and if I were to switch to Android, Google Drive would fill that niche). Once a blue moon when I need to get files to other machines on my local network, Syncthing and Snapdrop do the trick.

I just use rsync

this is overly simplistic. rsync to where? please tell us more :p

It may be a reference to this famous comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 :)

It depends on your needs. I primarily used Dropbox as a backup destination for a range of directories on my computer.

About a decade ago, this worked great. All I had to do was create a symlink within my Dropbox and the directories were backed up.

Then a few years ago, Dropbox stopped supporting symlinks because they “caused problems”. It’s unclear what problems exactly because I’ve never actually heard of anyone who experienced any issues. Nonetheless, the solution was to move the real directories into Dropbox and put a symlink in their original location. This _did_ cause problems, including needing to disable SIP, and breaking navigation in Finder which treats symlinks like shortcuts.

Finally, the latest update completely broke backups for me. Admittedly this was not Dropbox’s fault; they were forced by Apple to use a new API which doesn’t allow the Photos library to be backed up.

I moved my backups to Backblaze B2 and cancelled my Dropbox subscription. Now I use rsync to back up my machine, and utilise Dropbox’s free tier for the small amount of cloud storage I actually need.

Oh, and for the amount of data I back up, B2 is almost an order of magnitude cheaper.

> stopped supporting symlinks because they “caused problems”.

If the reason for that was really written with such vagueness, it's almost certain that there was some sort of vulnerability / Security issue. The most vague, the most serious the issue. If it was just "they cause problems" then someone somehow figured out how to use symlinks to get access to someone else's data.

It's been a long while since I worked there, but IIRC one of the big issues at the time was that the symlink "support" couldn't actually work properly:

- some users want symlinks to be synced as symlinks (and they might not know it, old Apple file formats have internal symlinks), so their files got corrupted if they were accessed on another computer - some users want the sync client to follow the symlink and copy all the files at the destination, which requires the client to listen to filesystem events for potentially the entire filesystem, which is no longer permitted in many cases

so, not exactly a vulnerability, but a mix of security and product issues.

> The most vague, the most serious the issue.

It depends. When I was working on security software, any problems that impacted security were explained to customers in great detail.

Problems that were merely embarrassing, though, were always described in the vaguest possible terms.

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