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Dropbox Secures $600M Credit Line Ahead of Expected IPO

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Re: Dropbox Secures $600M Credit Line Ahead of Expected IPO

#111

Post by microtonal »

kilroy123 wrote: post #102
laurentdc wrote: post #35

I'm failing to see their competitive advantage. Is it the file history? Linux client? Genuinely asking, I pay 7 € / mo for OneDrive (1 TB) and I get a desktop license of Office along with that too.

Same here. I'm a paying dropbox customer, but I plan to switch in a month before my annual subscription renews. Amazon drive offers more space for only $60 USD a year. Plus google apps offers more space than dropboxes business plan.

I tried to switch quite many times. Problems are typically: refusal to sync some files, excessive memory and CPU use (last time I tried OneDrive it used ~700MB RAM when storage was nearly empty), no LAN sync (speeds up things considerably when sharing with family/colleagues), no block-level sync (touch a small part of a 300MB file and it gets completely resynced), no Linux client.

Re: Dropbox Secures $600M Credit Line Ahead of Expected IPO

#112

Post by alphapapa »

Afton wrote: post #103
protomyth wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am curious, why would you go into the project thinking rsync and not git? It seemed to me most of these syncing folders are really a special case of source code control.

I wasn't involved in these design discussions early on, and Skydrive certainly didn't use rsync, this was just meant as an example of "this is essentially a solved problem, we just need some UI". It isn't, and presenting it as such just gets you into a bad situation.

But Dropbox doesn't handle any merging of changes; any conflicts are left for the user to resolve. In this way it's basically an automatic version of Unison, which is exactly "some UI" around a "solved problem." Right?

Re: Dropbox Secures $600M Credit Line Ahead of Expected IPO

#113

Post by alphapapa »

dleslie wrote: post #25
Afton wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it shouldn't take Apple/Microsoft/Google/Amazon too much work to put out a comparable product and offer it for free I worked on SkyDrive/OneDrive for a few years. That's what we thought too. This stuff inevitably starts out with "seriously, how long is it going to take to make essentially a wrapper around rsync" and ends up with "Hey, guess what happens when you cross filesystem errors with distributed systems erro…

Funny, I'm a Linux and Windows 10 user and I prefer OneDrive to Dropbox because I have less problems with it as a user. rclone is a large contributing factor, however. And on Windows, OneDrive feels like less of a system hog.

I've been looking at rclone but am always leery of trusting any new software project with my data. Have you had any issues with it? Thanks.

Re: Dropbox Secures $600M Credit Line Ahead of Expected IPO

#114

Post by robbiemitchell »

Strom wrote: post #40
robbiemitchell wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's $20/month for unlimited storage on Dropbox.

Is this a hidden plan? The cheapest unlimited plan I see right now on their website is 54€/month, which is the advanced business plan for 3 users. Even if I take the annual plan and divide the price by 12 it's 45€/month. Also these prices don't include VAT, while the personal plans do. Perhaps you were unaware that the business plans can't be bought for a single user?

I stand corrected, I was not aware there is a 3-license minimum.

Neither the pricing page nor the plan comparison page make this clear. You have to click into the business section to actually see that. Super annoying.

Re: Dropbox Secures $600M Credit Line Ahead of Expected IPO

#116

Post by yeukhon »

013a wrote: post #98
yeukhon wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually quite an interesting point. Consider S3. They provide unlimited storage, but their software has to be able to keep up with the insane growth of data, albeit the hardware storage demand as well.

S3's cost to the consumer scales with the amount stored. That's different from Amazon, Dropbox, or Google, who offer enterprise-facing non-developer storage options at a flat rate for "unlimited". They can do this because these enterprise-facing products offer fewer performance guarantees relative to their developer-facing products. But, ultimately, "unlimited" doesn't mean unlimited, in literally all of these produc…

I would think enterprise offering would have a stricter SLA than developer-facing product. The only thing between Dropbox and Amazon is that there is no independent enterprise offering for S3, except Amazon pays a penalty for violating said SLA.

Re: Dropbox Secures $600M Credit Line Ahead of Expected IPO

#117

Post by robbiemitchell »

robbiemitchell wrote: post #33
yeukhon wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we need a better storage backup system. I've got data on iCloud and on multiple desktops and laptops. My iCloud doesn't have all the photos because I'd run out of space and be paying dozens of dollars monthly [1]. I was helping my friend to select a disk backup solution a while ago, and not that many really came to my likings. Backblaze[2] is probably the only one I would say pretty good for a monthly backup…

It's $20/month for unlimited storage on Dropbox.

As others have pointed out, I was not aware there is a 3-license minimum.

Neither the pricing page nor the plan comparison page state this minimum. You have to click into the business section to actually see that.

Re: Dropbox Secures $600M Credit Line Ahead of Expected IPO

#118

Post by alphapapa »

dleslie wrote: post #109
Karunamon wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's fine for you and me, but limits its adoption (hence appeal, hence longevity) to people that download unofficial, unsupported third party clients and manually set up cron jobs. The reason Dropbox is kicking ass is that nobody wants to deal with the manual work. Download a program, put stuff in folder, stuff appears elsewhere. No thought required. Simple.

I had to stop using Dropbox because it was unusable on Linux. It leaked memory, hogged CPU cycles, and cranked up IO Wait times. It was simple and thoughtless, for sure; and that reflected in its decrepit behaviour.

I've been using Dropbox on Linux for many years, and it's definitely had some occasional issues with memory leaks, and its general CPU and memory usage has definitely increased. Used to be it never went over 100 MB RSS, but now it's always well over that, at about 250 right now.

Anyway, I run it at nice 5 and "ionice -c3", and even though I'd like to switch to something else, I still haven't found anything better for Linux use. Everything I've looked at has some issue that makes it a non-starter.

Re: Dropbox Secures $600M Credit Line Ahead of Expected IPO

#119

Post by pestaa »

brianwawok wrote: post #36
meritt wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's bewildering to me how a company can have $1B in revenue and not able to make file-syncing profitable.

I assume their two biggest expenses are employees and the free product. Drop employees and they are insta profitable, but innovation slows. Drop the free plan, and they lose the cheap marketing they have going on. What is the right play for them? Seems tough.

> Drop the free plan, and they lose the cheap marketing they have going on.

Is it cheap though when combined with wages it's more than they make?

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