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The new Dropbox

blog.dropbox.com

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Re: The new Dropbox

#341

Post by newscracker »

microtonal wrote: post #11

Me and my wife ended both ended our Dropbox Plus subscriptions last weekend (after being paying users for five years or so). As a side-effect, my mom also cancelled her subscription (since she was using it to share photos with us). The primary reasons: - Constant nagging in the user interface to upgrade to Dropbox Pro or Dropbox Business. Don't want it, don't need it. - Accumulation of a lot of UI clutter over the ye…

Dropbox seems to have prioritized enterprise customers and de-prioritized consumers as customers. Most consumers would need a solid storage and sync solution, and nothing more. So you’re likely not the target customer any longer.

Re: The new Dropbox

#342

Post by innocenat »

asdff wrote: post #247
wwweston wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't need 2TB either, but I do need a cross-platform solution where the incentives of the company are aligned more or less with mine in providing the service. iCloud will always primarily be about Apple devices, which I like well enough and have several of, but maybe won't always. Microsoft's offering will probably be the same from the PC side of things. Google will offer me the world for free but data mine the he…

No idea about linux users, but onedrive on mac is virtually indistinguishable to dropbox, but with more function with ms product integrations. These days it's been apple being lazy with cross platform, not microsoft.

There are no official OneDrive client for Linux.

Re: The new Dropbox

#343

Post by agumonkey »

hobofan wrote: post #278
agumonkey wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

dropbox, considering their size, is really in a position for a solid rewrite. ocaml ? http://roscidus.com/blog/blog/2014/06/06/python-to-ocaml-ret... nim ? rust ? go ?

Rust doesn't sound too unrealistic, given that they were one of its first big commercial users.

they do rust ? fun

Re: The new Dropbox

#344

Post by steve_adams_86 »

diziet wrote: post #72

I do a lot of UI/UX design as a part of what I focus on, both at work and for fun. This page is a juxtaposition of well thought out elements and things that make me go `???`. Like: - Good product marketing messaging - Well done images and GIFs that get to the point - News-site like past first article scrolling, I bet it drives more engagement. I even like how the UI elements change color when you go to another articl…

This entire launch feels like what you've described. Things like these tool tips are absolutely killing me: https://cl.ly/365a42db2db9

It feels rough on the edges.

Re: The new Dropbox

#345

Post by dreamcompiler »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #54
microtonal wrote: post #11

Me and my wife ended both ended our Dropbox Plus subscriptions last weekend (after being paying users for five years or so). As a side-effect, my mom also cancelled her subscription (since she was using it to share photos with us). The primary reasons: - Constant nagging in the user interface to upgrade to Dropbox Pro or Dropbox Business. Don't want it, don't need it. - Accumulation of a lot of UI clutter over the ye…

I'm getting tired of their constantly dropping support for older versions of MacOS (I don't upgrade MacOS often because every new version is a net productivity hit for me), and their upgrader daemon that A. Cannot be shut off, and B. Upgrades my Dropbox client whether I want it to or not. Even with Google's very determined auto-upgrader, I finally figured out how to shut it off. Not Dropbox. Here we go again. Every c…

To clarify, when I said, "dropping support for older versions of MacOS" I didn't mean "product still works but you're on your own." That's what most companies do and I have no problem with it. Dropbox doesn't do this. With Dropbox, the client program stops working entirely for no good reason and on arbitrary dates when they think your OS is too old. I find this entirely unacceptable.

Re: The new Dropbox

#346

Post by myu701 »

jonotime wrote: post #313
liyanage wrote: post #203

I've been a Dropbox user for many years but I'm looking for a replacement. What drives me nuts and hasn't gotten better over the years is their truly awful Python-based macOS client software. It is constantly burning a ton of CPU/battery. It's always at or near the top of Activity Monitor's list in the Energy tab. It seems like their app constantly reacts to any file system activity, even if that activity is outside…

I've used Dropbox since the beginning, and Nextcloud for the last few years. Nextcloud client seems to use %10 of the memory of Dropbox on my machines. I'm now in the process of switching to SyncThing. The advantage of Syncthing over Nextcloud, is you can used it centralized or decentralized (without a server), I dont need to manage SSL certs and I dont have to poke holes in my firewall. Syncthing client also uses ve…

The greatest power of Syncthing I've found is that once you get two devices to handshake, you're done.

Laptop, meet phone Id, phone, meet laptop Id. Laptop, meet desktop, desktop meet laptop. Oh I've got my server, server meet desktop meet laptop and vice versa.

Want some files to be available on all devices at once? Put it in the Bank Cannister folder which you've set as active for all devices.

Want to drop airdroid or plugging in your phone's internal storage to transfer media files to/from the phone? Setup phonelaptopdesktop folder named PhoneMusic and tell the syncthing app to store the contents of that file in the same directory as your already existing music root.

Want off-site backups but too cheap to pay for backblaze like me? Backup to Blu-ray, local external drive, and sync to off-site location (my dad's PC or DO droplet).

And when I say sync, I mean setup the syncing folders then let it background P2P sync on its own time. Eventual consistency might as well be instant for all but 1% of the time where you look for the file then see it written to the 'local' drive before your eyes.

Re: The new Dropbox

#347

Post by josteink »

signal11 wrote: post #236
azinman2 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it doesn’t work nearly as well. He underestimated how hard it would be to solve it properly.

iCloud is great for Mac/iOS users. I never felt it worked well on Windows. It never felt right. So yes, Apple still has work to do if they want wider iCloud use. Maybe they don't want to? But Microsoft and Google are creeping up. Their file sync is almost there with Dropbox. OneDrive works on Mac and Windows, supports Files on Demand (similar to Dropbox Infinite - essentially placeholder files, very useful for small…

> Dropbox still does sync really well and has the best app, in my opinion -- including the only one that works on Linux

That used to be true, but Dropbox decided they no longer wanted that market-advantage.

I’ve uninstalled Dropbox from all my Linux machines because it no longer supports ZFS (or any other file-systems except ext4).

Re: The new Dropbox

#348

Post by artificialLimbs »

jwong_ wrote: post #306
saghm wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been hosting NextCloud on a $10/month Digital Ocean VPS for maybe 8-10 months now, and I've been super pleased with it. I'm not much of a devops person, but I found it fairly easy to set up and configure, and it runs smoothly enough that most of the time it's indistinguishable from using third-party cloud file sync service. I occasionally ssh in to apply updates (and renew the Let's Encrypt cert, since I've been…

How big is your sync folder? I have around 25GB I'd like to get off Dropbox.

Mine is 2TB (capacity), because I mounted my ZFS array at home via SSHFS as the data directory on my droplet.

Re: The new Dropbox

#349

Post by josteink »

AntiqueFig wrote: post #128
microtonal wrote: post #11

Me and my wife ended both ended our Dropbox Plus subscriptions last weekend (after being paying users for five years or so). As a side-effect, my mom also cancelled her subscription (since she was using it to share photos with us). The primary reasons: - Constant nagging in the user interface to upgrade to Dropbox Pro or Dropbox Business. Don't want it, don't need it. - Accumulation of a lot of UI clutter over the ye…

> Dropping support for file systems outside ext4. One of my machines uses Linux on ZFS Well if you're using ZFS you can create a zvol for your dropbox folder and format it in ext4 and it'll work: https://pthree.org/2012/12/21/zfs-administration-part-xiv-zv...

I tried that and it still stopped syncing.

After numerous attempts, I decided to stop battling tools which aren’t working for me, so I just uninstalled Dropbox instead.

Their loss, not mine.

Re: The new Dropbox

#350

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

Dwolb wrote: post #61

SaaS needs to chill out for like two seconds. What we’re seeing here is a strategic maneuver by Dropbox to move up the UX stack from a single file syncing tool to a meta/coordination layer between SaaS products. The goal is to own the user experience and integrate all the adjacent or overlapping SaaS tools in a user’s workflow so you can control both the user and the suppliers. We’re going to see this more frequently…

> SaaS needs to chill out for like two seconds.

Love this quote.

BUT... I know my group is trying to address exactly what Dropbox seems to be aiming at here. How do you find all the hundreds and thousands of pieces of information that are being generated in just a small group of people? Sharepoint is Microsoft's current attempt, and even though my megacorp uses it, my group has asked me to create an alternative, because it sucks (and hard, given our implementation). There needs to be just ONE BOX that searches EVERYTHING.

I just finished a prototype of a search tool for firmware dumps, based on Elasticsearch. It works even better than I hoped. It only takes a few seconds to search across thousands of images for combinations of hundreds of yes/no questions. (Albeit quite a bit longer to marshal the actual values.) My current though is to create an index to dump all Office documents into, and let Elasticsearch do its thing. I can create a taskbar app to drag files into, and a spotlight-like search box to dig up anything dumped into it.

Tell me there's a better way. I don't really want to write this app. This is an obvious problem for an organization of ANY size now. (It's a problem for my church's staff of 10!) I, for one, am glad to see Dropbox taking a stab at it.

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