491–500 of 590 posts
I stopped loving Dropbox when they killed off Public Links, and it's gotten worse from there.
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Maybe it's because they were expanding too much and hiring too many people
Who provides dropboxes actual storage? That provider could just keep squeezing dropbox until the provider creates a copy of dropbox or has them bent over just to the point of them switching to another provider. Maybe dropbox should have been building their own data centers in the mean time, cutting their overhead. That idea of restraining growth in favor of long term stability probably wouldn't sit so well with the s…
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Assuming the second drive is always connected to the machine & on, why are you opting for that nightly sync vs. mirroring the two disks in raid1?
It's been a stupid decision at the time of the setup. Now its already there, and any attempt to change it will have to erase the drives, and this is a huge pain in the arse.
Whatever happened to the philosophy of “do one thing and do it well”? I use Slack and Zoom often, but I have never once thought — gee I really wish I could just open up this presentation in Dropbox directly into my Zoom meeting. I just don’t see the integration working in that direction. Sure, Dropbox should make sure that it’s available as a provider to save/open files for other programs — that make sense. The integ…
> Whatever happened to the philosophy of “do one thing and do it well”? This relies on composability, integrating together several such components into a coherent whole. Users don't understand composability or want to do it. They want the integration to already exist and just work.
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 wonder how much of it is Pythons fault, how much is the way they designed it, and how much is the problem domain.
If there's one specific bottleneck (ex: hashing files) then that's a prime candidate for Cython[2] or the plain CPython C-API.
Even when you have dropbox restricted to a small folder with _no IO events at all_ it's still constantly working, which is the real problem and entirely an optimization/design problem.
[1]: https://github.com/gorakhargosh/watchdog
[2]: https://cython.org/
[3]: https://docs.python.org/3/c-api/index.html
[t]: ... except when forced to use kqueue or polling
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To me, this mass exodus from platforms to iCloud is _scary_. I've been rolling my own solution for some time now based on Resilio Sync. I understand that I'm the minority and a power user, but honestly giving Apple (or Google, or Dropbox, or _____) control over my files like that does not appeal to me in the slightest. On sort of a tangent, I'm also choosing not to use iCloud because I really feel like it gives Apple…
> control over my files like that does not appeal to me in the slightest. Then self-host Nextcloud on your NAS. > anti-consumer practices when it comes to hardware repairability and data ownership. Hardware repairability? Agreed, but this goes hand-in-hand with security. IMO all hardware and data should be entangled with the Secure Enclave/T2 chip but Apple is a long way from that (looks, however, as if they are work…
Nextcloud's implementation is terrible.
> IMO all hardware and data should be entangled with the Secure Enclave/T2 chip
This is an absolutely terrible implementation of security. There is no reason that your data should be tied to a circuit board that does everything. Mac logic boards are ticking time bombs.
> I don't get tech people who do this. You go to a store, ask about a product that you are clearly more knowledgable than the employee on, and then complain that they aren't knowledgable? Unless you are lost there is zero reason for you to ask an employee about a product.
We as tech enthusiasts should care. What is shown and received by all consumers is what leads the industry. I went in because the baseband CPU had flexion damage in my iPhone 7. I went in for the out of warranty repair. They asked if I had a backup. I said yes. They asked if I did a local or iCloud, I just said no, I use Google Photos. I then got this obviously scripted sales pitch for iCloud.
> That said, I trust Apple not to datamine your photos. I don't trust Google on that.
They're _probably_ datamining your photos anyway. This trust that people have in Apple seems to be pretty blind.
My entire comment was lead with yeah I'm a power user and a different case. My comment was tackling how Apple's attitude is anti-consumer.
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And it doesn’t work nearly as well. He underestimated how hard it would be to solve it properly.
Onedrive at least works great in my experiences. I bave a dropbox account, but my uni supplied me with a huge onedrive allotment. I sync every user file on my computer and I can access it anywhere with an internet connection. The msoffice integrations are great too, and ms office online is pretty feature rich. Dropbox had a great idea, but it's not hard for a large company to copy it like microsoft did. Apple just do…
We have a mix of iOS and Android, and some physical and virtual Windows 10 PCs.
The macOS sync client is generally very fast and keeps out of the way. It gets tripped up occasionally, but no more so than any other. It was really clunky when we first started using it for Sharepoint, but they seem to be iterating fast these days and we see very few issues at all.
For Sharepoint365 the sync client means our people just treat it as our “cloud network drive” with selective folder sync options (we don’t use any of the other Sharepoint stuff).
If you’re an Office365 shop, the integration is incredibly nice. I can start work on a Word doc on a PC and save it in OneDrive or Sharepoint365, and then on my iPad open Word and the document is sitting right there as the last file I worked on in the File>Open screen, with a “Go to where you left off” marker when the file is open.
We tried Box and liked it initially, but it became hard to justify it in the face of easy functionality and pricing from Office365+OneDrive. iCloud isn’t flexible enough for most of our business use cases. DropBox performance was always an issue and we didn’t want to saddle our dev laptops with that performance hit.
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Yes, their symlink handling is absurd, and they have the usual sanctimonious defense when questioned about this. To be fair, most commercial cloud services overthink this, and also get it wrong. A symlink is just a file, like any other. It is a user's responsibility to insure that a symlink will work elsewhere; cloud services should just copy the file, just like any other. The users who expect a symlink to trick a cl…
"To be fair, most commercial cloud services overthink this, and also get it wrong." ssh user@rsync.net ls -asl some/dir ... looking good ... "There's exactly one sync program that gets it all right: Unison, written by Benjamin Pierce" ssh user@rsync.net unison Usage: unison [options] or unison root1 root2 [options] or unison profilename [options] (Ask about the HN readers' discount)
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 agree with the issues with the Mac OS client burning too much CPU/battery, I've learned to live with that as an inconvenience, since otherwise, it works great by fulfilling the top priority you want in a service like this: it is reliable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, their symlink handling is absurd, and they have the usual sanctimonious defense when questioned about this. To be fair, most commercial cloud services overthink this, and also get it wrong. A symlink is just a file, like any other. It is a user's responsibility to insure that a symlink will work elsewhere; cloud services should just copy the file, just like any other. The users who expect a symlink to trick a cl…
"To be fair, most commercial cloud services overthink this, and also get it wrong." ssh user@rsync.net ls -asl some/dir ... looking good ... "There's exactly one sync program that gets it all right: Unison, written by Benjamin Pierce" ssh user@rsync.net unison Usage: unison [options] or unison root1 root2 [options] or unison profilename [options] (Ask about the HN readers' discount)