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Dropbox Transfer

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Re: Dropbox Transfer

#81

My company (Fortune 500 Aerospace/Defense) has implemented something like this for years now. I’ve personally used it to send CAD files to outside manufacturers/suppliers who are under an NDA. I’ve really grown to like the service and always wished I could use it for personal stuff so I will definitely be trying this out.

If you want to self-host, Nextcloud has this service and it works incredibly well.

Re: Dropbox Transfer

#82
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect the bundled OneDrive in Office365 is hurting them. Dropbox is better, but hard to justify if you already have something that's good enough.

100%. I shut down DropBox at last $dayjob (mid-size) after piloting OneDrive. Saved tens of thousands a year. OneDrive was inferior, no doubt, but good enough. And will only become better. More importantly, I cannot imagine anyone building better integration with Office (live editing) than the actual Office company.

> OneDrive was inferior, no doubt, but good enough. And will only become better.

I'll hold my breath. Dropbox basically had sync across all major OS's ready to work very early in its life (10 years ago?). The fact that OneDrive and Box's desktop sync performs so poorly leads me to believe this is not where their engineering effort is and nor will it anytime soon (it's probably more on the back-end admin for enterprise clients).

Re: Dropbox Transfer

#83

I do music production as a side hobby. Virtually all the producers and studios I've worked with use WeTransfer. It's fast, efficient, and free. I can't see any reason to switch.

This might be more to stop people from switching away from Dropbox, not convincing people to switch to Dropbox.

Re: Dropbox Transfer

#84

Their answer to Firefox Send? send.firefox.com

Unlikely. I have seen 0 send links around and wetransfer is still king of the office. I'd like to see some numbers, though.

> Unlikely. I have seen 0 send links around

Do you routinely monitor a large portion of file sharing that goes on in the world? Sorry, but this is just a weird (but common) way to make a claim that [something in the tech world] is not used...

I personally use Firefox Send all the time. Works very well and I trust it to do the job.

Re: Dropbox Transfer

#85
post #16
post #3

Good to see them finally doing something addressing actual user needs for a change, instead of chasing greener pastures. Given my informal observations over the years, I wouldn't be surprised if transferring large files was the main need that drives users to Dropbox - when dealing with individuals and companies outside tech, I frequently saw them giving the advice to "get a Dropbox" when someone needed to send them m…

I suspect the bundled OneDrive in Office365 is hurting them. Dropbox is better, but hard to justify if you already have something that's good enough.

I use Dropbox only because of Linux Support. In India, All of Office 365 is stil cheaper than Dropbox, but no linux support stops me from using it.

Re: Dropbox Transfer

#86

Dropbox is not going to win me back as a user. Not after they chose to drop support for non-APFS/HFS+ filesystems on macOS without sufficient explanation.

What filesystem are you using? ZFS? You don't have any HFS+ or APFS volumes?

Correct, I use ZFS for my home directory. I do use APFS for everything else. But I’d have preferred to keep my Dropbox folder under my home so I got rid of Dropbox altogether.

Re: Dropbox Transfer

#87
post #39
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect the bundled OneDrive in Office365 is hurting them. Dropbox is better, but hard to justify if you already have something that's good enough.

That wouldn't surprise me - I had seriously considered subscribing to Dropbox many times, but the price was just too high for my needs. When they forced me to make a decision (by enforcing the 3 client rule), I evaluated the costs/benefits and ended up going with OneDrive - cheaper overall and I got Office 365. I much prefer Dropbox's sync technology, but not at double the price.

What's baffling to me is that OneDrive already has the same technology as Dropbox (block-level syncing instead of the more common file-level syncing), but they have arbitrarily only turned it on for Microsoft filetype extensions (mostly Microsoft Office files). If they enabled it for all filetypes I'd switch over tomorrow.

Re: Dropbox Transfer

#88
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect the bundled OneDrive in Office365 is hurting them. Dropbox is better, but hard to justify if you already have something that's good enough.

I would have loved to use Dropbox, since they have a proper official Linux client. However, it’s impossible to have multiple Dropbox accounts sync to a single user on a computer (1). “Better” is relative to what you need. (1) exception: you can have one personal and one business account

You can use Maestral[0] for that!

[0] https://github.com/SamSchott/maestral-dropbox

Re: Dropbox Transfer

#89
post #38

If you need to send large files to someone, you can use Firefox Send: https://send.firefox.com/ The file is encrypted, the urls are expiring, it costs nothing.

This is limited to 1GB. Dropbox is limited to 100GB file size.

It's 2.5 GB if you log in. For anything I share, that's plenty.

Re: Dropbox Transfer

#90
Seems useful, and a step in the right direction. I think the future of file sharing is permanent URLs to files stored on decentralized hard drives, with dead simple access control settings (ie here's the list of email addresses that can access this file). You need either ipv6 (plus an ISP that allows port 80), or some sort of proxy for this to work. Range requests must be supported. Also I think it needs to be designed from the ground up for sharing not just with people, but also with apps, just like you can access Google drive data using their API. It's surprising to me that WebDAV is the closest thing we have to an open protocol for doing this sort of thing. I think we need something simpler, with a standardized auth protocol. Maybe RemoteStorage, but honestly it still looks complicated to me.
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