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Open-source Dropbox client, with multi-account, no-device-limit and M1 support

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Re: Open-source Dropbox client, with multi-account, no-device-limit and M1 support

#191

Post by nyanpasu64 »

gajjanag wrote: post #175
manigandham wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dropbox still has the best syncing tech [1][2] which handles complex situations with lots of files and responds instantly. That alone is worth it if you need it. However the rest of the product is crap. Dropbox had a solid business with a "magic folder that syncs" but has been chasing new features and product lines with little success. Even the enterprise offering was far behind Box.com for years and now has tons of…

Maybe Dropbox's is the best out of a bunch of mediocre syncing solutions. However, I do wish to add that Dropbox struggles with scale: lots of small files slow down sync to a crawl and spin CPU at 100%. Concretely, I had a certain folder with 100,000+ small files for some research I was doing with a collaborator. It took my laptop 24 hours to sync this folder, and throughout my CPU was at 100% throughout. For compari…

Both the official Dropbox client and Maestral take hours at high CPU usage to complete an initial sync of my 7 gigabyte Dropbox with 30 thousand files. Maybe sync is hard, maybe Dropbox's data representation is inefficient, maybe it's because both are written in Python, an inefficient language.

Re: Open-source Dropbox client, with multi-account, no-device-limit and M1 support

#192

Post by nyanpasu64 »

refulgentis wrote: post #4
est31 wrote: post #3

> Maestral uses the public Dropbox API which, unlike the official client, does not support transferring only those parts of a file which changed ("binary diff"). Maestral may therefore use more bandwidth that the official client.

Save 60 MB on Electron, burn 10 TB of bandwidth

It's a good tradeoff since it lets me escape the official Dropbox client trying to upload my drives, photos, etc. to the cloud, and spam me with upsell offers on a daily basis (if you're operating with a nearly full Dropbox in steady-state).

Re: Open-source Dropbox client, with multi-account, no-device-limit and M1 support

#193

Post by nonbirithm »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #59
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dropbox always feels like it peaked early and has steadily gotten worse as they try to add more and more features to it. > I feel like they are missing the mark when it comes to marketing to consumers here. I get the impression they're relying on name recognition and first mover advantage to keep the simple users flowing in, while all of the extra features and GUI fluff are built out to attract some other audience th…

In my impression, they are removing useful features and adding unnecessary ones. Since I joined over a decade ago, they have removed an extremely useful Public folder with the capability to generate direct links, limited the number of devices, and added a ton of features I never wanted from them, like Paper.

My belief is that they're trying to find a way to remain profitable. VCs expect returns, and with Dropbox's main feature now included by many other services like O365 and Drive, I would think that they're finding themselves forced to make such changes whether or not they want to.

Re: Open-source Dropbox client, with multi-account, no-device-limit and M1 support

#194

Post by sushid »

Macha wrote: post #162
manigandham wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Ultimately the comment was somewhat correct though. Dropbox's core product is a feature. It misidentified the competition as tech-savvy users, but ultimately it turned out to be MS/Apple/Google. And consequently when those competitors added that feature, Dropbox's growth has stalled and they've been flailing around to find a USP since. It was enough to get a decade of VC money and even start breaking even in 2020, bu…

> It misidentified the competition as tech-savvy users, but ultimately it turned out to be MS/Apple/Google.

How is this "somewhat" correct? The competition turned out to be trillion dollar companies implementing the exact same thing, not linux sysadmins.

Re: Open-source Dropbox client, with multi-account, no-device-limit and M1 support

#195

Post by kmeisthax »

manigandham wrote: post #79
sylens wrote: post #7

I was a very early Dropbox adopter but eventually switched to OneDrive a few years back because they bundled Office 365 with 1 TB of storage. I just went and looked at the official Dropbox plans to see if there was a family plan similar to the 5 users I get with Office 365/OneDrive...and found their plan/pricing page overwhelming. There's rows upon rows of features to compare across versions like "Traffic and Insight…

Dropbox still has the best syncing tech [1][2] which handles complex situations with lots of files and responds instantly. That alone is worth it if you need it. However the rest of the product is crap. Dropbox had a solid business with a "magic folder that syncs" but has been chasing new features and product lines with little success. Even the enterprise offering was far behind Box.com for years and now has tons of…

One particular advantage of Dropbox is that it's vendor-neutral and on pretty much every platform I can think of. This is good for people like me who insist on having one foot in every ecosystem. Good luck finding, say, an iCloud or OneDrive client for Linux.

Now if only the iPad client could actually background upload files when you save files using the system file picker...

Re: Open-source Dropbox client, with multi-account, no-device-limit and M1 support

#196

Post by WastingMyTime89 »

burnte wrote: post #21
Spooky23 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you make a lot of changes, the Dropbox sync works. Google drive or OneDrive choke in a variety of situations. The product sucks in lots of other ways.

I hate OneDrive, and I don't even USE it. I hate it because my corporate users taht use it have a constant stream of issues with it. It fails to sync constantly, the agent fails to load properly, or needs to be logged in again for some reason, etc. It's a never ending stream of failures with the heaviest users.

I hate OneDrive because Office apps have some extremely strange interaction with it. They are not always in sync with the main client.

There is nothing like changing an excel file, having it correctly modified locally but still seeing the old data in a linked PowerPoint because OneDrive didn't update.

It also managed to lose me a day of work once despite having saved the file regularly. None of my modifications were properly synched to the history.

I also hate how it pauses itself when I'm sharing my phone connection and tends to struggle when I restart it.

I used to really dislike Google Drive before my company migrated but between that and the abysmal outlook search I really miss Google.

Re: Open-source Dropbox client, with multi-account, no-device-limit and M1 support

#198

Post by rcarmo »

gtirloni wrote: post #134
rcarmo wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did exactly that. I work at Microsoft now, but two years before I joined I went through the same process but kept Dropbox for many years solely for Linux support. Then they botched that, so I moved my Linux/Mac working trees into SyncThing (since I only need local sync anyway).

How have they botched Linux support? It works flawlessly for me and GDrive/OneDrive don't even come close.

This was back when they removed support for some filesystems. I never went back.

Re: Open-source Dropbox client, with multi-account, no-device-limit and M1 support

#199

Post by iamcreasy »

agys wrote: post #106

I’m looking forward to test this client…! Dropbox was an exceptional product with perfect OS integration and interesting features like the “public folder” with an added web server, a versioning system, etc. My use case was not storing big backup files in the cloud but synchronise files between several machines: keeping compatibility with older systems/devices and smaller but cheaper DropBox (100GB?) sizes would have…

> features like the “public folder” with an added web server

I thought Dropbox disabled this feature?

From here: https://help.dropbox.com/files-folders/share/public-folder

Excerpt:

Using the public folder to render HTML content :: As of October 3, 2016 Dropbox Basic (free) users can no longer use public links to render HTML content in a web browser. If you're a Basic user, and you created a website that directly displays HTML content from your Dropbox account, it will no longer render in the browser.

Effective September 1, 2017, Dropbox Plus and Business users can no longer render HTML content, and the Public folder and its sharing functionality have been disabled.

Re: Open-source Dropbox client, with multi-account, no-device-limit and M1 support

#200

Post by SahAssar »

manigandham wrote: post #181
gajjanag wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe Dropbox's is the best out of a bunch of mediocre syncing solutions. However, I do wish to add that Dropbox struggles with scale: lots of small files slow down sync to a crawl and spin CPU at 100%. Concretely, I had a certain folder with 100,000+ small files for some research I was doing with a collaborator. It took my laptop 24 hours to sync this folder, and throughout my CPU was at 100% throughout. For compari…

Sure, but Rsync and Dropbox are very different. There's really no software option that handles that many small files well with the same features (realtime sync, folder moves, binary diffs, file history, etc). Rsync is great for taking a snapshot and replicating it elsewhere, which is probably a better fit for research projects anyway.

Sounds to me like git has basically all those features (although you need to have plugins for the binary diffs and realtime would require frequent pull/push/rebase).
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