Computers as I used to love them

Besides needing a (2020) in the title, this deserves some commentary.

I switched from Dropbox to a mix of OneDrive and SyncThing in 2020 due to the bloat in their client app:

switch: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2020/06/21/1600

later: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2020/08/08/1900

What I did, in a nutshell, was to remove the Dropbox client from all of my machines, link my Synology NAS to my Dropbox account (and to my OneDrive account, too, but for snapshotting) and then using the SyncThing client to sync all my git working trees while keeping Office docs and archives in OneDrive.

I split things this way because I've worked across various machines and OSes since 2010 and wanted a way to have a consistent filesystem layout in all of them. I split things across two services because:

- Both OneDrive and Dropbox have trouble with very high cardinality folders (like my 2.1GB git repos) that have hundreds of thousands (if not actual millions) of tiny files that change frequently (and that I may not want to have outside my LAN anyway).

- OneDrive integrates with Office apps and is a pretty decent way to have off-site storage and shared online editing of a few hundred thousand "beefier" files (in my case, mostly personal and legal docs), as well as having a very generous 1TB free tier for each family member.

Neither replaces backups, but (more to the point), neither is perfect. In SyncThing's case, I have a container running on my NAS as an introducer/master replica, and three different machines accessing it (Windows, Mac and Linux), and I keep having sync issues and conflicts in my git repos even though all versions are in lockstep.

Ironically, I _never_ had a git repo corrupted while using Dropbox since... 2015? (I did when trying OneDrive, but that was mostly because I was using an OpenSource Linux client and it had sync issues). And yet, SyncThing keeps doing it every couple of months, to the extent where I need to reset some repos every now and then.

SyncThing is pretty great in that I can switch off external discovery and be absolutely sure my stuff never leaves my LAN _and_ have things sync very quickly, but it's definitely not fully baked yet, and I wouldn't recommend using it without a good backup strategy (all my personal projects live in a gitea instance and that is backed up off-site as well).

Also, there are hardly any good mobile clients (I have an iOS one, but it has trouble syncing large folders while running in the background and its Files integration is flaky). I could use just about any mobile editing app with Dropbox, and I have much more limited choices right now (OneDrive "works", but the Files provider also has issues).

I'm trying this one, with mixed results: https://www.mobiussync.com/

Coming from a similar background product-wise: the struggle is real, and while file syncing and sharing is great and achievable it only allows you N user retention/acquisition, and thus M profit potential. If you (or your investors) demand M*1000 of that, you start looking for a way to usurp not only the user's file syncing needs, but also document editing, calendars, email, contacts, backup... anything that is within reach. This is exacerbated by the fact that more and more vendors (such as Adobe and Figma) drive away from "files", which effectively forces you to use _their_ cloud storage solution. When you are Dropbox this is not a very sweet spot to be in, because Adobe has _both_ the apps for creating projects _and_ the storage/sync, but you only have storage/sync.

As long as cloud storage needs to grow exponentially at any cost, feature bloat of the kind Nikita is describing will continue. Most likely Syncthing is so good exactly because they do not have these extrinsic pressures.

Add to that the fact that in a bigger product org, the way you get promoted is by shipping "your" feature. Quite often it would be a feature no user would ever want, but it is much more the problem of selling "your" feature to management internally versus selling it directly to the user.

A great example of a solution which is local-first, allows you BYO cloud storage (of multiple kinds) and simply offers its own cloud storage at a small markup is Arq, and we are blessed that it does not have the pressures I have described above.

If you change a file does it keep older versions?

I loved Dropbox. If they had a reasonably priced plan with like 50GB I would have subscribed in a heartbeat but they claimed it was impossible to do so all they offer now is like 2TB for $20 CAD a month which is far more than I need or want to pay. Then they neutered the free plan to 3 devices and I've mostly stopped using it.