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Google Drive detailed: 5 GB of free space, launching next week

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Re: Google Drive detailed: 5 GB of free space, launching next week

#151
post #30

I'm hoping this will compel Dropbox to reevaluate their pricing structure. Storage from Google is an order of magnitude cheaper than Dropbox - paid storage starts at $5/year, and for the same $100/year as the cheapest Dropbox account (50GB) you get 8x the capacity.

Dropbox is running on top of S3. If you look at the S3 pricing per GB for storage and bandwidth, it's not exactly cheap. Back of the envelope, I'm guessing a 50GB account costs Dropbox something like $3-$4 per month. Their $9.99 plan can't really go down by an order of magnitude and still be profitable.

The likelihood that Dropbox is paying the rack rate is near 0.

Re: Google Drive detailed: 5 GB of free space, launching next week

#152

OK, so now when they suspend your Google account you also get to experience loosing whatever you had in Google Drive. Just for this I am converting my Dropbox account into one of their paid packages to do my part in ensuring they stick around. One would hope that at one point Google might start to realize that the way they are handling accounts could work against their own interests. I --and I am sure others-- have e…

"I --and I am sure others-- have exactly zero interest in touching any Google product other than Analytics because it can all go "poof" overnight if an algorithm doesn't like something you did somewhere...and you'll never know why and never have real recourse to attempt to fix it."

We who recognize the problem are in the minuscule minority, and those of us who don't use their services because of that are in the unmeasurable minority. Google won't lose a measurable cent over it.

Re: Google Drive detailed: 5 GB of free space, launching next week

#153
post #98
post #9

We've seen this before. It was called google video. Google ended up buying youtube because even they could no longer deny they'd lost the battle and they couldn't risk it going to a competitor. Dropbox is in for a rough ride, as long as they can maintain focus and quality (beat them at customer support, that should be a walk in the park) they'll be the biggest YC exit ever once Google has run its course with the Goog…

Dropbox can not really have customer loyalty at all. It will take me 2 mins to switch from dropbox to Google drive if they offer more free space...

It would take me far longer given that I've set it up on all PC's and devices that I use.

Also, would require to be quite certain Google's software works as well as Dropbox's does.

Re: Google Drive detailed: 5 GB of free space, launching next week

#154

We worked on a startup product a few months which is currently shelved. It had a file system like interface and simplified moving files between dropbox, amazon S3, google docs and multiple accounts (any one with two dropbox accounts ?). With all this google drive news, its pretty tempting to bring it back to life :)

This is what the future of online storage will be, but it won't be google/dropbox/amazon etc. but rather 'your wordprocessor'/'your email'/'your social network' etc.

adding a compatibility layer between storage networks is a temporary fix for when a standard is formed.

Re: Google Drive detailed: 5 GB of free space, launching next week

#156
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dropbox is running on top of S3. If you look at the S3 pricing per GB for storage and bandwidth, it's not exactly cheap. Back of the envelope, I'm guessing a 50GB account costs Dropbox something like $3-$4 per month. Their $9.99 plan can't really go down by an order of magnitude and still be profitable.

The likelihood that Dropbox is paying the rack rate is near 0.

That, and there are a lot of the same files stored across accounts; DB stores it 'once' and delivers it to all the people with the same hash of that file.

Re: Google Drive detailed: 5 GB of free space, launching next week

#157
post #23

If this thing works properly on Android, I'm dropping Dropbox in a heartbeat.

Try Dropsync, it works wonders.

Yes I have it, but it sucks - it can't sync my whole Dropbox (too many files, takes hours, crashes, then restarts at the beginning) so now I have to set up several sync pairs. Plus I have to run it manually, because doing a full scan every few hours is a serious slowdown/battery drain.

Re: Google Drive detailed: 5 GB of free space, launching next week

#158
post #23

If this thing works properly on Android, I'm dropping Dropbox in a heartbeat.

What doesn't work for you on dropbox for android? I use it all the time and am wondering what sort of things I might be missing.

? It doesn't sync the whole dropbox, just one file at the time. That's not 'dropbox' as I know it and as it's useful, its a crutch, just barely better than ftp. I'm not sure what you mean by 'wondering what I'm missing' because Dropbox on Android is nothing like Dropbox on the desktop, the differences are obvious.

Re: Google Drive detailed: 5 GB of free space, launching next week

#159
post #23

If this thing works properly on Android, I'm dropping Dropbox in a heartbeat.

What doesn't work for you on dropbox for android? I use it all the time and am wondering what sort of things I might be missing.

Also, Dropbox is getting progressively worse over time, rather than better. The v2 of the Android client was even worse than v1 (although to be honest I don't remember in detail what it was that changed, just that it was a real nuisance when it changed, I don't use the 'official' client on Android any more). To be fair though, I just checked the Dropbox blog, and it seems that they did add file renames to v2. So, I guess that's one thing that got better. rollseyes

The recent 'update' to the web UI is worse than what they had before - less information, navigation and discoverability have gotten worse, so much potential yet so little progress being made.

I'm saying all this as a Dropbox for Teams subscriber, I'm paying these guys 800 USD / year, so I'm not a freeloading whiner.

Re: Google Drive detailed: 5 GB of free space, launching next week

#160
post #107
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't you also need to remove cookies and perhaps clear local data?

I shouldn't have to. But i got no way to be sure Google leaves me completely. I auto-clear all types of cookies on each browser exit anyway, for performance.

I did the same (clear on startup), but then Firefox stopped crashing daily, doing it once a week doesn't seem enough.
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