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New Dropbox Pro plans

blog.dropbox.com

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Re: New Dropbox Pro plans

#111
post #8

I really wish there was a plan between free and 50G (now 100G). Kudos foe the increased storage though. Not having the pricing page live yet is kinda weird.

If I may just say: I have Google Drive, and am loving it. It's much cheaper than dropbox, as I pay only $5 and get 100GB of space. That's WAY more than I need, but it syncs to all my devices. However, I will be the first to say that DropBox has some really great features that Google Drive lacks. For example, there is no public folder for Google Drive, like there is for Dropbox, and I cannot throttle the speed at whic…

Does Google Drive do LAN sync? Like any self respecting geek I have far too many computers and LAN sync keeps the bandwidth down, especially on freshly installed systems.

I'm also primarily on Linux so Google Drive is useless to me. (Yes I know about grive.)

My biggest peeve with Dropbox is that it doesn't know about multiple users. I have a personal paid account, as well as a separate team account for work. All of their software and sites work as though you only have one account, which is a huge pain.

Separately they also screw over paid accounts who share folders. For example if two users each get a paid account for 50GB each and the first one shared 10GB of content with the second, then the second will only be able to use 40GB for their own files. So there will only be a total of 90GB of unique storage even though 100GB has been paid for. I understand (and agree) why they do this with free accounts, but their support kept refusing to see why it is an issue when both accounts are paid.

The users issue and shared space issues mean I'm highly likely to move to Google once they support Linux.

Re: New Dropbox Pro plans

#113
post #70
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although Microsoft is not as cool these days, I am liking the new SkyDrive ( http://windows.microsoft.com/en-GB/skydrive/compare ). (I also use a paid SpiderOak account for backup and sharing.)

Iirc skydrive offers 25 gigs. I wonder why they're saying just 7 though. EDIT - Yep my account says 25. I'm thoroughly confused.

They launched with 25 gigs but that was only a short term promotion at the start of this year. 7 gigs is their standard free offering. Anyone who signed up during the promotion period gets to keep 25 gigs free though of course.

Re: New Dropbox Pro plans

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't trust Dropbox as a journaled backup solution. I powered up a virtual machine that had been down for a while and had dropbox installed. I tried to SSH in. My password kept being rejected. I verified my key through the console, and then it dawned on me that the VM's clock was off, and that's why SSL didn't work. So I set the clock. I think I set it a couple seconds into the future. Fast forward a couple of…

rsync to an external drive. I use droppy for Web access and convenience only. Suggestion: rsync a folder tree over to the dropbox directory once a session? anacron every 30 mins?

It's better to use duplicity than rsync. It provides incremental backups so you can restore from points in time.

Re: New Dropbox Pro plans

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can then add suspenders to your belt: sign up for multiple backup services. E.g. I have Backblaze and Crashplan. $3/mo for Crashplan and $5/mo for Backblaze give me two unlimited backups.

If you were to choose one, which would it be? I'm with CrashPlan now, but their upload speed is so impossibly slow that I'll never upload all my data. Uploading only 250GB has taken me 4 months. And the software is not so great. I wouldn't mind paying a little bit more if those problems were fixed.

Not sure… I had tried Backblaze last year and had the same problem as yours: after a few months I was still not done with the initial backup, so I cancelled. A few months ago I figured I should give online back-ups another try and I signed up for both at the same time. Both took less time the second time around somehow… I was planning on keeping only one but in the end, at that price, it's worth it to keep both.

Overall I don't care too much about the software (I agree Crashplan's is pretty bad) since it would be needed only in case of crash. But I like Crashplan a bit better because it can back-up your whole drive and they're cheaper. Their family plan is very cheap too.

Re: New Dropbox Pro plans

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can then add suspenders to your belt: sign up for multiple backup services. E.g. I have Backblaze and Crashplan. $3/mo for Crashplan and $5/mo for Backblaze give me two unlimited backups.

If you were to choose one, which would it be? I'm with CrashPlan now, but their upload speed is so impossibly slow that I'll never upload all my data. Uploading only 250GB has taken me 4 months. And the software is not so great. I wouldn't mind paying a little bit more if those problems were fixed.

Backblaze doesn't limit your upload speeds if you have a lot of stuff to backup which is why I stuck with them instead of switching to another provider. That said, backing up from Norway still isn't fast - I only get about 13GB/day, so it's still taking forever to get everything backed up, but I just made sure to exclude the lower priority stuff at first and add another folder or drive at a time in order what is most important to me. So far I have about 2.5TB backed up across 2 computers.

Re: New Dropbox Pro plans

#119
post #8

I really wish there was a plan between free and 50G (now 100G). Kudos foe the increased storage though. Not having the pricing page live yet is kinda weird.

I don't know. $10 a month really doesn't seem like a lot of money to me. Especially considering the cost of, say, the computers you're running it on.

It depends on what you are doing with it and what you are comparing it to. For 50 Gigs, its extremely cheap.

But if you really say want 5 gigs, then $10 a month seems a bit high, especially now that Gdrive gives you 5 gigs free.

Its also a bit of a pyschological barrier seeing that second digit in the monthly bill as opposed to say $5/month and knowing that the yearly cost breaches the triple digit barrier.

Re: New Dropbox Pro plans

#120
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Not everyone has their account at max 2) They get bulk discounts from Amazon that take the price down quite a bit 3) They only store one copy of a file across their user base, so even though they bill you for 100GB and you have it completely full, it's possible they are only storing a small fraction of that. A folder of music for example is likely to not actually take up any space at all, but they get to bill you…

Except that the metadata on your MP3's is likely different, whether you've purchased them or just edited the genre in ID3 data. I've often wondered if backup services "parse" MP3's into data and metadata for backup purposes, just because it can enhance deduplication so much. I've never heard of them doing it, but it's the first thing I would do...

Perhaps, but not a lot of people rip their own anymore. There are a lot of identical songs out there thanks to Amazon MP3, iTunes Music Store and all the various scene releases.
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