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Dropbox for Business

dropboxatwork.com

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Re: Dropbox for Business

#101

Post by _zen »

nileshtrivedi wrote: post #24
malanj wrote: post #17

Unless they drop the price soon we're going to move away from them. It sounds silly to argue over $15/user/month, but in comparison to Google Drive it's just started feeling too expensive. I really like the product, but I don't know if any product in a commoditized space can sustain such a price premium.

For Dropbox, it is their core business. For Google, it's a drop in their massive bucket of cash that comes from advertising. If business reliability matters to you, Dropbox seems comparatively better.

You really think Google would drop Google Apps for Business and Google Drive? That is really illogical. It's the future, they're not going to drop it.

Dropbox is more likely to go under before Google Drive does.

Re: Dropbox for Business

#102

Post by hrktb »

Angostura wrote: post #90
ableal wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> unlimited backups (older versions of files). Versions are not backups. I wish I could find a simple web page that I read quite a few years ago. It very starkly explained why some things are commonly confused with, but just are not , backups. The consequences of those confusions are usually bad.

So, to all intents and purposes versions appear to act as backups, but you read a Web site a few years ago that said they aren't so that's what you tell people?

Not really. The concept of version works like backup for full fledge systems (SVN, git), but not what Dropbox exposes.

Dropbox keeps version of _existing_ files. You won't get back the files deleted and synched by mistake/misbehavior of some script. A backup would keep the files.

You'll also have different behaviors if you need to bring back a set of data (i.e. all your files as they were two days ago). You'll be in pain to do it file by file with Dropbox's version system.

Re: Dropbox for Business

#103

Post by Touche »

tommi wrote: post #83
Touche wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really frustrates me that there are separate clients that do the same thing, but talk to a different domain. If these companies cared about their customers they would be putting together an open source spec for cloud syncing so that we could just pick our favorite clients and tie them to the individual accounts.

Not going to happen. Part of the reason is just what you mentioned: they care about their customers. With various clients they would have to support the problems coming from all of the clients and that would cause their service to look bad even though the problem lies within client app.

You are really fluent in newspeak aren't you.

That's a crazy weak argument. I'm sure glad JPEG's aren't limited to only work with apps created by JPEG Inc. Dropbox's new image app would be pretty worthless if every company was as insistent about keeping things proprietary.

Re: Dropbox for Business

#104

Post by Yabood »

malanj wrote: post #17

Unless they drop the price soon we're going to move away from them. It sounds silly to argue over $15/user/month, but in comparison to Google Drive it's just started feeling too expensive. I really like the product, but I don't know if any product in a commoditized space can sustain such a price premium.

Shameless plug: http://www.nubisio.com. Our pricing is capacity based, so you can have as many users as you want, and our product (CloudStorm) supports all major cloud providers.

Re: Dropbox for Business

#105

Post by price »

hrktb wrote: post #102
Angostura wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, to all intents and purposes versions appear to act as backups, but you read a Web site a few years ago that said they aren't so that's what you tell people?

Not really. The concept of version works like backup for full fledge systems (SVN, git), but not what Dropbox exposes. Dropbox keeps version of _existing_ files. You won't get back the files deleted and synched by mistake/misbehavior of some script. A backup would keep the files. You'll also have different behaviors if you need to bring back a set of data (i.e. all your files as they were two days ago). You'll be in…

Dropbox keeps the history of deleted files just like modified files. Take a look on the web interface and hit the "Show deleted files" trashcan in the icons at the top.

Or for a different view, hit the "Events" link on the left navbar.

Re: Dropbox for Business

#106

Post by egeozcan »

hrktb wrote: post #102
Angostura wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, to all intents and purposes versions appear to act as backups, but you read a Web site a few years ago that said they aren't so that's what you tell people?

Not really. The concept of version works like backup for full fledge systems (SVN, git), but not what Dropbox exposes. Dropbox keeps version of _existing_ files. You won't get back the files deleted and synched by mistake/misbehavior of some script. A backup would keep the files. You'll also have different behaviors if you need to bring back a set of data (i.e. all your files as they were two days ago). You'll be in…

A colleague of mine always says that you don't have a backup if a single nuke* can take everything away. So even with soft deletion, versioning in itself would not be a backup solution. OTOH, I'd bet Dropbox has distributed backups.

* An exaggeration for natural disasters, wars, lock-downs, fires and so on.

Re: Dropbox for Business

#107

Post by conception »

Touche wrote: post #77
ereckers wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that the killer feature with Dropbox is that it "just works". I jumped on the 50GB Mac mobile app special from Box.net a few months ago and upon trying to use their Box Sync desktop client I found that it just doesn't work. Bogged the machine down, was never able to properly sync files. I've got 50GB at Box.net that I don't know what to do with and I definitely wasn't moved to the category of a prospective co…

It really frustrates me that there are separate clients that do the same thing, but talk to a different domain. If these companies cared about their customers they would be putting together an open source spec for cloud syncing so that we could just pick our favorite clients and tie them to the individual accounts.

That's basically S3 actually.

Re: Dropbox for Business

#108

Post by m_mueller »

giovannibajo1 wrote: post #94
m_mueller wrote: post #69

I lost trust in Dropbox when it comes to the quality of their client and I would therefore not use it for business purposes. * I've had two instances of near data loss where I could only recover data from the local hidden cache folder that gets deleted after a week. It had to do with a user error with moving out files from the Dropbox directory when the client was off - previous versions in the webapp can easily beco…

The business account comes with unlimited history of deleted/modified files, so you can recover anything that once was on Dropbox. On my Macbook Pro, the "average battery impact" (last 8 hours) as reported by Activity Monitor is 1.2 (not sure what's the unit, but it's a low value compared to other apps), and we use it daily for work so it's kind of active the whole day. I wouldn't call it a CPU hog by far.

1) That's good to hear about unlimited history - however that wasn't the issue in my case - the files either didn't show up in in the history anymore, even though it clearly wasn't past the grace period, or the showed up and reported an error when trying to open them. So the last I checked, there were non recoverable states in Dropbox and I therefore would never trust it as the only backup (and neither should you).

2) The CPU hog thing is very inconsistent - it probably doesn't affect all OS version/hardware combinations or they would have solved it since long ago. All I know is that I regularly see the client go to 80-100% usage of one core for a rather long time, meanwhile taking forever to sync just a few files - which clearly shouldn't happen in an application that mostly does IO. There are probably certain file types it has some problems with, but I didn't have the patience to analyze it yet, I simply switched to SpiderOak.

So no, I just can't trust their code quality.

Re: Dropbox for Business

#109

Post by hablahaha »

chris_mahan wrote: post #65
fragmede wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do understand that it's the IT department at the Fortune 500 company thats doing the blocking, right? Dropbox has no control over your IT department, any more than you'd have control over my wireless internet.

And the question becomes: why is this IT department blocking the dropbox service?

For the same reason a lot of companies block USB ports on company computers: so you don't take work material without their knowledge.

Re: Dropbox for Business

#110

Post by Angostura »

hrktb wrote: post #102
Angostura wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, to all intents and purposes versions appear to act as backups, but you read a Web site a few years ago that said they aren't so that's what you tell people?

Not really. The concept of version works like backup for full fledge systems (SVN, git), but not what Dropbox exposes. Dropbox keeps version of _existing_ files. You won't get back the files deleted and synched by mistake/misbehavior of some script. A backup would keep the files. You'll also have different behaviors if you need to bring back a set of data (i.e. all your files as they were two days ago). You'll be in…

Fair enough. Thank you for the explanation.
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