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Dropbox (YC S07): Simple Tasks for Extra Space (768MB total)

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Re: Dropbox (YC S07): Simple Tasks for Extra Space (768MB total)

#111

Post by zcid »

gst wrote: post #27

I love Dropbox from a usability point of view, but unfortunately the missing encryption is the main reason why it's not an option for me right now. I'd like to also be able to backup sensitive data, but I don't trust the Dropbox employees with access to my data. Instead, I'm currently using Wuala which encrypts the data diretly on the client. An alternative to Wuala seems to be SpiderOak, which also features client s…

I just store a TrueCrypt container on my Dropbox. It's a little clunky if you need to dismount/mount it a lot, but if your system is on 24/7 then it isn't really noticeable.

Re: Dropbox (YC S07): Simple Tasks for Extra Space (768MB total)

#112

Post by robryan »

ivankirigin wrote: post #37
bajsejohannes wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice idea! Thanks for the extra space. Here's a question: I'm very inclined to pay for Dropbox, but I don't actually need 50 GB - I use 1% of that now. On the other hand, I would absolutely pay the same amount for 10 GB for 5 years. It would give me the warm fuzzy feeling of giving back and I would feel safer with the service. Have you ever discussed this model? Any plans to implement it?

There is still a lot of work to be done on different pricing plans for sure.

Yeah, the best suggestion I would have to dropbox would be to charge more sooner. I would absolutely pay for the service, just through referrals, the student thing and extra space offers like this I'm never going to get to the point where I actually need extra space.

I'm sure many people that use dropbox like me to backup code, whole websites and writing/ uni work would feel the same way.

Re: Dropbox (YC S07): Simple Tasks for Extra Space (768MB total)

#113

Post by ugh »

pavs wrote: post #109
ivankirigin wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn't at Dropbox particularly early, so that is more of a question for someone like Drew Houston. The first time I used the product, I knew it was awesome. The first time I talked to Drew about the big ideas, I knew it was going to be much bigger than what most people might think. The Cloud™ is one of those mega trends, and Dropbox is right in the middle of it.

It seems to me not a lot is going on from users point of views (features), did I miss something?

Always having access to up to date versions of your files from anywhere independent of the hardware you are using seems like a pretty big deal to me, especially since Dropbox works so effortlessly. Is that not enough?

Re: Dropbox (YC S07): Simple Tasks for Extra Space (768MB total)

#114

Post by joshzayin »

ivankirigin wrote: post #26

I work at Dropbox and came up with this page. Thanks for throwing confounding variables in this soft launch experiment, Hacker News. A few points that might interest yall: 1. We won't publish to facebook or twitter without your explicit permission. 2. We ask for information about your facebook profile because it will make Dropbox better. It's mainly about learning about our users without annoying surveys. We won't ma…

The error message given for a message that's too long is somewhat ambiguous. It states, "Message are limited to 140 characters"-but doesn't say that "I love Dropbox because " is included in that. It should say, "Messages are limited to 117 characters" and include a character count--on editing a message, the count doesn't work.

Re: Dropbox (YC S07): Simple Tasks for Extra Space (768MB total)

#116

Post by peteforde »

ivankirigin wrote: post #26

I work at Dropbox and came up with this page. Thanks for throwing confounding variables in this soft launch experiment, Hacker News. A few points that might interest yall: 1. We won't publish to facebook or twitter without your explicit permission. 2. We ask for information about your facebook profile because it will make Dropbox better. It's mainly about learning about our users without annoying surveys. We won't ma…

I'm a passionate amateur photographer, and after a bad crash where I lost years of work I became really neurotic about my multi-site recovery plan. Today I have Drobos and Time Capsules spread around my house and office, plus Dropbox and even a few rsync cron jobs all keeping me calm.

Today, my Aperture library is 109GB, because I work with archival scans from medium format film.

TL;DR: 100GB is a very small limit. How can I pay you more?

Re: Dropbox (YC S07): Simple Tasks for Extra Space (768MB total)

#117

Post by daniel_iversen »

A good test of a product is how many people are willing to give you a positive review to their friends/family/colleagutes/etc

Keep up the good work Dropbox, you ROCK!!

PS: Who could have thought that so much innovation could happen with something so seemingly small (an "online disk drive")

Re: Dropbox (YC S07): Simple Tasks for Extra Space (768MB total)

#118

Post by Zev »

fragmede wrote: post #17
pavs wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not much of a feedback if you are asked why you love dropbox. I don't know why someone would _not_ love dropbox...

Closed source binary blob needed for client. Meaning it doesn't work on PPC/MIPS/ARM computers. (Not important to most, but it's a valid technical reason why not.)

  z:~ Zach$ cd /Applications/Dropbox.app/Contents/MacOS/
  z:MacOS Zach$ file Dropbox 
  Dropbox: Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures
  Dropbox (for architecture ppc):	Mach-O executable ppc
  Dropbox (for architecture i386):	Mach-O executable i386
Looks like it can run on PPC. Or do you run PPC on a non-Mac OS?

Re: Dropbox (YC S07): Simple Tasks for Extra Space (768MB total)

#119

Post by dedward »

ivankirigin wrote: post #32
cjoh wrote: post #25

Seems to me that Dropbox will have a pretty good asset here a la rapleaf. If they get enough people to voluntarily give them their twitter and facebook IDs, Dropbox will have a very accurate lookup service of email|facebook|twitter -- that's something a lot of companies are after these days.

Dropbox won't sell user data.

Currently.

Re: Dropbox (YC S07): Simple Tasks for Extra Space (768MB total)

#120

Post by riobard »

almost wrote: post #97
gst wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even less space is required. Dropbox stores duplicate files only once. So if many users store the same files the cost per user is practically zero. That's also the reason why uploads are so fast. If a file is already on the server it isn't uploaded again.

Is it really shared between accounts? So for example if I knew someone with Dropbox had a file that could have one of several contents and I wanted to know which of those contents they had I could try uploading the different versions and see which one uploaded faster? A little far fetched maybe, but I'm sure there's a way to exploit something somewhere using that....

You can test this with relatively large files. If a 100mb file finishes syncing to Dropbox within seconds over a slow DSL, you can be pretty sure that someone has already uploaded a copy there before you do.
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