Why we are leaving Dropbox

Post by lazzlazzlazz » Thu, Apr 23, 2015, 5:07 PM UTC

steven777400 wrote: post #107

DenisM wrote: post #34

One problem we have witnessed with Dropbox is that low-tech users tends to delete files they don't personally need. Often times this causes deletion of the files for the entire company. Resultingly admins are afraid to share file access with users, and users are afraid to cause problems, so they ask admins to email the files instead, which sort of puts you back at the square one. We might be approaching a point where…

This is a confusing case even for non "low-tech" users. I had a shared dropbox folder with a friend. I was done with my copy of the files, so I deleted them because I was close to my dropbox space limit. He freaked out because dropbox then deleted them from his drive too. In retrospect, I guess it makes sense, but the idea that a delete would propagate was certainly not the expected behavior.

Post by dagw » Thu, Apr 23, 2015, 5:18 PM UTC

vetinari wrote: post #82

dagw wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having to manage VPN accounts for everybody I want to share a folder with sounds like a huge pain. Especially if I have to go ask the VPN admin each time. And I'm still curious how you do offline access and syncing to local disk.

There is no offline access or syncing. The data is available over gigabit link. It is local, after all. No need to sync to hide the latency. And after all, there is more data on NAS, that the drive on my notebook can handle. No need to have it all locally.

Post by DenisM » Thu, Apr 23, 2015, 5:35 PM UTC

mattlutze wrote: post #50

DenisM wrote: post #34

One problem we have witnessed with Dropbox is that low-tech users tends to delete files they don't personally need. Often times this causes deletion of the files for the entire company. Resultingly admins are afraid to share file access with users, and users are afraid to cause problems, so they ask admins to email the files instead, which sort of puts you back at the square one. We might be approaching a point where…

It used to be a big pile of something-or-other, but the newest iteration of SharePoint is really quite a solid product, particularly for some of the trickier tasks around document management and distribution. And with the Office 365 versions, smaller businesses don't need to worry about building out the physical resources (or hiring the admin personnel) to run an instance. It might be something to ask your IT folks i…

Post by justinpaulson » Thu, Apr 23, 2015, 5:42 PM UTC

rogerbinns wrote: post #92

DenisM wrote: post #34

One problem we have witnessed with Dropbox is that low-tech users tends to delete files they don't personally need. Often times this causes deletion of the files for the entire company. Resultingly admins are afraid to share file access with users, and users are afraid to cause problems, so they ask admins to email the files instead, which sort of puts you back at the square one. We might be approaching a point where…

Dropbox need to do a lot better job on space usage. It is trivial for Dropbox accounts to end up with more usage than many common devices have (cough MacBook Air cough). We had managers deleting content to free up space, not realising that deleted it for everyone. I guess their mental model is seeing the Dropbox folders as more of a cache than synced files affecting everyone. Yes, there is selective sync. Now use it…

Post by jinushaun » Thu, Apr 23, 2015, 6:03 PM UTC

fit2rule wrote: post #72

The most frustrating thing for me, while watching a new generation of users grow up on Dropbox and similar functionality, is that this sort of thing should really be in the Operating System by now, as a standard feature. But it seems the OS vendors have lost their way and are chasing shiny colors and new hardware, as usual. Wasn't so long ago you kind of expected a new filesharing technology to be built-in to the ope…