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New Dropbox Pro plans

blog.dropbox.com

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Re: New Dropbox Pro plans

#121

Post by kalleboo »

dchuk wrote: post #38
statictype wrote: post #32

If I'm calculating this correctly, S3 costs about $12.50 per 100GB per month (and that's not including any http requests you make). How is Dropbox (I assume they store data in S3) offering a lower price than that? I know they de-dupe data but is there enough common data being stored for them to be able to charge so little?

I pay for a 50gb account but use about 5% of it. I would imagine the vast majority of their users don't use anywhere near the full storage amount.

And even among those who do, a lot of that will be purchased music, movies etc that they can dedup.

edit: not to mention shared folders. 45 GB of my account is a shared folder from work, which is probably shared among 10 users who all have to pay for the same data

Re: New Dropbox Pro plans

#122

Post by tallanvor »

cletus wrote: 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.

That's why I'm using both Dropbox and Skydrive now. --If I'm likely to need to access it on my phone, I put it on Dropbox since the app is nicer, but I joined Skydrive early enough that I have 25GB free, and if I really need more, adding 100GB for $50/year is less than half the cost of what Dropbox charges.

Re: New Dropbox Pro plans

#123

Post by kalleboo »

crazygringo wrote: post #105
jonknee wrote: 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...

I can't recall of it was Dropbox or one of the other services, but I read they blocked up the files into blocks of a certain size. As long as the MP3 header doesn't change size (they usually contain padding or are at the end of the file to avoid this) it would just be one block that changed.

Re: New Dropbox Pro plans

#124

Post by kalleboo »

keithpeter wrote: post #100
Semiapies wrote: post #56

Videos I might believe, but I'm skeptical that family documents and photos are filling 50 and 100 GB accounts. :)

Photos half a meg each so 2000 per gig. 100k photos might happen, I have a couple of filing cabinets full of 35mm negatives and contact sheets (ok not family snaps). Put some music and videos in there and you are away.

Half a meg each? Even my cell phone takes 2-3 MB photos. And then if use iPhoto or something, it stores the original and edited photos separately. My humble personal iPhoto library is 65 GB.

Re: New Dropbox Pro plans

#125

Post by jason_slack »

timaelliott wrote: post #115

I really wish Dropbox would add the ability for arbitrary directory syncing. This single "dropbox" folder is so annoying. Until them, I'm quite content with one of their competitors.

They do have 'Selective Sync' but those folders do have to be in your Dropbox folder for that. So not exactly what you are looking for unless you re-organize to use that structure.

Re: New Dropbox Pro plans

#126

Post by dfischer »

lelandbatey wrote: post #78
cletus wrote: 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…

My beef with Google Drive is that you can't symlink. I don't want to use my petty internal laptop hard drive for all the space. I need my external drive to be the "muscle." Google Drive won't let me sync that.

Re: New Dropbox Pro plans

#127

Post by msh »

glesica wrote: post #66
luser001 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question: why not use Backblaze to backup your important things? Dropbox is primarily a sharing and synchronization tool: using it for backup is very expensive. IMHO. YMMV. Edit: They now match Spideroak's pricing. If anybody from Spideroak is reading this: you have an awesome service, but here are a couple of things you might want to do. I like your commitment to privacy and hence use it, but sadly, IMHO it'…

Lack of reasonable Linux support made it surprisingly difficult to find a backup provider. I ended up going with CrashPlan. I tried SpiderOak but their client software was terrible and the headless install basically didn't work.

Jungledisk is good and got clients for Linux Mac and windows

Re: New Dropbox Pro plans

#128

Post by riobard »

crazygringo wrote: post #105
jonknee wrote: 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...

You don't need to worry about the particular structure of the files if you break the files into fixed-size chunks (e.g. 512KB) and do the dedup based on the chunks. The difference in the metadata of MP3 will be just in the first chunk, and the rest will be exactly the same no matter how you change the ID3 data. This strategy works for many other types of media files, too.

Re: New Dropbox Pro plans

#129

Post by barking »

mirkules wrote: post #25
edanm wrote: post #5

I had really hoped this would happen in response to competitors like Google Drive. Now it's hear and I can only say: YAAAY!! I'll repeat it, for the billionth time: Dropbox is one of the companies that has drastically changed computing for me over the last few years. I absolutely adore it, and I simply cannot understand the many people who do not use Dropbox to host everything. All of my important, non-computer-speci…

There are many reasons not to use Dropbox: 1. Sensitive/Confidential info - I would never feel comfortable storing any kind of documentation on a 3rd party server that is sensitive to me like mortgage docs, tax docs or receipts. 2. Many companies have a strict policy disallowing use of Dropbox because it would leak information. On a personal level, any kind of work that I don't want to share with others (this include…

I use Boxcryptor. When I look in my dropbox folder all the files, file and folder names are encrypted. Instead of this, I as a user interact with my mounted Boxcryptor drive where I view same files and folders unencrypted.

Re: New Dropbox Pro plans

#130

Post by keithpeter »

mike-cardwell wrote: post #114
keithpeter wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

http://duplicity.nongnu.org/

Still in beta? I'll try it out on a test box later on when things are quieter.

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