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The new Dropbox

blog.dropbox.com

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Re: The new Dropbox

#381

Post by hellofunk »

zymhan wrote: post #379
vvoyer wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After receiving an email like: > This is all for just $20.88 more a year 1. I never asked for anything more 2. you still charge me for more at a higher price I just bought 2TB data on iCloud, moving everything there. Now I will have good photo application with face recognition which is awesome. Do not expect any move from Dropbox to make your personal life better, they won't. They are going towards enterprise custome…

Did I miss where they're charging existing customers more? My account page still shows $99/yr.

The features are added to your account at no additional cost for your current term. However the renewal of your yearly contract will be at the new price.

Re: The new Dropbox

#382

Post by saghm »

jwong_ wrote: post #306
saghm wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been hosting NextCloud on a $10/month Digital Ocean VPS for maybe 8-10 months now, and I've been super pleased with it. I'm not much of a devops person, but I found it fairly easy to set up and configure, and it runs smoothly enough that most of the time it's indistinguishable from using third-party cloud file sync service. I occasionally ssh in to apply updates (and renew the Let's Encrypt cert, since I've been…

How big is your sync folder? I have around 25GB I'd like to get off Dropbox.

Fairly small; it's only about 5 GB, so I can't say for certain how well it would work with something that large. At least at the size that I have, changes propagate across my devices pretty much instantaneously .

Re: The new Dropbox

#383

Post by CamperBob2 »

darkpuma wrote: post #371
liyanage wrote: post #203

I've been a Dropbox user for many years but I'm looking for a replacement. What drives me nuts and hasn't gotten better over the years is their truly awful Python-based macOS client software. It is constantly burning a ton of CPU/battery. It's always at or near the top of Activity Monitor's list in the Energy tab. It seems like their app constantly reacts to any file system activity, even if that activity is outside…

Symlinks in general suck on OSX. Try symlinking a file from an NFS mount onto your desktop and see if you get a thumbnail for it in Finder. In Finder, you won't. Now you might think, "well that's NFS, it's probably not thumbnailing those files because the latency exceeds some timeout." That's what I thought. However if you add that same directory containing such symlinks to your dock, you will see thumbnails for syml…

They suck on Windows, too. I've tried using junction points more than once to share a common library directory among several different projects, and have always ended up in makefile hell when some projects 'see' changes to files in the library directory while others don't.

I can understand why Dropbox doesn't want any part of the dumpster fire that is symbolic linking. Maybe they work great on Linux, where they are a core aspect of how the filesystem works under the hood. But Dropbox has to present unified behavior across all supported platforms, and the last thing they want is to be put in the position of providing tech support for filesystem bugs and quirks and race conditions.

Re: The new Dropbox

#384

Post by JohnJamesRambo »

jonstokes wrote: post #196

Looks like Zawinski's Law is still 100% true: “Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.” Coined by Jamie Zawinski (who called it the “Law of Software Envelopment”) to express his belief that all truly useful programs experience pressure to evolve into toolkits and application platforms (the mailer thing, he says, is just a side effe…

I've never heard of this, thanks for sharing. So true.

Re: The new Dropbox

#385

Post by tanderson92 »

Syzygies wrote: post #289
liyanage wrote: post #203

I've been a Dropbox user for many years but I'm looking for a replacement. What drives me nuts and hasn't gotten better over the years is their truly awful Python-based macOS client software. It is constantly burning a ton of CPU/battery. It's always at or near the top of Activity Monitor's list in the Energy tab. It seems like their app constantly reacts to any file system activity, even if that activity is outside…

Yes, their symlink handling is absurd, and they have the usual sanctimonious defense when questioned about this. To be fair, most commercial cloud services overthink this, and also get it wrong. A symlink is just a file, like any other. It is a user's responsibility to insure that a symlink will work elsewhere; cloud services should just copy the file, just like any other. The users who expect a symlink to trick a cl…

SyncThing also gets this right.

Re: The new Dropbox

#386

Post by fauigerzigerk »

brobdingnagians wrote: post #362
Shorel wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anyone still build native clients for anything? It seems no one bothers anymore, no matter the size of the company. Any native clients we have now were built years ago and now they are only maintained. I think nowadays even Audacity would be an Electron app.

I'm starting a company and writing native clients. There isn't any reason not to. There are lots of cross-platform GUI libraries that are fine for business applications, you get native speed, there are plenty of languages that are both safe and fast. You get full access to the full power of the OS if you need it. I think the current craze of non-native clients is because of web-developers who don't know how to do any…

>There are lots of cross-platform GUI libraries

In what sense is an app native if it uses cross-platform GUI libraries? Ahead of time compilation alone doesn't make an app native in my view.

Re: The new Dropbox

#387

Post by Max-q »

zymhan wrote: post #379
vvoyer wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After receiving an email like: > This is all for just $20.88 more a year 1. I never asked for anything more 2. you still charge me for more at a higher price I just bought 2TB data on iCloud, moving everything there. Now I will have good photo application with face recognition which is awesome. Do not expect any move from Dropbox to make your personal life better, they won't. They are going towards enterprise custome…

Did I miss where they're charging existing customers more? My account page still shows $99/yr.

I got a this mail:

> Dropbox Plus just got an upgrade. And a new price—starting on [xxx] , 2019 (that’s your next billing cycle), Dropbox Plus will be $119.88 a year (plus any applicable taxes).

Re: The new Dropbox

#388

Post by rconti »

ubermonkey wrote: post #73
microtonal wrote: post #11

Me and my wife ended both ended our Dropbox Plus subscriptions last weekend (after being paying users for five years or so). As a side-effect, my mom also cancelled her subscription (since she was using it to share photos with us). The primary reasons: - Constant nagging in the user interface to upgrade to Dropbox Pro or Dropbox Business. Don't want it, don't need it. - Accumulation of a lot of UI clutter over the ye…

>Accumulation of a lot of UI clutter over the years. Wow. I literally never see UI clutter, because I never log into the site, and only rarely use the iOS apps. DB is mostly just multi-system sync & versioning for me, and in that regard it works GREAT.

The UI got worse when they broke it, what, 4, 5, probably 6 years ago now? It USED to be a menu bar icon with a green check showing it was up to date. Now its just a box. Now when I click the dropdown I can either view a "notifications" or "recent files" tab, neither of which I want. One of my notifications (the oldest of the 3 that show on the screen is A YEAR old. It used to look like an OS X menu. Now it's just some weird list with arbitrary icons spewed all over the screen that's utterly inconsistent with everything else on my system.

At least it used to be clean. Now it's not.

Re: The new Dropbox

#389

Post by dole »

jammygit wrote: post #323
jonotime wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used Dropbox since the beginning, and Nextcloud for the last few years. Nextcloud client seems to use %10 of the memory of Dropbox on my machines. I'm now in the process of switching to SyncThing. The advantage of Syncthing over Nextcloud, is you can used it centralized or decentralized (without a server), I dont need to manage SSL certs and I dont have to poke holes in my firewall. Syncthing client also uses ve…

I had a lousy experience setting syncthing up for the first time, but then a really pleasant experience using it. I would recommend it as a decent sync option

For those on Windows, I recommend the SyncTrayzor Syncthing wrapper. Made the thought of getting Syncthing initially configured a lot less daunting and made getting off Dropbox much easier.

https://github.com/canton7/SyncTrayzor

Re: The new Dropbox

#390

Post by eridius »

agumonkey wrote: post #343
hobofan wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust doesn't sound too unrealistic, given that they were one of its first big commercial users.

they do rust ? fun

They use Rust in the datacenter. The layer that actually writes bits to disk is written in Rust. I don't know why they haven't yet deployed a native desktop client that's a Rust core with a thin platform-native GUI wrapper.
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