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The new Dropbox

blog.dropbox.com

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Re: The new Dropbox

#531

Post by Naac »

pedroaraujo wrote: post #206
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…

Seafile is a wonderful Dropbox replacement: - https://www.seafile.com/en/home/ Open-source and all. :)

Only the community edition is open source. Nextcloud has no "Enterprise" edition.

Re: The new Dropbox

#532

Post by Naac »

cmer wrote: post #450
pedroaraujo wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seafile is a wonderful Dropbox replacement: - https://www.seafile.com/en/home/ Open-source and all. :)

Seconded. Significantly better than Nextcloud for file syncing. Nextcloud syncs over Webdav which can be pretty painful.

> Significantly better than Nextcloud for file syncing

Can you share numbers?

Re: The new Dropbox

#533

Post by shrimp_emoji »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #380
Traster wrote: post #12

I strongly feel this is a bad direction for Dropbox. Many companies have tried to integrate tools together. It's always half-baked simply because those tools aren't designed to be integrated. I find it kind of odd Dropbox would be bragging about a dropdown menu to create a Google doc. Surely if that's important to me I get Google drive - the integration will be better because the same company makes the different tool…

> Personally what I value is just basic cloud storage with a decent automatic sync. That reminds me of a pretty famous Quora answer (here https://www.quora.com/Dropbox-product/Why-is-Dropbox-more-po... ) that described why Dropbox succeeded: > Well, let's take a step back and think about the sync problem and what the ideal solution for it would do: There would be a folder. You'd put your stuff in it. It would sync. T…

I've looked for Dropbox alternatives, and none of them match up in ease of use or features. A folder you put stuff into and that syncs to everything else (with optional selectivity so that your 250 GB music library isn't synced where you don't want it) is amazing, and that it works on everything from iOS to Windows to Linux is amazing.

It'd be great if the clients were native and faster or whatever, but shipping beats perfection.

Re: The new Dropbox

#534

Post by azinman2 »

manigandham wrote: post #490
azinman2 wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not.” We aren’t talking about corporations, but rather publicly traded companies. As the previous article pointed out you do have an obligation to your shareholders, and that obligation is to somehow act in their best interest. Certainly the stock market price goes down if you aren’t growing.…

The stock price does not have to keep going up. Dividends and buybacks are another option based on cashflow which doesn't require growth.

And can they remain flat without impact stock performance?

Re: The new Dropbox

#535

Post by rsync »

bubblethink wrote: post #500
rsync wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"To be fair, most commercial cloud services overthink this, and also get it wrong." ssh user@rsync.net ls -asl some/dir ... looking good ... "There's exactly one sync program that gets it all right: Unison, written by Benjamin Pierce" ssh user@rsync.net unison Usage: unison [options] or unison root1 root2 [options] or unison profilename [options] (Ask about the HN readers' discount)

I have always been intrigued by your service, and will probably try it at some point for a smallish setup for important data, but whenever I think of backups in the TB range, it gets way out of budget (even after accounting for borg or other discounts). Do you have any plans to compete on pricing with other popular cloud/storage providers? I understand that this is a different product for a different audience.

"Do you have any plans to compete on pricing with other popular cloud/storage providers?"

We try to keep out pricing very roughly inline with Amazon S3. If you know to look for the discount signup rates it should be very slightly cheaper than S3.

We can't promise customers support from real UNIX engineers and also match B2 pricing. I'm happy with that and plan to continue on that path ...

We would be very happy to have you.

Re: The new Dropbox

#536

Post by bigiain »

mzs wrote: post #435
Syzygies wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"symlink is just a file…" A file for which you exclusively use lstat() & readlink() instead of all the other usual functions in the standard library you use for regular files. What about named pipes? Or sockets? Or whiteout? Are they too just files since they have a filename?

"Please wait: backing up /dev/urandom - 0% of NaN"

(To be fair, anyone who tries to backup /dev deserves whatever they get...)

Re: The new Dropbox

#537

Post by granshaw »

apple4ever wrote: post #523
Barrin92 wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>No, shut up. Most of the world doesn't sit in front of their browser all day. well, I've got bad news for the guy. Just being a data storage company is probably not a great business strategy because the web and competition have become ubiquitous.

I disagree. If you have a niche, and you do it WELL, you can do that. And Dropbox did. But now they are messing that up. And not just this. They implemented a 3 device limit, and the next level is super expensive. Unlike any of their competitors. I'd say that is not a great business strategy.

Doing well in a small niche is fine for a lifestyle company - for a public company like Dropbox expected to keep growing? Not so much.

Re: The new Dropbox

#538

Post by liyanage »

icebraining wrote: post #332
bretpiatt wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you say 'support symlinks' what behavior would you expect the service to have with them? I run a company with sync software, we treat them same as any other file so if you have one in a folder set to sync, we sync it, we don't follow the link and sync the linked file (as the link could go outside of the configured sync folder).

I guess you're doing it the way liyanage prefers. Dropbox, on the other hand, follows symlinks: https://aurelio.net/articles/dropbox-symlinks.html

Yes that's exactly what I need. Just sync the symlinks to the server and back down. Don't follow them.

Re: The new Dropbox

#539

Post by vonseel »

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…

why would I need 2TB if I am only using 200-300GB of space?

I don’t understand how anyone outside of photographers and people working with audio or video could need that kind of storage.

I have used Dropbox and Google Drive with around 1TB of Logic Pro X projects before, but that’s a ton of data to keep laying around (without using selective sync) and represents much more than the “active” projects I actually need to keep handy.

As a normal personal user, I’m probably closer to your estimates of 200-300GB of data and that’s mostly iPhone photos data. I currently stored my photos with Google but am planning to move my data over to iCloud since all my devices are Apple and performance seems better.

Re: The new Dropbox

#540

Post by jolmg »

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…

> The users who expect a symlink to trick a cloud service into special behaviour (like syncing folders elsewhere) are also wrong.

I use neither Dropbox nor Unison, but on the treatment of symbolic links, every program that somehow manages files have some sort of configuration option to decide whether or not to follow symbolic links. It's not about tricking a service into special behaviour. It's just that either handling by following or not following the links are both appropriate behaviour in different situations.

In the case of Unison, it chooses not to follow by default, but it also can be configured to follow as described here:

https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/download/releases...

Furthermore, when the destination host is a Windows system, Unison refuses to not to follow a symbolic link, since Windows doesn't support symbolic links.

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