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The new Dropbox

blog.dropbox.com

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Re: The new Dropbox

#581

Post by robyn92 »

FullyFunctional wrote: post #164
randlet wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been happy with pCloud which has Win/Linux/Mac/Android/iOS clients.

I pay for both and pCloud is cheap but inferior (for me) in two ways: 1. pCloud doesn't support file permissions or symlinks, thus you can't use it as a real filesystem (eg, building and testing software out of it). 2. pCould is a "cloud fs" (the files aren't on a host filesystem), whereas Dropbox is syncing a host filesystem. The difference is very visible in performance. If the first issue was fixed (I've asked the…

Up vote for pCloud, definitely worth it!

Re: The new Dropbox

#582

Post by scifi6546 »

joshschreuder wrote: post #474
mattnewport wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know you're being facetious but email clients fail to satisfy me primarily when it comes to search and organization, remaining performant when dealing with large archives of mail, good UI/UX and robustness / reliability. None of these are really problems inherent to email, though they are perhaps inherent to software.

I think the same problems appear in other domains with large libraries. Music players have also been historically terrible with bad UI, slow searching and many of the same issues you mentioned.

surprisingly I have found rhytmbox by the gnome devs to be pretty good. It does what is supposed to very well and it works which is all I want out of a digital music player.

Re: The new Dropbox

#583

Post by scifi6546 »

asdff wrote: post #211
blowski wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree - grow or die. “Do one thing well” might work well for open source Unix CLI tools, but not for companies with shareholders expecting dividends. I wish it wasn’t that way, but that is how it is.

That's the issue with taking too much funding or going public. You become beholden to the profit margin and the quality of the product is completely irrelevant if it still prints money. You turn your company into a metastasis, demanding exponential growth, market share, and profit as the only metrics of success. What ever happened to just doing well enough to pay the bills, your employees, and a touch saved for a rai…

The open source world really kills your argument. Red Hat is on the stock exchange and it is fairly happy to work on a product for long time periods (rhel and related products) without it turning into a gigantic blob. I feel it just depends on the industry. Some industries want rapid development while others (like the enterprise) value stability.

Re: The new Dropbox

#584

Post by bradgessler »

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…

Agreed. Their iOS client is a huge pain too. Finding files is a bear. It’s so bad that Apple’s “File” app is a much better way to browse and search Dropbox files. I suspect in macOS Catalina we’ll be able to search files through a similar way.

Also, Dropbox Paper shows the same lack of attention to detail. The iOS client has all sorts of really stupid basic bugs like undo and copy & paste not working properly. It’s nuts.

It feels like Dropbox’s culture is to ship a product and not do the hard work that it takes to make the core basics rock solid on all devices and platforms. It’s really hard work, but it’s essential for a user base as large as theirs.

The even harder part is for their leadership and PMs to say “No” to new features until they hey the basics right; otherwise they are going to find themselves in the position of doing a lot of things not very well.

Re: The new Dropbox

#585

Post by pathartl »

Naac wrote: post #530
pathartl wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then self-host Nextcloud on your NAS. Nextcloud's implementation is terrible. > IMO all hardware and data should be entangled with the Secure Enclave/T2 chip This is an absolutely terrible implementation of security. There is no reason that your data should be tied to a circuit board that does everything. Mac logic boards are ticking time bombs. > I don't get tech people who do this. You go to a store, ask about a…

> Nextcloud's implementation is terrible. Please explain more

I have two major problems with it, what it's written in and how it manages files.

It's written in PHP. I'm not complaining about the language... I started as a PHP dev and fully recognize why an establishment might use it. The issue I have is PHP is always a pain in the ass to get configured properly. Of course there's always docker implementations, but even those haven't been constructed well imo.

Secondly, the way it manages files is absolutely terrible. Now I haven't really used it in about a year so I don't remember the specifics, but I now have a folder on my NAS that is pretty much not removable due to what I believe is an abuse of ACLs. What I really need is just something with a web interface that can sync with my other devices without imposing its own file/folder structure. At least with my experience in the past, this is a pain with Nextcloud.

Re: The new Dropbox

#586

Post by dflock »

layer8 wrote: post #527
dflock wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dropbox linux client works, but it's not great. It's recently stopped syncing for me because it now only supports ext4 filesystems, for some reason - and I currently have everything on btrfs.

You can use a loopback file to work around that, e.g. see https://metabubble.net/linux/how-to-keep-using-dropbox-even-... .

Thanks, didn't know that. I think I'll just stop using Dropbox, though.

Re: The new Dropbox

#587

Post by cookiecaper »

rsync wrote: post #547
jng wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried to use unison for serious production work a few years ago, and it fell short. It would fail or become incredibly slow with large (but not huge) amounts of data. A pity because the concept is great. I wonder if it has improved since.

"I wonder if it has improved since." Unison is very interesting and it is, indeed, very special in that it solves the very specific use-case of my parent post. However, my own opinion, and that of just about everyone who cares about backup tools is that 'borg' is the "one true way": https://www.stavros.io/posts/holy-grail-backups/

I played with borg some in the early days and was unimpressed with some of the methodology and code quality displayed on public forums like GitHub. This is kind of archival work MUST be correct and carefully designed due to its sensitive nature. I hope I'm not giving the project an unfair shake here, but I checked it again recently and the first several lines of the GitHub page list 3-4 fairly recent versions that have caveats around data corruption and the like ...

This is not really isolated to borg, so I don't want to pick on them too much (plz shield your eyes in the direction of rclone...), but calling it the "holy grail" is a bit rich IMO. This kind of stuff is simply not industrial grade software.

Re: The new Dropbox

#588

Post by b2gills »

gjm11 wrote: post #421
hobofan wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> going from 2 to 3 isn't that hard That's true now, 6 months from EOL of Python 2, where all the common dependencies have upgraded, and there finally is agreement that Python 3 is the way forward. That should have been true on the day Python 3 was released.

Going from 2 to 3 isn't that hard because Python 3 was released ages ago with the expectation that the changeover would be gradual. The only ways I can see to make it that easy on the day Python 3 was released are (1) no backward-incompatible changes (but enabling such changes was the whole point of Python 3) or (2) doing all the preparatory work before "releasing" Python 3, which in practice would have taken just as…

Not to mention that just about all of the changes I've heard about in Python from 2 to 3 are changes that Perl5 has already handled in a backwards compatible way. (In at least some cases the changes happened more than a decade ago.)

Re: The new Dropbox

#589

Post by yangcheng »

I don't get why I would save a google doc in Dropbox. I just tried that, and the Dropbox's search can't search content on my google doc. The google doc also takes five more seconds to load compared to if I just create a google doc on google, and it's not available offline either. So what're the real benefits users get?

Re: The new Dropbox

#590

Post by Naac »

pathartl wrote: post #585
Naac wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nextcloud's implementation is terrible. Please explain more

I have two major problems with it, what it's written in and how it manages files. It's written in PHP. I'm not complaining about the language... I started as a PHP dev and fully recognize why an establishment might use it. The issue I have is PHP is always a pain in the ass to get configured properly. Of course there's always docker implementations, but even those haven't been constructed well imo. Secondly, the way…

Can't speak to your first point, as my only interaction with Nextcloud php configuration has been to comment in/out various php modules. I don't have too many modules though, so maybe that's why I haven't had any configuration issues.

Regarding file management, the working solution for me has been to mount any external storage with a fuse mount ( NAS, dropbox, etc. ), and then just use the Nextcloud "external storage" option. Other than Nextcloud's general slowness ( I'm running on an underpowered server ) I haven't had any issues.

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