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Why we are leaving Dropbox

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Re: Why we are leaving Dropbox

#61

Post by zurn »

vetinari wrote: post #19
ccvannorman wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you using it for? Are you part of a company that shares everything on Dropbox, and how often do you use it? I'm also a "happy" Dropbox customer -- but I'm part of a 3-person startup and we only share relatively small files and folders. This post (and numerous others) make me think it's time to move on when we grow the team.

I always wondered, why do small companies use Dropbox at all? A 1 TB NAS in RAID-1 by Synology or QNAP will cost you about 400 EUR (including VAT). That's about 9% of what the author of the article paid for some 700 GB in Dropbox. It will do everything that Dropbox does, except you can use standard protocols (SMB, AFS, WebDAV, whatever) and the data will not leave your company.

A NAS box is going to get hacked (X), have backups neglected/misconfigured/misdelegated and then have data accidentally deleted or experience disk crashes, etc. You can improve your chances by investing time and energy on taking good care of it, but even then you can still get bitten.

(X) devices from both vendors you mentioned are pretty frequent victims

Re: Why we are leaving Dropbox

#62

Post by eevilspock »

fennecfoxen wrote: post #47
eevilspock wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

8. Condoleezza Rice on the board. 9. Mailbox app has server-side access to your email (Gmail or iCloud). This is totally unnecessary for a mail client. They claim they need it to support Snooze functionality, but that is not true. It can be implemented entirely in the client, storing snooze meta-data (with a reference to, not a copy of, the email) only on their servers for cross-device sync purposes.

I like that this new thing where we declare our political enemies anathema and refuse to do business with anything they're affiliated with. I think we need to escalate a little, though, and start boycotting every business that uses Dropbox, too. Also, Stanford. It's the only way to effect justice in this crazy messed-up world.

It's not about political enemies. It's about what choosing her says to me and many other people about Dropbox, their ethics and their priorities. Iraq war aside, the attitude of a board member about government power and the NSA's ability to snoop on any and all your data, in secret, protected by gag orders, is extremely relevant for a cloud service and for anyone who thinks what the NSA is doing is wrong.

Are you saying that it is wrong for people such as I to not trust or feel morally off using a business based upon the ethics or philosophy of its leadership?

Re: Why we are leaving Dropbox

#63

Post by slantyyz »

vetinari wrote: post #19
ccvannorman wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you using it for? Are you part of a company that shares everything on Dropbox, and how often do you use it? I'm also a "happy" Dropbox customer -- but I'm part of a 3-person startup and we only share relatively small files and folders. This post (and numerous others) make me think it's time to move on when we grow the team.

I always wondered, why do small companies use Dropbox at all? A 1 TB NAS in RAID-1 by Synology or QNAP will cost you about 400 EUR (including VAT). That's about 9% of what the author of the article paid for some 700 GB in Dropbox. It will do everything that Dropbox does, except you can use standard protocols (SMB, AFS, WebDAV, whatever) and the data will not leave your company.

>> I always wondered, why do small companies use Dropbox at all?

For smaller companies who don't want to manage infrastructure, the short answer is time.

* Setting up the NAS.

* Servicing the NAS when a drive fails.

* Setting up a backup for the NAS.

* Supporting people for connections to NAS

Re: Why we are leaving Dropbox

#64

Post by vetinari »

zurn wrote: post #61
vetinari wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always wondered, why do small companies use Dropbox at all? A 1 TB NAS in RAID-1 by Synology or QNAP will cost you about 400 EUR (including VAT). That's about 9% of what the author of the article paid for some 700 GB in Dropbox. It will do everything that Dropbox does, except you can use standard protocols (SMB, AFS, WebDAV, whatever) and the data will not leave your company.

A NAS box is going to get hacked (X), have backups neglected/misconfigured/misdelegated and then have data accidentally deleted or experience disk crashes, etc. You can improve your chances by investing time and energy on taking good care of it, but even then you can still get bitten. (X) devices from both vendors you mentioned are pretty frequent victims

Only devices with services exposed to Internet were hacked. Devices inside LAN, with external access provided by VPN, were not hacked.

This applies to any service or device that you run. NAS is no exception. Your printer could be hacked, if you exposed it to the Net.

Data can be accidentaly deleted anywhere, cloud providers or your own storage. You must make backups anyway.

Re: Why we are leaving Dropbox

#66

Post by xasos »

jayvanguard wrote: post #39
dheera wrote: post #32

I use Dropbox because they don't try to innovate on the UI side. I use it mainly to sync certain directories (like fonts, desktop backgrounds, themes, dotfiles, certain /etc files, code workspaces, and other configuration files) across my Linux machines. It's also a billion times more easy to use Dropbox with people from China than Google Drive because you can set up an EC2 server in Japan, install the command line v…

Same. Innovation is not what I want out of Dropbox. I want stability, speed, and continued bug fixes. The one point I agree with him on though is that the web interface could use some work.

This is what happened with Google. The innovated on the UI front multiple times, and I'm really starting to dislike their new design changes on Drive, GMail (by way of Inbox), etc.

Re: Why we are leaving Dropbox

#67

Post by rickyc091 »

leetrout wrote: post #65

Interesting opinions. I just reinvested myself in Dropbox now that CloudApp has hampered their free usage and raised their first tier pricing. http://getcloudapp.com/plans/ Dropbox's screenshot sharing is working really well and perfect replacement.

Take a look at https://minbox.com/. I use it as a replacement for cloudapp.

Re: Why we are leaving Dropbox

#68

Post by slantyyz »

vetinari wrote: post #59
smacktoward wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then you have to worry about keeping that VPN access secure. There's been cases where that's been a problem, like the ransomware attacks on Synology NAS boxes (see http://www.anandtech.com/show/8337/synology-advises-users-of... ). > to pay someone to get you such a NAS and configure everything for you is still a fraction of cost, that you would pay for cloud providers. Dropbox for Business costs what, $75/month f…

That ransomware attacks were on Synology boxes that had their web console exposed to the web. Nothing to worry about when using VPN.

>> Nothing to worry about when using VPN.

If you are a services/consulting company and do client work on-site, you often have to sign an agreement from the IT department that prevents you from using a VPN on the client's network. In those cases, your remote workers need web access to files.

Re: Why we are leaving Dropbox

#69

Post by perakojotgenije »

mw67 wrote: post #26
willyyr wrote: post #5

I expected to read the alternative solution you plan to use. Did i miss something?

I see only 3 alternatives anyway: 1/ Google Drive 2/ Box 3/ USB keys

www.copy.com gives you 20gb on free account. Has clients for windows, linux and mac. With this refferal [1] you get another 5gb.

https://copy.com?r=WV7J4N

Re: Why we are leaving Dropbox

#70

Post by kfk »

The worst thing for me is not being able to sync only 1 folder instead of the whole thing. When you are syncing a mobile phone, you don't want to be downloading GBs of stuff, maybe only 1 folder with your resized pictures...
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