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Dropbox silently installed new file manager app on users’ systems

arstechnica.com

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Re: Dropbox silently installed new file manager app on users’ systems

#91

Post by mrlala »

bhouston wrote: post #40
CPLX wrote: post #3

This seems like a good time to resurface the worlds best Quora answer, by Michael Wolfe. Answering “Why is Dropbox more popular than other tools with similar functionality?”: 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. They built that. Why didn't anyone else build that? I have no idea. "B…

> "But," you may ask, "so much more you could do! What about task management, calendaring, customized dashboards, virtual white boarding. More than just folders and files!" > > No, shut up. People don't use that crap. They just want a folder. A folder that syncs. This argument is a good one but it only covers the rise of Dropbox. We are now in a different era. Dropbox's functionality is now table stakes and not somet…

Dropbox can handle a LOT of files. I haven't seen any other service that doesn't just break.

OneDrive cannot handle tons of files. It just doesn't work. It ends up freezing, you have no idea what's going on. Can't speak to macOS related stuff.

We finally were able to migrate off of this.. but we had a VERY file hefty folder structure. Instead of databases we chose to keep things in individual files for various reasons. Needless to say this didn't scale well, and there were about 750k files on the structure. Most of this was archival, but we simply didn't have the time or care enough to reduce the number of files.. we just wanted to be able to sync this to cloud data as is. Many files were super small, so never an absolute size thing just a LOT of files. And a chunk would keep changing throughout the day.

Dropbox was able to handle this for years- never an issue. Yeah it was fairly CPU intensive, but it worked very well.

I tried OneDrive on this.. what a nightmare. I tried owncloud, bittorrent sync, some others I can't even recall. Granted this has been about 3-4 years since I really tried some other ones with lots of files, but I was so annoyed every time I did.

Re: Dropbox silently installed new file manager app on users’ systems

#92

Post by scarface74 »

zapnuk wrote: post #30
nessunodoro wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love my Nextcloud so much. I use it all day every day and it just works. It's missing a few tiny things on my wish list, but it's crazy to me how I don't miss Dropbox at all. I can't speak for what it's like to administer Nextcloud for a large org, but for my personal work sync it is a godsend. Easily my favorite software of the last three years.

I just switched back to dropbox after switching to Nextcloud. For some reason I constantly got a'... could not be downloaded because of a local file clash' error with 6 files. 2*3 files have the same name but are in different subfolders. I've searched for this error, deleted the filed locally and in the cloud. Every time I add them again, I get the same error. Not to mention that I get reminded of this error every 30…

There are so many better options then Dropbox.

iCloud once Apple introduces folder sharing in iOS 13.

OneDrive - $9.99 a month full Office Suite including on mobile/web and 6TB of storage. There is a third party Linux client (https://www.expandrive.com/onedrive-for-linux/)

Re: Dropbox silently installed new file manager app on users’ systems

#93

Post by hylaride »

blackbrokkoli wrote: post #24

Dropbox current direction just makes me sad. I struggled with file management for a long time - balancing accessibility from phone, highly effective programming environments, backing up large quantities of not-small photos, that stuff. So I sat down one afternoon, drafted a directory structure, subbed to Dropbox and...it worked so well. Synced my configs between machines, got an Android app which could preview lot's…

I had the same experience with dropbox. I first started to balk at them when the agent kept sucking more and more memory as updates came, then everything you describe. I ultimately just went all-in with icloud. The pricing is (now) better than dropbox, but I'm also all-in on the Apple ecosystem.

Re: Dropbox silently installed new file manager app on users’ systems

#94

Post by pestaa »

izzydata wrote: post #55

Ever since they killed public folder hosting I've mostly stopped using Dropbox and moved to Imgur. I want to be able to drag pictures into a folder and then right click them and get a url to give to people. It was also nice for various types of small files. I haven't found anything else that has that level of convenience. The windows context menus on right click were very good and now they are gone.

I use NextCloud and it has this feature on the desktop. Though it may be a dialog box first to configure expiration date, and password, I don't fully recall.

Agreed about the public folder hosting. I remember memorizing my Dropbox user ID just so I could send people a public URL within seconds.

Re: Dropbox silently installed new file manager app on users’ systems

#95

Post by seanieb »

blackbrokkoli wrote: post #24

Dropbox current direction just makes me sad. I struggled with file management for a long time - balancing accessibility from phone, highly effective programming environments, backing up large quantities of not-small photos, that stuff. So I sat down one afternoon, drafted a directory structure, subbed to Dropbox and...it worked so well. Synced my configs between machines, got an Android app which could preview lot's…

You really should opt in to try the new client. I have. It’s identical to before unless you want to use the new file browser for search or something else it can remain closed.

Re: Dropbox silently installed new file manager app on users’ systems

#96

Post by untog »

speeder wrote: post #54
bhouston wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SoundBlaster sold sound cards as well, but then sound cards got integrated into the motherboards and now only <0.01% of people buy sound cards.

What killed SBlaster was not motherboards having sound cards. It was movie studios convincing microsoft to ban from Windows the best featuresof SBlaster cards (those features are STILL banned by the way) because they were afraid of people using them to pirate movies. It is a reaaaaally long story, but to make it short: MS changed radically how windows drivers worked, and what a driver could do, during the transition…

The vast majority of people didn't buy Sound Blaster cards for their advanced 3D sound rendering, though. They bought them to play sound at a level more advanced than a PC speaker, which is what most had at the time.

Once motherboards integrated that there was no need for most people to buy a separate sound card. I know I didn't, especially when working out what you're spending your money on - video cards were far more important. But those, too, have become less important as integrated graphics have improved.

Re: Dropbox silently installed new file manager app on users’ systems

#97

Post by jcranberry »

0_gravitas wrote: post #90

Perhaps I dont fully understand the value of something like DropBox, when it comes to syncing my files the only thing I've ever needed has been github (or other online repo). Among syncing it has all the other version control goodness, and I will likely use it until I can setup some kind of home server

From the users perspective git is an application which you use to actively maintain a repo. Whereas Dropbox is more or less just a magic folder. Entirely different levels of convenience.

Re: Dropbox silently installed new file manager app on users’ systems

#98

Post by redm »

carti wrote: post #68
redm wrote: post #7

I don't think this was a mistake. The mistake is that they were automatically switched but I'm sure they intended to download and install it in the background. I know several people who clicked "try the new dropbox" and it was instantly installed/available. I'm not sure this is a problem because I/they asked to try it, but it still felt a bit odd that it was already installed. Uncanny Valley. https://en.wikipedia.org…

I don't think the uncanny valley concept is really applicable here, unless the file manager resembles a human. It's certainly a departure from the expected behavior, though.

I think its fairly widely accepted that the Uncanny Valley principle can be applied to things like usability and design.

For example: https://medium.com/s/user-friendly/the-ux-uncanny-valley-cf3...

Re: Dropbox silently installed new file manager app on users’ systems

#99

Post by theamk »

speeder wrote: post #54
bhouston wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SoundBlaster sold sound cards as well, but then sound cards got integrated into the motherboards and now only <0.01% of people buy sound cards.

What killed SBlaster was not motherboards having sound cards. It was movie studios convincing microsoft to ban from Windows the best featuresof SBlaster cards (those features are STILL banned by the way) because they were afraid of people using them to pirate movies. It is a reaaaaally long story, but to make it short: MS changed radically how windows drivers worked, and what a driver could do, during the transition…

I don't think this is the case. I remember seeing something about 3D sound in the card settings, thinking "that's not going to work with my 2.1 speaker system, must be just a useless gimmiky DSP" -- and never using it again. Most of my friends had the same experience.

Later on, I got a new computer and a much better speakers, and spent some time getting digital output to work. I used my motherboard for that, because at this stage, I wanted soundcard to be just a simple, stupid data sender. No DSP, no "advanced 3D sound rendering" -- the ideal sound card takes data from input (DVD) and sends them to speakers, acting as a dumb data pipe.

Same goes for "fancy CRT features" -- what is that exactly that CRTs can do that flat-screens can not? Other than duck hunt-style controllers, I don't think there is anything.

Re: Dropbox silently installed new file manager app on users’ systems

#100

Post by inops »

the_pwner224 wrote: post #18
chiefalchemist wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw Nextcloud ( https://nextcloud.com/ ) mentioned above but I'm not seeing anything that looks like a personal (or SMB) solution. Where should I be looking? What product/page? tia

You can either host it on your own server or find a free public server. I self-host it for just me (one user) and it works. It's PHP so the setup should be pretty easy.

I run my Nextcloud instance (for me and family) on a Raspberry Pi 3. The web interface is fairly slow because of the hardware (and likely my configuration :p), but it serves nicely as a Dropbox replacement.
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