We might be approaching a point where different different kinds of users and maybe different verticals will be able to justify separate file sharing apps. Or even all other apps, for that matter.
Yes, there is selective sync. Now use it to reduce consumption by 10GB. It requires lots of non-Dropbox tools to try to achieve that. They do need an alternate way similar to hierarchical storage that brings in files as you need/reference them, rather than everything.
It might be something to ask your IT folks if they've considered recently.
There are two large trends making it possible:
1) It gets cheaper to make software.
2) Technology becomes cheaper and more prevalent in the hands of the end users, especially mobile tech, thus increasing the addressable market size.
Resultingly, it becomes viable to create distinct software for separate user groups. This is a trend reversal from the previous 20 years, when different groups of users were trying to use the same piece of software. As the "universal" software gets more complex, it requires more customization, so its the usability is eroding (see: dropbox file deletion problem). A tailored solution is inherently more user-friendly. At least that's my story and I'm sticking to it! :)
You should ask yourself that question any time you write an article. (Or give a talk, teach a lesson...) If you gave enough information, that should sound like a stupid question. But if it sounds like something that might reasonably be asked, you forgot to communicate something important. In this case, the big missing piece of data is what they will be using instead of dropbox.
Because without that critical piece of data, this entire article can be summed up as "Dropbox sucks."
Not sure "so what?" is a reasonable test anyway. If you're snarky enough, couldn't you ask that about any article at all?
Personally i moved all my storage, contacts and calendars over to a self-hosted owncloud instance, which i did not regret so far. But i'm not going to write an article about it ...
I don't care if they innovate or not. I care that the experience of using Dropbox is measurably worse than it was a year ago.
If I'm running, say, npm install or bundle install or installing Xcode (or doing anything else I/O heavy), Dropbox starts using a bunch of CPU, proportional to the amount of I/O going on at the time. Note that none of these operations are inside my Dropbox folder.
I do believe the FSEvents infrastructure allows you to just watch an individual folder [1], so it shouldn't have to be this way...
[1]: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin...
As far as I can tell, there's no way to tell which of my 18,394 files are stuck.
I'm using Mac Mini with HDD and Dropbox takes 90% of disk I/O when there are more than 20-30 files updating.
I used to keep my projects in Dropbox folder before but now it literally slows my work.
(Disclaimer: this is a referral link that will give us 5gb https://copy.com?r=b2yUAQ ;-))
Let's not forget they have a working Linux client. Maybe things have changed since I last looked, but they were one of the few supporting Linux (both cli and gui).
I can even use the photo sync from multiple devices because it creates folders per phone
My company forces me to use a proxy so I must manually configure Dropbox and Copy with that proxy info even though I've already configured OS X to use the proxy. Why can't they obtain the system-wide OS X proxy info that all other (non command line) apps use?
When I'm not at work the proxy isn't available and neither Dropbox nor Copy will recognize that fact and bypass it. Instead they just hang, even though all other GUI apps are fine. I have to manually turn proxying off in each app in order to get syncing to work. It's not only a pain to do this but it's also easy to forget, and then you wind up with files you need that haven't been synced.
So what are you switching to?
I really like BTSync for th following:
1) Like git the copies are on local machines
2) I control the servers and I control the folders that are shared
3) Super fast in a local network
4) You can use whatever encryption you want and it works perfectly
5) You can selectively sync individual folders and files
6) Easy to share things that are Read Only or Read/Write
https://github.com/pjc50/pjc50.github.io/blob/master/secure-... : my own notes on sync/cloud storage services. I have my own prejudices as to what I want, but that may align well with the prejudices of HN.
Sounds like an opportunity.
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 version of Dropbox, and have it serve a synced directory over HTTPS from a non-blocked IP address. Can't do that easily with Google Drive or anything that tries to be too much.
The one point I agree with him on though is that the web interface could use some work.
1/ Google Drive
2/ Box
3/ USB keys
But it seems the OS vendors have lost their way and are chasing shiny colors and new hardware, as usual.
Wasn't so long ago you kind of expected a new filesharing technology to be built-in to the operating system. But it does seem like those days are over - the line keeps getting redrawn, which defines what an "OS" is, to most people. At this point, at least in the case of Dropbox, the Web seems to have driven us all mad.
Store your stuff outside your house, on someone elses hardware? Really?
Good point, and actually I'll start to accommodate this in my considerations of the topic in the future.
7. Deceptive advertising. Telling their customers that they encrypt data enroute and at rest without telling them that they use a single common password for every customer.
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.
It's the only way to effect justice in this crazy messed-up world.
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.
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.
> It’s such a flawed design.
> One major advantage of cloud storage and selective sync is that I conveniently want to be able to re-organise files and folders through my Browser, without actually being forced to download everything first.
Hmm. The way I see it the Web UI is a bonus and a fall back when you are not near the computer where it's much easier to move files and folders around. Dropbox was sold and still sell as `files on your devices synced everywhere´ not `central mainline repo that downloads to your devices´.
I am old school, I still think that file management in the browser doesn't work well.
But I agree the desktop client (win and mac) got slower and slower (UI wise). My debian installation runs a previous version that is much faster.
I am glad they aren't packing it with new features that would disturb the dropbox mental model every layman has.
This way, you'd be able to have petabytes of stuff seemingly "synced" to your local disk; stuff would just be (much) slower to access the first time, or if you hadn't used it in a while. (Sort of like Apple's "fusion drives", but with the spinning disk very, very far away.)
It's almost like a FUSE-mounted WebDAV share or somesuch, but where you interact with it through its local cache on your real filesystem, rather than by your OS making its read/write requests to the server itself.
OK, 55GB that’s way more than most of storage services offer. Plus - here is the deal - Hubic offers true folder syncing (not like Dropbox or Onedrive, just one folder), plus they offer backup option only. The mobile device apps are pretty good. One thing I like about Hubic is it give expiry dates on shared links.
SugarSync doesn’t provide free space. Cubby has limited storage and you have to do a lot of work to get some space. Copy is not interesting anymore since they cut the referral program. Dropbox sucks because you have to do 30 referrals to get just a few Gig space. I find HubiC is pretty good and it now pretty fast, I am averaging 2-3 GB upload per hour which is pretty decent. Here is a sign up link to get you extra 5GB in addition to 25GB plus you can get 25 GB additional space for a total of 55GB of space easily on HubiC: https://hubic.com/nl/offers?referral=CYHNPO .....
Just sign up with this link and you get the bonus space instead of the regular 25GB if you go directly through Hubic website. And you can have peace of mind HubiC is owned by OVH, they are pretty big internet hosting company, hosting is in Europe.
Right now they have 500,000 accounts, which is pretty impressive for a service that just started a couple of months ago.
If you decide to subscribe to their service, it’s starts at 80 cents per month, pretty good price, so no need to prepay chunk of money and you can cancel anytime.
Here is the link again: https://hubic.com/nl/offers?referral=CYHNPO
Cheers.
Unsure why "they" would not come out and say that.
Complaint #2 - It's buggy.
Oooooooooooooooook.
Dropbox's screenshot sharing is working really well and perfect replacement.
How does Dropbox make this better than google docs or different from the network drive we all access on the company server by VPN?
The desktop app allows you to select a subset of folders to sync: https://www.dropbox.com/en/help/175
Not returning any meaningful information when problems arise is the most annoying aspect of modern apps, especially on phones. Even Windows cryptic error numbers were better than this.
Spideroak FTW! If you keep an eye open for promos and stuff, it's not hard to rival a free Dropbox account.
(For things I don't care about or need to use in collaborative settings, I still use Google Drive and OneDrive)
Google doing actual customer support? I thought the internet said that never happened.
I use bittorrent sync (stay with 1.3.109 until they stop messing it up or syncthing gets a bit more mature). I've never paid for it, it Just Works (no install, just binary, takes literally 30 seconds to get two machines syncing, I've used it to send files to my mum because it's easier than teaching her to use mediafire), it's not storage limited, it end-to-end encrypts and because it's peer to peer, it is way faster because it doesn't upload to a server first.
Remind me again why you lot insist on using third party providers for this stuff?
I have a dedicated Linux server from Kimsufi which runs any testing I need to do for my work and also has a BitTorrent Sync client installed. I have Sync installed on my phone, laptop and work computer, so anything I need to share I can, easily and quickly.
