6 ms·

It's not amazing at all :) I still struggle to find a reason why should I use dropbox over ftp or any other file repository service. I guess marketing and creat

by zerr 10y ago

It's not amazing at all :) I still struggle to find a reason why should I use dropbox over ftp or any other file repository service. I guess marketing and creating artificial buzz played big role in their success.

briandear 10y ago
Explain FTP to your mom and see how long it takes them to figure out how to do it. Also how can you FTP from an iPhone? How do you have local copies on multiple device stay in sync? How do you share a link to your file to a third party? I'm talking about normal people and not experienced engineers.
- drdaeman 10y ago
  I did, and dad uses this to share files with friends, privately (I had eventually built a tiny Flask app that does access checks and serves same files over HTTP). It's just a network-connected external drive to him.
sgift 10y ago
Comfort. The reason is comfort.
sergiotapia 10y ago
I gladly pay $100/year to never ever ever EVER have to hear my wife complaining about me losing the pictures of us and the kids. You can't put a price on that my friend. :) Same reason I pay for iCloud storage on our family account. Peace of mind. Could I wire up some rsync contraption, sure maybe - would I sleep peacefully? No.
- zepolen 10y ago
  Google photos is better for that.
  - kw71 10y ago
    So long as Google decides to keep the service operating, maybe.
    - icebraining 10y ago
      Yes, but Dropbox isn't even profitable yet.
  - tonyplee 10y ago
    I have 1/2 TB of pictures kids pic, videos from cell phone, SLR etc backup to multiple HDD. If everyone put 1/2 TB or more to google, can google backend really handle that, if so for how long? Also need to consider how long it will take me to download back those pic once they decide to shutdown the "free" service.
    - TulliusCicero 10y ago
      > If everyone put 1/2 TB or more to google, can google backend really handle that, if so for how long? Not everyone is going to do that though (anytime soon anyway) so that's not a real concern. It's like asking when gmail first launched "okay but what if EVERYONE uses the full gigabyte?"
    - i336_ 10y ago
      I'll answer in reverse order: > Also need to consider how long it will take me to download back those pic once they decide to shutdown the "free" service. This is an incredibly good point, both in terms of bandwidth considerations (particularly their ratelimiting) and in terms of products randomly disappearing with limited takeout windows. FWIW, https://get.google.com/albumarchive/<G+ https://get.google.com/albumarchive/<G+ UID> will net you takeout archives of your image albums. Incidentally this works with any Google account that doesn't have public photo access turned off, and is rather fun to play with (as is the site: search operator :D) -- > can google backend really handle that, if so for how long? YouTube used to officially report that 300 hours are uploaded per minute, back in 2014. http://tubularinsights.com/hours-minute-uploaded-youtube/ http://tubularinsights.com/hours-minute-uploaded-youtube/ says we're likely at 700hr/min now. OK. (Been wanting to do this math for a while, actually...) Let's see. This is all back-of-the-envelope and I wouldn't mind some more concrete numbers to work with! YT reencodes all videos into several formats. I'm looking at http://youtu.be/1tQ5XwvjPmA http://youtu.be/1tQ5XwvjPmA, which is 1:20:58 long. It was uploaded fairly recently so has the full complement of encodings. I see: - 5 DASH audio bitrates: 51k (27.53MB), 66k (31.93MB), and 120k (58.02MB) for clients that can decode OPUS, 89k Vorbis (46.67MB), and 132k M4A (73.16MB) - 6 DASH video sizes in both WebM/MP4 (so 12 total formats): 256x144 (43.09MB / 63.54MB); 426x240 (39.79MB / 140.34MB); 640x360 (71.80MB / 122.65MB); 854x480 (118.37MB / 266.00MB); 1280x720 (234.63MB / 548.81MB); and 1920x1080 (463.04MB / 1.05GB). (Yes, WebM is amazing compared to MP4.) - Three legacy video formats: 176x144 3GP (39.51MB), 320x180 3GP (116.05MB), 640x360 WebM (211.30MB), 640x360 MP4 (205.97MB), and 1280x720 MP4 (621.68MB). So, for this standard, 30fps 1080p video, YouTube is actually storing... 4.51GB of data. Huh! Nice. If this video is 1h20m, 1-(60/80) means I should subtract 25% from 4.51, and I get 3.38GB for one hour of video. OK. Taking that figure of 700 hours... that's 2366GB (2.31TB) per minute :) In other words YouTube needs to find disk capacity for 39.42GB of data every second. I'm not sure how to multiply by an increasing gradient with a back-of-the-envelope calculation, so I'll punt and pretend it was 700 hours/min all the way back to 2014, so the past 2 years. Quite inaccurate, but possibly still interesting: (2.31 * (1024^4)) * 12 * 365 * 2 = 22249277495024025.60 Uhh.... that's... ah. 22PB. Err, 19.76PB to be precise. This is for the boring 30fps-and-under 1080p videos out there. Not the 60fps, 2K/4K/8K (!), 360° and similar stuff, and there's an increasing pile of that being uploaded.
- skuzye 10y ago
  I agree. Having them take care of backups has a lot of worth in my book also
- pjc50 10y ago
  Funnily enough, I wrote a "one-way sync your OneDrive to external disk" tool for my wife to avoid the opposite problem: loss of data due to failures of the paid-for sync solution.
CPLX 10y ago
Every time this topic comes up, which is reasonably often, I like to link to this: http://www.michaelrwolfe.com/2013/10/19/why-is-dropbox-more-popular-than-other-programs-with-similar-functionality/ http://www.michaelrwolfe.com/2013/10/19/why-is-dropbox-more-...
- jodrellblank 10y ago
  Which is funny because 'a folder, that syncs' is what the Windows 95 briefcase was for. It was nice. And they ditched it for Offline Folders, which was "a folder that syncs, until it breaks all the time". And in the meantime, here's Joel Spolsky in 2008: “Imagine all your devices—PCs, and soon Macs and mobile phones—working together to give you anywhere access to the information you care about.” And what is this Windows Live Mesh? It’s a way to synchronize files. Jeez, we’ve had that forever. When did the first sync web sites start coming out? 1999? There were a million versions. xdrive, mydrive, idrive, youdrive, wealldrive for ice cream. Nobody cared then and nobody cares now, because synchronizing files is just not a killer application. I’m sorry. It seems like it should be. But it’s not. Damn, they just finished building something called Windows Live FolderShare and I haven’t exactly noticed a stampede to that. I’ll bet you’ve never even heard of it. [..] this so called synchronization problem is just not an actual problem, it’s a fun programming exercise that you’re doing because it’s just hard enough to be interesting but not so hard that you can’t figure it out. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/05/01/architecture-astronauts-take-over/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/05/01/architecture-astro... And now Microsoft is ditching Offline Folders which break a lot, for Work Folders - folders that sync over HTTPS, without a local hidden cache.
  - zerr 10y ago
    Also, I don't remember names, but there were similar 3rd party paid services in late 90s - and they also had virtual disks integrated in Windows.
laumars 10y ago
I get that many techies can live without Dropbox and it's ilk (myself included), but NOBODY should ever be advocating FTP. It's insure (no encryption - unless you're talking about FTP(E)S, but that introduces it's own issues), it's broken by design (no clear client/server relationship which can cause issues for NATing and filewalls (particularly if running with TLS), output specs depend on the host OS (eg directory listings), no automatic way of differentiating between text and binary data so modern FTP clients have to guess from file extensions (picking the wrong mode will break your files)). ?FTP is outdated - from a bygone era we no longer compute in and thus by modern standard it's become horrible in every conceivable way. Thankfully we have SFTP which natively supports chroot (not all FTP servers do), key-based logins (more secure) as well as passwords, compression, and no fuzzy callback ports like in FTP. Also sshfs is pretty handy too. If one needs "anonymous FTP" then you can also throw HTTPS into the list of better solutions: TLS encryption, compression, smarter handling of MIME types, and again no stupid fuzzy callback ports. I don't often say things this strongly, but FTP should die.
- gumby 10y ago
  FTP needs no defending -- it was really useful in 1979, but times have changed (e.g. I suspect every machine on the Internet uses an 8-bit byte). One point you wrote surprised me though: > no clear client/server relationship which can cause issues for NATing and filewalls (particularly if running with TLS) Really, crocks like NAT and stateful firewalls should die. Layers 4 and below are inherently peer-peer -- the net should not treat endpoints differently (i.e. should not privilege some over others). That simply encourages a "client" or "consumer" mentality in both the technical and social senses.
  - martinald 10y ago
    The thing is while NAT is horrible for what you're saying, it probably did more to improve security than anything else, which wasn't it's primary goal. I remember what the internet was like when ADSL/cable models first came along. Everyone was getting pwned none stop. Any RCE could easily be applied by scanning a consumers DSL/cable IP pool and you'd be able to hit a very high %age of them. NAT totally stopped this.
petercooper 10y ago
Maybe you can't, and that's fine. For me, being able to work on stuff on one machine, then jump over to another one of my machines and it's just there is hugely valuable. The backup element is kinda secondary but nice to have.
- corobo 10y ago
  This is exactly why I use Dropbox. Backing up, sharing files with others may one day be handy sure. Having files on all of my devices without the effort is why I pay them whatever their monthly fee is.
27182818284 10y ago
>ftp or any other file repository service Dropbox is a success because millions of people don't know the meaning of the words you just wrote. This is even hinted at int he application itself: "Dropbox is kind of like taking the best elements of subversion, trac and rsync and making them "just work" for the average individual or team."
fsloth 10y ago
Dropbox replaced USB sticks for transporting miscellanious files for me. The less I need to do my own admin stuff the better (it's not productive, and it's not my core competence).

by zerr 10y ago

briandear 10y ago

Explain FTP to your mom and see how long it takes them to figure out how to do it. Also how can you FTP from an iPhone? How do you have local copies on multiple device stay in sync? How do you share a link to your file to a third party? I'm talking about normal people and not experienced engineers.

drdaeman 10y ago
I did, and dad uses this to share files with friends, privately (I had eventually built a tiny Flask app that does access checks and serves same files over HTTP). It's just a network-connected external drive to him.

sgift 10y ago

Comfort. The reason is comfort.

sergiotapia 10y ago

I gladly pay $100/year to never ever ever EVER have to hear my wife complaining about me losing the pictures of us and the kids. You can't put a price on that my friend. :) Same reason I pay for iCloud storage on our family account. Peace of mind. Could I wire up some rsync contraption, sure maybe - would I sleep peacefully? No.

zepolen 10y ago
Google photos is better for that.
- kw71 10y ago
  So long as Google decides to keep the service operating, maybe.
  - icebraining 10y ago
    Yes, but Dropbox isn't even profitable yet.
- tonyplee 10y ago
  I have 1/2 TB of pictures kids pic, videos from cell phone, SLR etc backup to multiple HDD. If everyone put 1/2 TB or more to google, can google backend really handle that, if so for how long? Also need to consider how long it will take me to download back those pic once they decide to shutdown the "free" service.
  - TulliusCicero 10y ago
    > If everyone put 1/2 TB or more to google, can google backend really handle that, if so for how long? Not everyone is going to do that though (anytime soon anyway) so that's not a real concern. It's like asking when gmail first launched "okay but what if EVERYONE uses the full gigabyte?"
  - i336_ 10y ago
    I'll answer in reverse order: > Also need to consider how long it will take me to download back those pic once they decide to shutdown the "free" service. This is an incredibly good point, both in terms of bandwidth considerations (particularly their ratelimiting) and in terms of products randomly disappearing with limited takeout windows. FWIW, https://get.google.com/albumarchive/<G+ https://get.google.com/albumarchive/<G+ UID> will net you takeout archives of your image albums. Incidentally this works with any Google account that doesn't have public photo access turned off, and is rather fun to play with (as is the site: search operator :D) -- > can google backend really handle that, if so for how long? YouTube used to officially report that 300 hours are uploaded per minute, back in 2014. http://tubularinsights.com/hours-minute-uploaded-youtube/ http://tubularinsights.com/hours-minute-uploaded-youtube/ says we're likely at 700hr/min now. OK. (Been wanting to do this math for a while, actually...) Let's see. This is all back-of-the-envelope and I wouldn't mind some more concrete numbers to work with! YT reencodes all videos into several formats. I'm looking at http://youtu.be/1tQ5XwvjPmA http://youtu.be/1tQ5XwvjPmA, which is 1:20:58 long. It was uploaded fairly recently so has the full complement of encodings. I see: - 5 DASH audio bitrates: 51k (27.53MB), 66k (31.93MB), and 120k (58.02MB) for clients that can decode OPUS, 89k Vorbis (46.67MB), and 132k M4A (73.16MB) - 6 DASH video sizes in both WebM/MP4 (so 12 total formats): 256x144 (43.09MB / 63.54MB); 426x240 (39.79MB / 140.34MB); 640x360 (71.80MB / 122.65MB); 854x480 (118.37MB / 266.00MB); 1280x720 (234.63MB / 548.81MB); and 1920x1080 (463.04MB / 1.05GB). (Yes, WebM is amazing compared to MP4.) - Three legacy video formats: 176x144 3GP (39.51MB), 320x180 3GP (116.05MB), 640x360 WebM (211.30MB), 640x360 MP4 (205.97MB), and 1280x720 MP4 (621.68MB). So, for this standard, 30fps 1080p video, YouTube is actually storing... 4.51GB of data. Huh! Nice. If this video is 1h20m, 1-(60/80) means I should subtract 25% from 4.51, and I get 3.38GB for one hour of video. OK. Taking that figure of 700 hours... that's 2366GB (2.31TB) per minute :) In other words YouTube needs to find disk capacity for 39.42GB of data every second. I'm not sure how to multiply by an increasing gradient with a back-of-the-envelope calculation, so I'll punt and pretend it was 700 hours/min all the way back to 2014, so the past 2 years. Quite inaccurate, but possibly still interesting: (2.31 * (1024^4)) * 12 * 365 * 2 = 22249277495024025.60 Uhh.... that's... ah. 22PB. Err, 19.76PB to be precise. This is for the boring 30fps-and-under 1080p videos out there. Not the 60fps, 2K/4K/8K (!), 360° and similar stuff, and there's an increasing pile of that being uploaded.
skuzye 10y ago
I agree. Having them take care of backups has a lot of worth in my book also
pjc50 10y ago
Funnily enough, I wrote a "one-way sync your OneDrive to external disk" tool for my wife to avoid the opposite problem: loss of data due to failures of the paid-for sync solution.

CPLX 10y ago

Every time this topic comes up, which is reasonably often, I like to link to this: http://www.michaelrwolfe.com/2013/10/19/why-is-dropbox-more-popular-than-other-programs-with-similar-functionality/ http://www.michaelrwolfe.com/2013/10/19/why-is-dropbox-more-...

jodrellblank 10y ago
Which is funny because 'a folder, that syncs' is what the Windows 95 briefcase was for. It was nice. And they ditched it for Offline Folders, which was "a folder that syncs, until it breaks all the time". And in the meantime, here's Joel Spolsky in 2008: “Imagine all your devices—PCs, and soon Macs and mobile phones—working together to give you anywhere access to the information you care about.” And what is this Windows Live Mesh? It’s a way to synchronize files. Jeez, we’ve had that forever. When did the first sync web sites start coming out? 1999? There were a million versions. xdrive, mydrive, idrive, youdrive, wealldrive for ice cream. Nobody cared then and nobody cares now, because synchronizing files is just not a killer application. I’m sorry. It seems like it should be. But it’s not. Damn, they just finished building something called Windows Live FolderShare and I haven’t exactly noticed a stampede to that. I’ll bet you’ve never even heard of it. [..] this so called synchronization problem is just not an actual problem, it’s a fun programming exercise that you’re doing because it’s just hard enough to be interesting but not so hard that you can’t figure it out. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/05/01/architecture-astronauts-take-over/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/05/01/architecture-astro... And now Microsoft is ditching Offline Folders which break a lot, for Work Folders - folders that sync over HTTPS, without a local hidden cache.
- zerr 10y ago
  Also, I don't remember names, but there were similar 3rd party paid services in late 90s - and they also had virtual disks integrated in Windows.

laumars 10y ago

I get that many techies can live without Dropbox and it's ilk (myself included), but NOBODY should ever be advocating FTP. It's insure (no encryption - unless you're talking about FTP(E)S, but that introduces it's own issues), it's broken by design (no clear client/server relationship which can cause issues for NATing and filewalls (particularly if running with TLS), output specs depend on the host OS (eg directory listings), no automatic way of differentiating between text and binary data so modern FTP clients have to guess from file extensions (picking the wrong mode will break your files)). ?FTP is outdated - from a bygone era we no longer compute in and thus by modern standard it's become horrible in every conceivable way. Thankfully we have SFTP which natively supports chroot (not all FTP servers do), key-based logins (more secure) as well as passwords, compression, and no fuzzy callback ports like in FTP. Also sshfs is pretty handy too. If one needs "anonymous FTP" then you can also throw HTTPS into the list of better solutions: TLS encryption, compression, smarter handling of MIME types, and again no stupid fuzzy callback ports. I don't often say things this strongly, but FTP should die.

gumby 10y ago
FTP needs no defending -- it was really useful in 1979, but times have changed (e.g. I suspect every machine on the Internet uses an 8-bit byte). One point you wrote surprised me though: > no clear client/server relationship which can cause issues for NATing and filewalls (particularly if running with TLS) Really, crocks like NAT and stateful firewalls should die. Layers 4 and below are inherently peer-peer -- the net should not treat endpoints differently (i.e. should not privilege some over others). That simply encourages a "client" or "consumer" mentality in both the technical and social senses.
- martinald 10y ago
  The thing is while NAT is horrible for what you're saying, it probably did more to improve security than anything else, which wasn't it's primary goal. I remember what the internet was like when ADSL/cable models first came along. Everyone was getting pwned none stop. Any RCE could easily be applied by scanning a consumers DSL/cable IP pool and you'd be able to hit a very high %age of them. NAT totally stopped this.

petercooper 10y ago

Maybe you can't, and that's fine. For me, being able to work on stuff on one machine, then jump over to another one of my machines and it's just there is hugely valuable. The backup element is kinda secondary but nice to have.

corobo 10y ago
This is exactly why I use Dropbox. Backing up, sharing files with others may one day be handy sure. Having files on all of my devices without the effort is why I pay them whatever their monthly fee is.

27182818284 10y ago

>ftp or any other file repository service Dropbox is a success because millions of people don't know the meaning of the words you just wrote. This is even hinted at int he application itself: "Dropbox is kind of like taking the best elements of subversion, trac and rsync and making them "just work" for the average individual or team."

fsloth 10y ago

Dropbox replaced USB sticks for transporting miscellanious files for me. The less I need to do my own admin stuff the better (it's not productive, and it's not my core competence).