13 ms·

Dropbox Reaches Key Profit Milestone

226 points by pacaro 10y ago

sunsu 10y ago
I had no idea that Dropbox had topped $1B in annualized revenue. Their new profitability gives me some measure of confidence that not all of the Unicorns are facing inevitable doom.
- hetfeld 10y ago
  I hope so too. Dropbox is the best app for syncing out there.
- JonFish85 10y ago
  "Their new profitability gives me some measure of confidence" "Profitability" can mean whatever you want it to mean at a given moment. In this particular case it's closer than a lot of measures, but it's still a non-GAAP profit. In general these sort of startup announcements are marketing materials. Every company I've been at has declared themselves "profitable" -- the devil is in the details of what you choose to ignore.
  - sunsu 10y ago
    I agree and that's why I used the words "some measure of confidence". However, it IS better than many other unicorn examples, such as Uber losing $800M in Q3 2016 for example.
skolos 10y ago
Looks like Dropbox starting popping up recently on the media. Looks like PR push. Maybe preparing for IPO.
- sunsu 10y ago
  It clearly says that in the article: "The San Francisco-based startup, founded in 2007, has been meeting with bankers to discuss plans to sell shares in an initial public offering"
- pdelbarba 10y ago
  I'm really starting to appreciate how cynical we've all become about how these corporations operate. They've always "been evil", but now it's just assumed.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    Even stubborn people learn eventually if they get burned enough times.
  - shimon 10y ago
    The company is overtly preparing for a big public sale of its shares. As part of that it is conducting press outreach with the goal of talking up how well it is performing. Seems roughly comparable to a company that's about to launch, say, a new electric car running a campaign to get people talking about how fun it is to drive electric cars. Other than the clear effort to get coverage from journalists, is there really something nefarious going on here?
    - sdflkd 10y ago
      Interacting with media / marketing seems to be considered evil on HN. Probably because it's easy to abuse.
      - pdelbarba 10y ago
        It's probably just a case of too many of us having to deal with the day to day struggles imposed by the friendly office marketing dept ;)
    - pdelbarba 10y ago
      Maybe evil was the wrong word to use given the context. My observation is merely that rather than saying "oh, they've been in the news a lot recently" it's now "oh, their marketing department has been working overtime on an astroturfing campaign ahead of a possible IPO"
      - 10y ago
phamilton 10y ago
> The measure does include compensation costs, such as stock or options issued to employees as part of their salary.
mrtron 10y ago
Amazing execution to get to $1B in annual revenue.
polskibus 10y ago
How come Dropbox wasn't eradicated by Microsoft's and Google's offerings that are integrated with their product suites?
- nicoburns 10y ago
  I would imagine partly because they have a lot of brand awareness form being first to market, partly because their product is pretty solid, partly because Dropbox still have the superior client (especially consistency across platforms)
  - planteen 10y ago
    I agree with the superior client. I have a personal paid Dropbox account. The reason I chose Dropbox was their Linux client. Nobody else is close.
- raiyu 10y ago
  Remember that while Steve Jobs infamously called Dropbox a feature, not a product, it took quite some time before Apple's cloud offering was really production ready. The same can be said for the other software giants. Also, for Dropbox to get to $1B in revenue they have hundreds of millions of users. This is a tremendous amount of adoption. Dropbox's real benefit lay in that it integrated directly into your OS so that it appeared just like a regular directory. This meant that usage patterns for users didn't change and so adoption ramped quicker. Google on the other hand was always more of a work suite or productivity suite. So ultimately what happened is that as the other large companies played catch up there simply wasn't enough of an advantage to switch to them away from Dropbox.
  - Angostura 10y ago
    And iCloud is still as confusing as hell.
  - epmaybe 10y ago
    I think that the reason jobs did that was because Dropbox refused their offer for acquisition
roymurdock 10y ago
> the company is now generating a profit excluding interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (positive EBITDA) EBITDA and cash flow are useful metrics to look at when evaluating whether or not a company can service debt, but I'm wondering why they needed to open a $600M credit line last month if they are gearing up for an IPO? I guess they need a bit of extra cash on hand to pay off taxes as well as interest on their last 2 loans (funding rounds) from JPMorgan?
- pacaro 10y ago
  It's worth noting that they replaced an expiring $500million line of credit that had not been touched. So you may be reading a little much into what may just be prudent financial planning
  - roymurdock 10y ago
    Hadn't known about that, thx for the info, should have been included in the article. New credit line makes sense then, not much to see here.
- pgwhalen 10y ago
  In the (approximated) words of Matt Levine, ask for credit when you don't need it, because when you do need it, they won't give it to you.
logicallee 10y ago
For anyone curious, the key profit milestone is "any". >Dropbox Inc.'s chief executive officer said the company is now generating a profit excluding interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization.
- MS_Buys_Upvotes 10y ago
  Yeah, I don't know why HN doesn't change this story to it's proper, correct title. Current title makes it look like Wall Street it saying it. The real title makes it clear that the CEO is saying it, which, as a result, makes it useless PR drivel.
  - grzm 10y ago
    HN doesn't change the title unless either the submitter or the mods are aware that the title should be changed. You can contact the mods via the Contact link in the footer. In my experience they're very responsive.
dorgo 10y ago
I'm not a dropbox user. A friend send send me a link to dropbox folder with fotos. The web-UI killed me. I could download the fotos one by one. It was not smooth or fast or pleasant, but it was possible. But since it were hunderets of fotos I looked for a big DOWNLOAD_ALL button. After some time I found such button, but it told me that the folder is too big (2 or 3 GB) for download. WHAT? I tried to create an account to download it to 'my' dropbox, but the free space was less than 2 GB, as far as I rememebr. So dropbox asked me to pay 10$ to get fotos from my friend. After cursing for an hour I asked my friend to bring the fotos on a usb stick.
- dublinben 10y ago
  As you've encountered, they count shared folders towards the quota of every single user with access. This multiple charging for the same data was one of the reasons I stopped using Dropbox.
- qznc 10y ago
  I have nearly pulled out of Dropbox by now. The fact that people send me Dropbox links is it's only reason to stay. I find it very convenient to use as a download manager. My reason to drop it is that I want my data out of the US for privacy. Our local (german) companies can provide the cloud basics by now.
  - lettergram 10y ago
    > My reason to drop it is that I want my data out of the US for privacy Given most cloud providers use AWS as a back end, that's probably not possible. Plus, if you send email, it likely will hit a gmail,hotmail,etc. server. It's basically impossible to avoid.
    - qznc 10y ago
      I use web.de for email, which is the largest german mail provider in Germany. Their data center is on the other side of my city. Unfortunately, they are somewhat spammy even if you pay. I think about switching to mailbox.org or posteo.de. Sure, lots of my contacts use gmail, but since email encryption is not really used, email is practically unsuitable for secure communication anyways. Fortunately, we have a few good instant messengers (Signal, Wire, Threema, ...) now. The primary use for email today is authentication, so I should probably get my own domain to maintain control. My replacement for Dropbox is SyncThing. There is no cloud storage. It does not provide sharing via public link of course.
philipyoungg 10y ago
Dropbox employees will be very pleased reading positive feedbacks from this thread.
- kerbalspacepro 10y ago
  I wonder how one feels when they receive this feedback, "I never think about you until you fail, and you have failed me the least of your competitors. You have succeeded in making me forget you. Good job. Here are 10 dollars."
sulam 10y ago
Drew's statement that Dropbox is the fastest SaaS company to $1B in annual revenue is either wrong or basically tied. Salesforce.com did it in just over 9 years, and it has been almost 10 years since Dropbox was founded.
mbesto 10y ago
> Dropbox Inc.'s chief executive officer said the company is now generating a profit excluding interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization FYI - it's very likely that Dropbox is depreciating a HUGE ($100's of millions) amount of data center cost.[0] Translated into a more common "AWS opex cost", might yield a company that isn't really profitable^. EBITDA can be very misleading (not saying it definitely is in this case) so it's always worth analyzing it with a grain of salt until you have all of the full granular details. [0] - http://www.datacenterdynamics.com/content-tracks/colo-cloud/dropbox-drops-aws-cloud/95872.fullarticle http://www.datacenterdynamics.com/content-tracks/colo-cloud/... ^EDIT - I should have said, "might not be profitable yet".
- JumpCrisscross 10y ago
  > EBITDA can be very misleading To illustrate, let's consider a company that buys a $100 data centre every 10 years. (To keep things simple, let's assume the data centre is worthless after 10 years.) The data centre generates $20 in revenues for each of those 10 years. Instead of showing an $80 loss in year 1 and then a $20 profit in years 2 through 10 (with the expectation of another $80 loss in year 11), accountants smooth the numbers based on expectations. The $100 data centre cost is "depreciated" over the expected lifetime of the asset. So one might account $10 of the data centre's cost to each of its ten years, thereby producing $10 of profit each year. This better reflects economic reality. Ebitda does not include depreciation. The aforementioned company's Ebitda would be $20 for years 2 through 10. This is a small problem in year 2. But if you're an investor in year 10, ignoring that depreciation is the flip side of capital expenditure, you're in for a nasty shock when year 11's predictable capital expenditure comes down the line.
  - mbesto 10y ago
    This is correct - good explanation. It's also why good financial professionals/investors look at cash flow statement (follow the money) more so than the income statement.
    - probe 10y ago
gist 10y ago
Can't help but remember the quintessential (links anyone?) dropbox critique when Drew first talked about it on HN. In particular something like 'why do we need this when you can just use rsync'.
- varenc 10y ago
  here it is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 my favorite comment is definitely this one: 1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
  - j605 10y ago
    So you perform commits after uploading. How are you going to convince your collaborators to do it too.
unabst 10y ago
I wrote this 448 days ago, on why I moved to Google Drive. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11030171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11030171 But now I'm back. Google Drive is unusable. I upgraded to a paid plan so I'd have no storage limits. But the moment I tried to back some large folders, I noticed the upload speeds were capped, and the native client kept crashing. I'd leave it on overnight, just to see it not running in the morning. 100 GB of files is a trivial amount these days, and it's impossible to manage on Drive. And selective sync would attempt to upload the folder before it deletes it locally, so was useless. I couldn't just select which folders to upload first, even though I was there trying it due to Drive's own inability to upload large amounts of files. Then there are all the sync issues. I had setup 5 or 6 computers to sync files, which is the main use case Drive is sold on. Yet, I'd notice (1) and (2) and (3) duplicate versions of the same file, and at one point I had a folder with (79). So I'd have to dig through partially synced folders and duplicates just to figure out what to sync first, then sort through computers to see if Drive was actually running. Then remove large folders to outside of Drive, and drop them in in batches just so Drive wouldn't choke itself. I also had an issue with file name length. I had copied a folder of saved web pages from Dropbox. I'd noticed all the directories were empty in Drive. Turns out, the folder names were too long. I understand the existence of technical constraints, but if I can't move files from Dropbox just by copying them, Drive needs to modify it's feature set. Insync is the only reason I still have Drive. It doesn't crash, and it doesn't have sync duplication issues. But again, there is some API rate limit that causes it to halt. Drive is simply incapable of handling large amounts of files. I wish they'd just say that. So I am back on Dropbox because I have no other options. And it just works. I had no idea syncing was such a hard problem. And now with smart sync, I can see the files locally without having them take up space. Most of the files are for storage purposes anyway, so this is genius. The new online interface is better than google also. It still locks up Photoshop, and I bet it's still piss slow in Japan, but for now all my large folders are back on Dropbox. Drive is reserved for Sheets and Docs that don't take up any space anyway, because the files are just links. I use Windows but I don't trust Microsoft.
- josefresco 10y ago
  Hey there - I went down a similar road as you about a year back when I looked for a file backup solution. I started with Dropbox, and attempted a sync of my local files. Within minutes the Windows app crashed. I switched to Google Drive, same thing. Synced a large number of files and the Windows software crashed. Even Tried Insync, still had crashing issues. Researched the issue and found that both clients are limited in the amount of RAM (32bit vs 64bit) and this limit is easily reached when syncing tens-of-thousands of files causing the software to crash. Neither provider offers a 64 bit version, or a version of their client software that handles syncing jobs this large. I finally settled on Backblaze which was affordable ($5/month), and "just worked". The files aren't as accessible as Dropbox or Drive, but I still use those for the files I need/touch often, and use Backblaze for my "entire PC" cloud backup solution.
WillyOnWheels 10y ago
https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/857662627496906752 https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/857662627496906752 "“EBITDA profitable”, n. Technical term used in accounting for companies running at a loss"
- mevile 10y ago
  Does the n stand for noun? Because that's not a noun is it. You can't point to an EBITDA profitable. You can't put one in your pocket. Is an EBITDA profitable dangerous? How about two? I have a million EBITDA profitables.
  - sanderjd 10y ago
    Agreed. Should be "adj." :)
fencepost 10y ago
Gah! Maybe it's just me and my lack of understanding of large corporate financing, but my past job history means that just seeing "EBITDA" or having it spelled out makes me twitch. Probably because both companies where "positive EBITDA" was a relevant phrase no longer exist.
kmfrk 10y ago
For me, Dropbox is the iTunes of file synchronization; I have to use it, but it's such a pain. It takes minutes to finish indexing on startup, and it occasionally decides to take up all my CPU, which has forced me to disable it on startup on Windows 10.
chambo622 10y ago
Surprised to see no talk of Paper on this thread. Sure, Dropbox has visibly tried and failed to build other offerings - Carousel and Mailbox - but Paper seems like the most well-reasoned attempt so far, and something a lot of their customers probably need. It reminds me a lot of Quip which Salesforce thought was worth $750M.
ksec 10y ago
I really wish some Cloud Storage Provider would have online file management solution. Currently I have many 2.5" HDD and USB stick, all with may be slightly different / duplicated Data. I wish I could upload all of them to the Cloud first and then start sorting it. Currently the only solution is to Buy a super large HDD, copy every files on to it and start sorting it.

226 points by pacaro 10y ago

sunsu 10y ago

I had no idea that Dropbox had topped $1B in annualized revenue. Their new profitability gives me some measure of confidence that not all of the Unicorns are facing inevitable doom.

hetfeld 10y ago
I hope so too. Dropbox is the best app for syncing out there.
JonFish85 10y ago
"Their new profitability gives me some measure of confidence" "Profitability" can mean whatever you want it to mean at a given moment. In this particular case it's closer than a lot of measures, but it's still a non-GAAP profit. In general these sort of startup announcements are marketing materials. Every company I've been at has declared themselves "profitable" -- the devil is in the details of what you choose to ignore.
- sunsu 10y ago
  I agree and that's why I used the words "some measure of confidence". However, it IS better than many other unicorn examples, such as Uber losing $800M in Q3 2016 for example.

skolos 10y ago

Looks like Dropbox starting popping up recently on the media. Looks like PR push. Maybe preparing for IPO.

sunsu 10y ago
It clearly says that in the article: "The San Francisco-based startup, founded in 2007, has been meeting with bankers to discuss plans to sell shares in an initial public offering"
pdelbarba 10y ago
I'm really starting to appreciate how cynical we've all become about how these corporations operate. They've always "been evil", but now it's just assumed.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  Even stubborn people learn eventually if they get burned enough times.
- shimon 10y ago
  The company is overtly preparing for a big public sale of its shares. As part of that it is conducting press outreach with the goal of talking up how well it is performing. Seems roughly comparable to a company that's about to launch, say, a new electric car running a campaign to get people talking about how fun it is to drive electric cars. Other than the clear effort to get coverage from journalists, is there really something nefarious going on here?
  - sdflkd 10y ago
    Interacting with media / marketing seems to be considered evil on HN. Probably because it's easy to abuse.
    - pdelbarba 10y ago
      It's probably just a case of too many of us having to deal with the day to day struggles imposed by the friendly office marketing dept ;)
  - pdelbarba 10y ago
    Maybe evil was the wrong word to use given the context. My observation is merely that rather than saying "oh, they've been in the news a lot recently" it's now "oh, their marketing department has been working overtime on an astroturfing campaign ahead of a possible IPO"
    - 10y ago

phamilton 10y ago

> The measure does include compensation costs, such as stock or options issued to employees as part of their salary.

mrtron 10y ago

Amazing execution to get to $1B in annual revenue.

polskibus 10y ago

How come Dropbox wasn't eradicated by Microsoft's and Google's offerings that are integrated with their product suites?

nicoburns 10y ago
I would imagine partly because they have a lot of brand awareness form being first to market, partly because their product is pretty solid, partly because Dropbox still have the superior client (especially consistency across platforms)
- planteen 10y ago
  I agree with the superior client. I have a personal paid Dropbox account. The reason I chose Dropbox was their Linux client. Nobody else is close.
raiyu 10y ago
Remember that while Steve Jobs infamously called Dropbox a feature, not a product, it took quite some time before Apple's cloud offering was really production ready. The same can be said for the other software giants. Also, for Dropbox to get to $1B in revenue they have hundreds of millions of users. This is a tremendous amount of adoption. Dropbox's real benefit lay in that it integrated directly into your OS so that it appeared just like a regular directory. This meant that usage patterns for users didn't change and so adoption ramped quicker. Google on the other hand was always more of a work suite or productivity suite. So ultimately what happened is that as the other large companies played catch up there simply wasn't enough of an advantage to switch to them away from Dropbox.
- Angostura 10y ago
  And iCloud is still as confusing as hell.
- epmaybe 10y ago
  I think that the reason jobs did that was because Dropbox refused their offer for acquisition

roymurdock 10y ago

> the company is now generating a profit excluding interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (positive EBITDA) EBITDA and cash flow are useful metrics to look at when evaluating whether or not a company can service debt, but I'm wondering why they needed to open a $600M credit line last month if they are gearing up for an IPO? I guess they need a bit of extra cash on hand to pay off taxes as well as interest on their last 2 loans (funding rounds) from JPMorgan?

pacaro 10y ago
It's worth noting that they replaced an expiring $500million line of credit that had not been touched. So you may be reading a little much into what may just be prudent financial planning
- roymurdock 10y ago
  Hadn't known about that, thx for the info, should have been included in the article. New credit line makes sense then, not much to see here.
pgwhalen 10y ago
In the (approximated) words of Matt Levine, ask for credit when you don't need it, because when you do need it, they won't give it to you.

logicallee 10y ago

For anyone curious, the key profit milestone is "any". >Dropbox Inc.'s chief executive officer said the company is now generating a profit excluding interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization.

MS_Buys_Upvotes 10y ago
Yeah, I don't know why HN doesn't change this story to it's proper, correct title. Current title makes it look like Wall Street it saying it. The real title makes it clear that the CEO is saying it, which, as a result, makes it useless PR drivel.
- grzm 10y ago
  HN doesn't change the title unless either the submitter or the mods are aware that the title should be changed. You can contact the mods via the Contact link in the footer. In my experience they're very responsive.

dorgo 10y ago

I'm not a dropbox user. A friend send send me a link to dropbox folder with fotos. The web-UI killed me. I could download the fotos one by one. It was not smooth or fast or pleasant, but it was possible. But since it were hunderets of fotos I looked for a big DOWNLOAD_ALL button. After some time I found such button, but it told me that the folder is too big (2 or 3 GB) for download. WHAT? I tried to create an account to download it to 'my' dropbox, but the free space was less than 2 GB, as far as I rememebr. So dropbox asked me to pay 10$ to get fotos from my friend. After cursing for an hour I asked my friend to bring the fotos on a usb stick.

dublinben 10y ago
As you've encountered, they count shared folders towards the quota of every single user with access. This multiple charging for the same data was one of the reasons I stopped using Dropbox.
qznc 10y ago
I have nearly pulled out of Dropbox by now. The fact that people send me Dropbox links is it's only reason to stay. I find it very convenient to use as a download manager. My reason to drop it is that I want my data out of the US for privacy. Our local (german) companies can provide the cloud basics by now.
- lettergram 10y ago
  > My reason to drop it is that I want my data out of the US for privacy Given most cloud providers use AWS as a back end, that's probably not possible. Plus, if you send email, it likely will hit a gmail,hotmail,etc. server. It's basically impossible to avoid.
  - qznc 10y ago
    I use web.de for email, which is the largest german mail provider in Germany. Their data center is on the other side of my city. Unfortunately, they are somewhat spammy even if you pay. I think about switching to mailbox.org or posteo.de. Sure, lots of my contacts use gmail, but since email encryption is not really used, email is practically unsuitable for secure communication anyways. Fortunately, we have a few good instant messengers (Signal, Wire, Threema, ...) now. The primary use for email today is authentication, so I should probably get my own domain to maintain control. My replacement for Dropbox is SyncThing. There is no cloud storage. It does not provide sharing via public link of course.

philipyoungg 10y ago

Dropbox employees will be very pleased reading positive feedbacks from this thread.

kerbalspacepro 10y ago
I wonder how one feels when they receive this feedback, "I never think about you until you fail, and you have failed me the least of your competitors. You have succeeded in making me forget you. Good job. Here are 10 dollars."

sulam 10y ago

Drew's statement that Dropbox is the fastest SaaS company to $1B in annual revenue is either wrong or basically tied. Salesforce.com did it in just over 9 years, and it has been almost 10 years since Dropbox was founded.

mbesto 10y ago

> Dropbox Inc.'s chief executive officer said the company is now generating a profit excluding interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization FYI - it's very likely that Dropbox is depreciating a HUGE ($100's of millions) amount of data center cost.[0] Translated into a more common "AWS opex cost", might yield a company that isn't really profitable^. EBITDA can be very misleading (not saying it definitely is in this case) so it's always worth analyzing it with a grain of salt until you have all of the full granular details. [0] - http://www.datacenterdynamics.com/content-tracks/colo-cloud/dropbox-drops-aws-cloud/95872.fullarticle http://www.datacenterdynamics.com/content-tracks/colo-cloud/... ^EDIT - I should have said, "might not be profitable yet".

JumpCrisscross 10y ago
> EBITDA can be very misleading To illustrate, let's consider a company that buys a $100 data centre every 10 years. (To keep things simple, let's assume the data centre is worthless after 10 years.) The data centre generates $20 in revenues for each of those 10 years. Instead of showing an $80 loss in year 1 and then a $20 profit in years 2 through 10 (with the expectation of another $80 loss in year 11), accountants smooth the numbers based on expectations. The $100 data centre cost is "depreciated" over the expected lifetime of the asset. So one might account $10 of the data centre's cost to each of its ten years, thereby producing $10 of profit each year. This better reflects economic reality. Ebitda does not include depreciation. The aforementioned company's Ebitda would be $20 for years 2 through 10. This is a small problem in year 2. But if you're an investor in year 10, ignoring that depreciation is the flip side of capital expenditure, you're in for a nasty shock when year 11's predictable capital expenditure comes down the line.
- mbesto 10y ago
  This is correct - good explanation. It's also why good financial professionals/investors look at cash flow statement (follow the money) more so than the income statement.
  - probe 10y ago

gist 10y ago

Can't help but remember the quintessential (links anyone?) dropbox critique when Drew first talked about it on HN. In particular something like 'why do we need this when you can just use rsync'.

varenc 10y ago
here it is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 my favorite comment is definitely this one: 1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
- j605 10y ago
  So you perform commits after uploading. How are you going to convince your collaborators to do it too.

unabst 10y ago

I wrote this 448 days ago, on why I moved to Google Drive. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11030171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11030171 But now I'm back. Google Drive is unusable. I upgraded to a paid plan so I'd have no storage limits. But the moment I tried to back some large folders, I noticed the upload speeds were capped, and the native client kept crashing. I'd leave it on overnight, just to see it not running in the morning. 100 GB of files is a trivial amount these days, and it's impossible to manage on Drive. And selective sync would attempt to upload the folder before it deletes it locally, so was useless. I couldn't just select which folders to upload first, even though I was there trying it due to Drive's own inability to upload large amounts of files. Then there are all the sync issues. I had setup 5 or 6 computers to sync files, which is the main use case Drive is sold on. Yet, I'd notice (1) and (2) and (3) duplicate versions of the same file, and at one point I had a folder with (79). So I'd have to dig through partially synced folders and duplicates just to figure out what to sync first, then sort through computers to see if Drive was actually running. Then remove large folders to outside of Drive, and drop them in in batches just so Drive wouldn't choke itself. I also had an issue with file name length. I had copied a folder of saved web pages from Dropbox. I'd noticed all the directories were empty in Drive. Turns out, the folder names were too long. I understand the existence of technical constraints, but if I can't move files from Dropbox just by copying them, Drive needs to modify it's feature set. Insync is the only reason I still have Drive. It doesn't crash, and it doesn't have sync duplication issues. But again, there is some API rate limit that causes it to halt. Drive is simply incapable of handling large amounts of files. I wish they'd just say that. So I am back on Dropbox because I have no other options. And it just works. I had no idea syncing was such a hard problem. And now with smart sync, I can see the files locally without having them take up space. Most of the files are for storage purposes anyway, so this is genius. The new online interface is better than google also. It still locks up Photoshop, and I bet it's still piss slow in Japan, but for now all my large folders are back on Dropbox. Drive is reserved for Sheets and Docs that don't take up any space anyway, because the files are just links. I use Windows but I don't trust Microsoft.

josefresco 10y ago
Hey there - I went down a similar road as you about a year back when I looked for a file backup solution. I started with Dropbox, and attempted a sync of my local files. Within minutes the Windows app crashed. I switched to Google Drive, same thing. Synced a large number of files and the Windows software crashed. Even Tried Insync, still had crashing issues. Researched the issue and found that both clients are limited in the amount of RAM (32bit vs 64bit) and this limit is easily reached when syncing tens-of-thousands of files causing the software to crash. Neither provider offers a 64 bit version, or a version of their client software that handles syncing jobs this large. I finally settled on Backblaze which was affordable ($5/month), and "just worked". The files aren't as accessible as Dropbox or Drive, but I still use those for the files I need/touch often, and use Backblaze for my "entire PC" cloud backup solution.

WillyOnWheels 10y ago

https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/857662627496906752 https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/857662627496906752 "“EBITDA profitable”, n. Technical term used in accounting for companies running at a loss"

mevile 10y ago
Does the n stand for noun? Because that's not a noun is it. You can't point to an EBITDA profitable. You can't put one in your pocket. Is an EBITDA profitable dangerous? How about two? I have a million EBITDA profitables.
- sanderjd 10y ago
  Agreed. Should be "adj." :)

fencepost 10y ago

Gah! Maybe it's just me and my lack of understanding of large corporate financing, but my past job history means that just seeing "EBITDA" or having it spelled out makes me twitch. Probably because both companies where "positive EBITDA" was a relevant phrase no longer exist.

kmfrk 10y ago

For me, Dropbox is the iTunes of file synchronization; I have to use it, but it's such a pain. It takes minutes to finish indexing on startup, and it occasionally decides to take up all my CPU, which has forced me to disable it on startup on Windows 10.

chambo622 10y ago

Surprised to see no talk of Paper on this thread. Sure, Dropbox has visibly tried and failed to build other offerings - Carousel and Mailbox - but Paper seems like the most well-reasoned attempt so far, and something a lot of their customers probably need. It reminds me a lot of Quip which Salesforce thought was worth $750M.

ksec 10y ago

I really wish some Cloud Storage Provider would have online file management solution. Currently I have many 2.5" HDD and USB stick, all with may be slightly different / duplicated Data. I wish I could upload all of them to the Cloud first and then start sorting it. Currently the only solution is to Buy a super large HDD, copy every files on to it and start sorting it.