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Slightly off topic, but I discovered the other day that shared folders count towards the disk quota for each account it's shared to. I had several GB of photos

Slightly off topic, but I discovered the other day that shared folders count towards the disk quota for each account it's shared to. I had several GB of photos shared with me on Dropbox, and it blew right over my free limit, despite the fact that none of them were actually mine. The photos also count towards the quota of the account sharing with me. That's soured me quite a lot on Dropbox.

kornish 8y ago
That's probably done to prevent people from creating many free accounts and sharing folders with each other to simulate having more storage space.
- ValentineC 8y ago
  Google Drive seems to have done this right — the file only counts towards the storage quota of the creator/"owner" of the file. That particular approach does have some other issues though.
  - israrkhan 8y ago
    What is wrong about Google Drive is that they count your email and drive storage in same quota. Few months ago, I exceeded my quota on Drive, and Gmail started giving me warning that I am running out of space, and will stop receiving emails if I do not upgrade, or free-up space.
    - xyzzyz 8y ago
      What is wrong about it? Would you prefer to have 2 GB shared quota, or separate quota of 1 GB each? With shared quota you have more flexibility as to what service you prefer to use more.
      - tjoff 8y ago
        Email is a critical service. Loosing emails because a misclick or uploaded a too big of file is not acceptable UX.
        colde 8y ago
        In that case, aren't you arguing that quotas shouldn't be placed on email at all? It's not like they instantly block receipt of mail if you go over the quota, you have time to fix it, which is much better than many mail services.
        tjoff 8y ago
        Not really, a gigabyte goes a long way for email and if you get a warning with 200 MB left or something you have lots of time to act on it. In contrast to a video recorded even by phones today a gigabyte is consumed in no time. Accidentally (without realizing how big it is or how much quota you have left) uploading a short clip is not something you put a lot of thought into. It's not like they instantly block receipt of mail [...] Well true, but it sucks having to rely on googles good will for that, you don't know the hard limits and they can change at any time without notice. It is still unacceptable UX.
        mrmanner 8y ago
        I once was over the quota for over two months in a row, and still had no problems sending and receiving email. So I think Google does understand that email is critical service :)
- bad_user 8y ago
  I have a big archive of family photos (130 GB and growing) that I’d like to share with my wife in read-only mode. She only needs Dropbox for a bunch of documents, so paying an extra €10 per month is not something we can do. Dropbox is a fairly expensive service. I’ve used it for years however I can no longer defend my choice. Extended versioning is gone. Expiring sharing links are gone from Plus, so I have to pay €20 per month for it ... yes they grandfathered old accounts, however I made the mistake of trying out Pro and their Support refused to reinstate my old Plus account. Want to search your documents? Pay €20 for Pro. Which wouldn’t be bad, except that their search is terrible. And I could not get their support to admit that they aren’t indexing all my documents. Just to get an idea, they aren’t indexing all PDFs (that Google Drive is indexing just fine) and they aren’t indexing text files with a .log extension either. A comparison with Google Drive isn’t even funny as GDrive does text recognition on images, indexing everything. Speaking of Dropbox’s support, I’ve never been more frustrated in my life as the only issue they’ve ever solved for me was a refund, which they had to provide by law due to me being an EU citizen. All in all, I ended up paying €20 per month for link sharing I had in Plus, broken full text indexing and piss poor support. Also they keep pushing collaboration features but I wonder for whom. I don’t think they’ve thought this through. If Dropbox is no longer a good place to keep my photos then it stops being a good service for sharing work items with colleagues. Do they hope for Dropbox to become a service imposed by management? Probably, however in that space they are competing with the likes of GSuite and we already have GSuite for email. And Extending that to the Business edition that gives you Unlimited space is much cheaper than going with Dropbox. I’ll grant that Dropbox’s desktop sync is the best in business. But I can deal with the warts of the others.
  - voltagex_ 8y ago
    I had sort of the same issues as you and ended up with OneDrive because other family members needed Office. In Australia you can often find 1 year x 5 accounts (1TB Onedrive space, Office, Skype minutes) for ~$70.
  - point78 8y ago
    10 or 20 a month is completely reasonable for what you need...
- simonebrunozzi 8y ago
  True; however, this bad behavior could be easily countered with a very simple algorithm. Dropbox could do better here.
paulsutter 8y ago
Exact same thing happened to me and it was the last time I ever use Dropbox. Product experience was a barrage of growth hacking I can imagine their investor deck. “62% of people are total chumps, that’s our target market”
- rozenmd 8y ago
  Just curious, what do you mean by growth hacking in this case?
  - ta1234567890 8y ago
    Can't speak for the parent comment. However I can relate. Today I installed Dropbox for my grandfather and their default entry-level free account comes with 2GB, but as soon as you create your account and install the software, they offer to give you 25GB of free space if you add 1 file to your account and you install Dropbox on your mobile. Not sure if that helps them artificially boost their numbers (by claiming more installed devices), or if they try to get your contacts to get more accounts.
    - shostack 8y ago
      Without being overly familiar with that specific tactic, on the surface I think it is actually much more benign. Incentivizing users to add their first file and install it on their phone (where it will likely want to slurp up photos, videos, etc. to back them up there) isn't a bad thing IMHO. It drives immediate engagement with the core product experience, and I'd be shocked if they didn't have data saying that people who upload at least one file and have the app installed on their phone convert to paid at some rate above people who don't. Thus, by incentivizing that behavior, they can likely boost conversion rates AND make users happier by getting more familiar with the service. Sounds like a win-win scenario to me. I wonder how many users sign up but don't ever use Dropbox.
    - Cthulhu_ 8y ago
      I found it an interesting approach to an incentivised tutorial of sorts it's very easy to install Dropbox on your desktop and just forget that it's there. By offering you free storage space by introducing you to features, such as their mobile app, sharing, etc, they're making you curious and interested in what else they have to offer you. You could call it growth hacking I guess. I think it's an interesting alternative to idk, a weekly "did you know that?" e-mail (e.g. Evernote) or a tooltips-driven tutorial, or Clippy.
keerthiko 8y ago
You can leave shared folders if you don't want it to take up your space. Just ask the owner to make the folder public and share the link with you and you can view the pictures in the browser or download the folder as a zip and keep a snapshot of the folder locally. Seems reasonable to me. If they didn't have this limitation, I would 100% have made tens of accounts and shared folders across all of them owned by just one of them, each device running a different dropbox account, effectively quadrupling my space for free.

kornish 8y ago

That's probably done to prevent people from creating many free accounts and sharing folders with each other to simulate having more storage space.

ValentineC 8y ago
Google Drive seems to have done this right — the file only counts towards the storage quota of the creator/"owner" of the file. That particular approach does have some other issues though.
- israrkhan 8y ago
  What is wrong about Google Drive is that they count your email and drive storage in same quota. Few months ago, I exceeded my quota on Drive, and Gmail started giving me warning that I am running out of space, and will stop receiving emails if I do not upgrade, or free-up space.
  - xyzzyz 8y ago
    What is wrong about it? Would you prefer to have 2 GB shared quota, or separate quota of 1 GB each? With shared quota you have more flexibility as to what service you prefer to use more.
    - tjoff 8y ago
      Email is a critical service. Loosing emails because a misclick or uploaded a too big of file is not acceptable UX.
      - colde 8y ago
        In that case, aren't you arguing that quotas shouldn't be placed on email at all? It's not like they instantly block receipt of mail if you go over the quota, you have time to fix it, which is much better than many mail services.
        tjoff 8y ago
        Not really, a gigabyte goes a long way for email and if you get a warning with 200 MB left or something you have lots of time to act on it. In contrast to a video recorded even by phones today a gigabyte is consumed in no time. Accidentally (without realizing how big it is or how much quota you have left) uploading a short clip is not something you put a lot of thought into. It's not like they instantly block receipt of mail [...] Well true, but it sucks having to rely on googles good will for that, you don't know the hard limits and they can change at any time without notice. It is still unacceptable UX.
      - mrmanner 8y ago
        I once was over the quota for over two months in a row, and still had no problems sending and receiving email. So I think Google does understand that email is critical service :)
bad_user 8y ago
I have a big archive of family photos (130 GB and growing) that I’d like to share with my wife in read-only mode. She only needs Dropbox for a bunch of documents, so paying an extra €10 per month is not something we can do. Dropbox is a fairly expensive service. I’ve used it for years however I can no longer defend my choice. Extended versioning is gone. Expiring sharing links are gone from Plus, so I have to pay €20 per month for it ... yes they grandfathered old accounts, however I made the mistake of trying out Pro and their Support refused to reinstate my old Plus account. Want to search your documents? Pay €20 for Pro. Which wouldn’t be bad, except that their search is terrible. And I could not get their support to admit that they aren’t indexing all my documents. Just to get an idea, they aren’t indexing all PDFs (that Google Drive is indexing just fine) and they aren’t indexing text files with a .log extension either. A comparison with Google Drive isn’t even funny as GDrive does text recognition on images, indexing everything. Speaking of Dropbox’s support, I’ve never been more frustrated in my life as the only issue they’ve ever solved for me was a refund, which they had to provide by law due to me being an EU citizen. All in all, I ended up paying €20 per month for link sharing I had in Plus, broken full text indexing and piss poor support. Also they keep pushing collaboration features but I wonder for whom. I don’t think they’ve thought this through. If Dropbox is no longer a good place to keep my photos then it stops being a good service for sharing work items with colleagues. Do they hope for Dropbox to become a service imposed by management? Probably, however in that space they are competing with the likes of GSuite and we already have GSuite for email. And Extending that to the Business edition that gives you Unlimited space is much cheaper than going with Dropbox. I’ll grant that Dropbox’s desktop sync is the best in business. But I can deal with the warts of the others.
- voltagex_ 8y ago
  I had sort of the same issues as you and ended up with OneDrive because other family members needed Office. In Australia you can often find 1 year x 5 accounts (1TB Onedrive space, Office, Skype minutes) for ~$70.
- point78 8y ago
  10 or 20 a month is completely reasonable for what you need...
simonebrunozzi 8y ago
True; however, this bad behavior could be easily countered with a very simple algorithm. Dropbox could do better here.

paulsutter 8y ago

Exact same thing happened to me and it was the last time I ever use Dropbox. Product experience was a barrage of growth hacking I can imagine their investor deck. “62% of people are total chumps, that’s our target market”

rozenmd 8y ago
Just curious, what do you mean by growth hacking in this case?
- ta1234567890 8y ago
  Can't speak for the parent comment. However I can relate. Today I installed Dropbox for my grandfather and their default entry-level free account comes with 2GB, but as soon as you create your account and install the software, they offer to give you 25GB of free space if you add 1 file to your account and you install Dropbox on your mobile. Not sure if that helps them artificially boost their numbers (by claiming more installed devices), or if they try to get your contacts to get more accounts.
  - shostack 8y ago
    Without being overly familiar with that specific tactic, on the surface I think it is actually much more benign. Incentivizing users to add their first file and install it on their phone (where it will likely want to slurp up photos, videos, etc. to back them up there) isn't a bad thing IMHO. It drives immediate engagement with the core product experience, and I'd be shocked if they didn't have data saying that people who upload at least one file and have the app installed on their phone convert to paid at some rate above people who don't. Thus, by incentivizing that behavior, they can likely boost conversion rates AND make users happier by getting more familiar with the service. Sounds like a win-win scenario to me. I wonder how many users sign up but don't ever use Dropbox.
  - Cthulhu_ 8y ago
    I found it an interesting approach to an incentivised tutorial of sorts it's very easy to install Dropbox on your desktop and just forget that it's there. By offering you free storage space by introducing you to features, such as their mobile app, sharing, etc, they're making you curious and interested in what else they have to offer you. You could call it growth hacking I guess. I think it's an interesting alternative to idk, a weekly "did you know that?" e-mail (e.g. Evernote) or a tooltips-driven tutorial, or Clippy.

keerthiko 8y ago

You can leave shared folders if you don't want it to take up your space. Just ask the owner to make the folder public and share the link with you and you can view the pictures in the browser or download the folder as a zip and keep a snapshot of the folder locally. Seems reasonable to me. If they didn't have this limitation, I would 100% have made tens of accounts and shared folders across all of them owned by just one of them, each device running a different dropbox account, effectively quadrupling my space for free.