8 ms·

I work at Dropbox and came up with this page. Thanks for throwing confounding variables in this soft launch experiment, Hacker News. A few points that might in

I work at Dropbox and came up with this page. Thanks for throwing confounding variables in this soft launch experiment, Hacker News. A few points that might interest yall: 1. We won't publish to facebook or twitter without your explicit permission. 2. We ask for information about your facebook profile because it will make Dropbox better. It's mainly about learning about our users without annoying surveys. We won't mandate facebook connect on signup so this is likely going to be the main path in the near term for people to facebook connect. Facebook auth also makes it really easy to post to facebook when you want to; the user experience is better. 3. Yes, runjake is right. Please do subscribe if you love Dropbox. I work here, so I set my capacity to 5TB and symlink everything important on my system (Desktop, Documents, etc) to Dropbox. The experience of coming to a home computer and having the stuff I was working on just appear is nothing less than magical. This is enabled by having more than a few gigs of storage. 4. If you want terabytes of storage, come work here. It is the best tech company in the valley: http://www.dropbox.com/jobs http://www.dropbox.com/jobs Ask me anything.

Pewpewarrows 16y ago
Tell everyone there to keep up the great work! I don't know how I survived before symlinking my entire life to my Dropbox account; it was just a mess of rewritable CDs, USB drives, and rsync commands. Thanks for the heads-up that you won't publish anything to FB/Twitter without explicit permission as that's exactly what I came to the comments to find out. I doubt that more than a tiny fraction of your users read hackernews though, so it'd be nice if you added a tiny "why are we asking you to link up" and/or "what will happen if I link up" blurbs explaining that you're not going to instantly make us tweet how awesome Dropbox is (which I would do anyway, but I absolutely hate services that auto-post after connecting). Edit: This would really only be useful for powerusers unless you gave it a nice front-end interface, but would you consider possibly creating something similar to a .gitignore config for your Dropbox? I constantly get random junk files based on OS and editor that end up in my Dropbox folders that I'd love for the central service to just ignore when syncing (like Thumbs, DS_Store, vim swp, random editors throwing backups ending in ~, etc).
- ivankirigin 16y ago
  The explanation pages are on their way. I would like to see an extra message "won't post anything" under the facebook connect step's button. I bet a test would show at least a 20% increase in conversion on that step.
bajsejohannes 16y ago
Nice idea! Thanks for the extra space. Here's a question: I'm very inclined to pay for Dropbox, but I don't actually need 50 GB - I use 1% of that now. On the other hand, I would absolutely pay the same amount for 10 GB for 5 years. It would give me the warm fuzzy feeling of giving back and I would feel safer with the service. Have you ever discussed this model? Any plans to implement it?
- ivankirigin 16y ago
  There is still a lot of work to be done on different pricing plans for sure.
  - robryan 16y ago
    Yeah, the best suggestion I would have to dropbox would be to charge more sooner. I would absolutely pay for the service, just through referrals, the student thing and extra space offers like this I'm never going to get to the point where I actually need extra space. I'm sure many people that use dropbox like me to backup code, whole websites and writing/ uni work would feel the same way.
jcfiala 16y ago
I'd love to work for dropbox, if it weren't for the fact that I'd have to move. Great work, though, I'm a big fan.
- ivankirigin 16y ago
  with great power comes great responsibility
DannoHung 16y ago
Can I just pay for Terabytes of storage? No offense, but I like the job I have.
- ivankirigin 16y ago
  If you don't want a job, we also accept payment in the form of first borns and souls. Like I mentioned elsewhere, there is a lot of work to do on different pricing plans.
- ecuzzillo 16y ago
  Seconded. (Dropbox is obviously an awesome place to work, but I still prefer my current situation at the moment.)
davecardwell 16y ago
I’d love to see a write-up of your experiences with this page once it’s been up for a while (assuming your corporate masters would allow it).
- ivankirigin 16y ago
  It wouldn't be a matter of corporate masters but of basic prudence. We've seen competitors straight copy other user acquisition channels and there are some important details on this page that might not be obvious. Luckily such lack of imagination shows in other ways. Also, it isn't clear at all from this post that the page isn't done. There are important but missing steps, for example. Also, there is no link currently from the normal web experience to /free. Such a write-up would be useful if only for us though. Writing codifies coherent thinking.
  - davecardwell 16y ago
    Ah, whoops. I wouldn’t have posted it here if I had known it wasn’t ready for public consumption. I think I came across it on a LifeHacker posting.
    - ivankirigin 16y ago
      It isn't a problem at all. I just wanted to stress that we made it public with a lot more to do. That matters in the context of some kind of write up about our experience.
lionhearted 16y ago
> Ask me anything. Congratulations on all the successes. You guys are doing something way cool. One question - when did you know Dropbox was a winner? And if the answer is "right away," then when did you really know Dropbox was a winner? Any specific events stand out to you?
- ivankirigin 16y ago
  I wasn't at Dropbox particularly early, so that is more of a question for someone like Drew Houston. The first time I used the product, I knew it was awesome. The first time I talked to Drew about the big ideas, I knew it was going to be much bigger than what most people might think. The Cloud™ is one of those mega trends, and Dropbox is right in the middle of it.
  - pavs 16y ago
    It seems to me not a lot is going on from users point of views (features), did I miss something?
    - ugh 16y ago
      Always having access to up to date versions of your files from anywhere independent of the hardware you are using seems like a pretty big deal to me, especially since Dropbox works so effortlessly. Is that not enough?
    - revorad 16y ago
      Isn't that the beauty of Dropbox? It just frickin works, you don't even notice it.
palish 16y ago
How do you like working at Dropbox?
- ivankirigin 16y ago
  I love it. It has a great culture and is moving extremely fast.
jeremyf 16y ago
Would be way cool if the "connect to Twitter" and "connect to Facebook" from this page allowed for archival of data directly into my Dropbox folder.
- ivankirigin 16y ago
  You mean your twitter and facebook data?
  - jeremyf 16y ago
    Yes. As much as possible - photos, text, etc. Edit: Ivan read my mind. Dropbox API project I now have. :)
    - ivankirigin 16y ago
      That is really interesting. Might I suggest building that with the API? https://www.dropbox.com/developers https://www.dropbox.com/developers
- WillyF 16y ago
  Backupify offers exactly this service. It would be nice if you could somehow keep the data on your Dropbox.
arfrank 16y ago
Did you guys ever fix the bugs that were there during the initial launch of this page, when you tweeted, or more accurately did you check that the accounts that did this while it was initially broken a few weeks ago got credited? Also keep up the good work!
- ivankirigin 16y ago
  Yes, we fixed the bugs. I believe everyone was credited. thanks!
ROFISH 16y ago
We use Dropbox here at work and it's great. Future looking, are there going to be tiers above 100GB?
- ivankirigin 16y ago
  Shoot me an email: ivan@dropbox.com
mdwrigh2 16y ago
Dropbox looks like a pretty amazing company to work for. Any chance you'll be hiring interns this summer?
- ivankirigin 16y ago
  http://dropbox.com/jobs http://dropbox.com/jobs Apply to something that looks good, but explain you're looking for an internship. Do the challenge problems to get noticed.
YuriNiyazov 16y ago
iirc after tipjoy's demise you went to facebook. Why did you leave for dropbox?
- ivankirigin 16y ago
  because Dropbox is awesome
  - mkramlich 16y ago
    and he wanted a TB of Dropbox space :)
wlesieutre 16y ago
Why does your application request access to the photos and videos I've uploaded to Facebook? I'm fine with you having access to my Twitter information, but this seems unnecessary.
- ivankirigin 16y ago
  This is in part to survey whether you use those apps but also to enable photo and video sharing. The latter isn't currently available.
almost 16y ago
What info do you get from Facebook? It's not that I don't trust you, I already trust you guys with all my files, but I'm interested. I also don't get why I'd want to post to Facebook from within Dropbox, got any cool use cases I'm missing? 5TB sounds good, but how long does that take to sync? I've got about 20GB in mine now I think and syncing it to a new computer seems like it would take several days (I get the "grab a snickers" message). I usually start of a new machine my rsyncing stuff over so not the end of the world, but it would be useful to download stuff at a speed resembling what my, not that great, connection can handle. Dropbox rules by the way, it's changed how I use my computers :)
- ivankirigin 16y ago
  Dropbox syncs over a LAN if available and the long sync time is only for initialization. When I get a new computer, I'll just make sure to have the old computer there. This is part of the process of getting a new one already, but people need to move stuff over manually sometimes. As far as what you can do today with facebook, if you download the beta builds from the forums you can get access to a new sharing model. You can publish links of files to facebook & twitter. This page will change a lot when we launch this properly, but you can see what i mean: https://www.dropbox.com/s/owdlzphfhiw2ao4/koalabox.PNG https://www.dropbox.com/s/owdlzphfhiw2ao4/koalabox.PNG Facebook and twitter are great for sharing, so it makes sense for Dropbox to leverage them when people want to share files. Photos is a good example application where sharing often means pushing to a social network.
blakeweb 16y ago
The features page of your website says this about security: >All transmission of file data and metadata occurs over an encrypted channel (SSL). >All files stored on Dropbox servers are encrypted (AES-256). And yet I hear people here saying that Dropbox is "missing encryption." What's the real story? Are there more technical details on your encryption posted somewhere on your site? I'd really like to know, as I actually have a good deal of semi-sensitive information stored in my account right now--a decision I made based on the wording I copied in above and on my trust in the Dropbox folks so far.
- ivankirigin 16y ago
  When people say Dropbox is missing encryption, they mean encrypting files before they are uploaded so not even Dropbox could look at the files - end to end, so to speak. They do not mean that Dropbox is insecure. Dropbox is secure. The problem with end to end is that it makes sharing or public files unfeasible, and those are important parts of Dropbox.
  - zcid 16y ago
    Have you considered making encryption available on a per-folder basis? The encryption would be done on the client side so it wouldn't incur any additional computational expense for your servers, but would still provide the peace of mind that many look for with TrueCrypt containers. This could be even be done in a way to allow the user to choose his implementation.
    - poi98u7y6tryuio 16y ago
      If you want to do that then encrypt the files with truecrypt or something you trust and let DB sync the truecrypt container file. But everytime you slightly change the contents, Dropbox will have to resend the entire container - thats one of the features of good encryption
      - zcid 16y ago
        I do this currently, but I wish there was a more elegant solution. As far as I can tell from my own usage, the only portion that is uploaded is the changed portion. I have a 1GB container currently synced and when I change files in that container, I can assure you that it doesn't upload 1GB of information. It appears to only transfer the delta.
jfb 16y ago
All I want is to be able to buy another 50-100GB, even at a premium.
agscala 16y ago
What happens if you have multiple ters of data in dropbox and you try to sync with a computer with less than that amount of space?
joshzayin 16y ago
The error message given for a message that's too long is somewhat ambiguous. It states, "Message are limited to 140 characters"-but doesn't say that "I love Dropbox because " is included in that. It should say, "Messages are limited to 117 characters" and include a character count--on editing a message, the count doesn't work.
peteforde 16y ago
I'm a passionate amateur photographer, and after a bad crash where I lost years of work I became really neurotic about my multi-site recovery plan. Today I have Drobos and Time Capsules spread around my house and office, plus Dropbox and even a few rsync cron jobs all keeping me calm. Today, my Aperture library is 109GB, because I work with archival scans from medium format film. TL;DR: 100GB is a very small limit. How can I pay you more?
- andreyf 16y ago
  But do you really want to pull down 109GB on every laptop you install Dropbox on? Or would you manage that via multiple Dropbox accounts? From what I can tell, Dropbox hasn't yet tried out the "backup solutions" space, but I'm also hoping they will, as most of my machines are constantly running out of disk space.
  - peteforde 16y ago
    One of the best (and yet seemingly little-known) tricks that Dropbox uses is that it will sync over a local LAN before attempting to download from S3. Between the tight OS integration and the hash table lookups (it checks to see if that MP3 is already in their storage cloud, leading to regular "instant upload" scenarios) I believe that Dropbox is the best new software tool of the decade.
    - andreyf 16y ago
      I'm not talking about upload/download, I'm talking about 109 gigs of movies on my 120/160GB SSD drive on both my home/work laptops, respectively. Or is everyone else walking around with multi-TB spinning drives in their laptops?
  - gaelian 16y ago
    > From what I can tell, Dropbox hasn't yet tried out the "backup solutions" space ... I'd really love to see this too. Like a feature where you could choose whether you wanted to sync specific data or just back it up or something.
  - 16y ago
greattypo 16y ago
Why does Dropbox expect casual users to understand concepts like symlinks in order to sync their desktops (or any existing folder outside of the dropbox directory for that matter)? Are their plans to make this more intuitive, given this is how you yourself find dropbox most useful?
- ivankirigin 16y ago
  We don't expect casual users to understand. If there is anything like this built into the basic product, it wont involve anything more than maybe asking if a user wants a feature. Everything should just work.
jodrellblank 16y ago
A dropbox server to run locally for company data that we don't want in the cloud (chargeable or free). Any plans along those lines?
- aidanf 16y ago
  You could set this up with unison(http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/ http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/) if you want to go the self-host route.
- ivankirigin 16y ago
  In my personal opinion, there is a big shift towards the cloud. Making tools for companies that haven't yet made the shift isn't a good idea.
mhartl 16y ago
This experiment is awesome. Dropbox is lucky to have you. (So is Luka. :-)
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
SilentMobius 16y ago
Why doesn't that Android client have the option to keep files sync'd? The whole point of Dropbox IMHO is to have your data when you need it, not maybe-if-I've-got-signal-and-I-can-wait-till-it's-transferred. At the moment The Android dropbox client is just a glorified SFTP client
jodrellblank 16y ago
> Ask me anything. Regarding your "voting" system so users can "decide what we work on next", why is it that there are things with tens of thousands of votes from a year ago not "being worked on" (or declined), yet "use application indicator in Ubuntu" with three hundred votes is being worked on? What's the point of a voting system if you don't address the most voted items first? Free storage for following dropbox on twitter has 16 votes. https://www.dropbox.com/votebox/2235/free-storage-space-for-following-dropbox-on-twitter-and-liking-on-facebook- https://www.dropbox.com/votebox/2235/free-storage-space-for-...

Pewpewarrows 16y ago

Tell everyone there to keep up the great work! I don't know how I survived before symlinking my entire life to my Dropbox account; it was just a mess of rewritable CDs, USB drives, and rsync commands. Thanks for the heads-up that you won't publish anything to FB/Twitter without explicit permission as that's exactly what I came to the comments to find out. I doubt that more than a tiny fraction of your users read hackernews though, so it'd be nice if you added a tiny "why are we asking you to link up" and/or "what will happen if I link up" blurbs explaining that you're not going to instantly make us tweet how awesome Dropbox is (which I would do anyway, but I absolutely hate services that auto-post after connecting). Edit: This would really only be useful for powerusers unless you gave it a nice front-end interface, but would you consider possibly creating something similar to a .gitignore config for your Dropbox? I constantly get random junk files based on OS and editor that end up in my Dropbox folders that I'd love for the central service to just ignore when syncing (like Thumbs, DS_Store, vim swp, random editors throwing backups ending in ~, etc).

ivankirigin 16y ago
The explanation pages are on their way. I would like to see an extra message "won't post anything" under the facebook connect step's button. I bet a test would show at least a 20% increase in conversion on that step.

bajsejohannes 16y ago

Nice idea! Thanks for the extra space. Here's a question: I'm very inclined to pay for Dropbox, but I don't actually need 50 GB - I use 1% of that now. On the other hand, I would absolutely pay the same amount for 10 GB for 5 years. It would give me the warm fuzzy feeling of giving back and I would feel safer with the service. Have you ever discussed this model? Any plans to implement it?

ivankirigin 16y ago
There is still a lot of work to be done on different pricing plans for sure.
- robryan 16y ago
  Yeah, the best suggestion I would have to dropbox would be to charge more sooner. I would absolutely pay for the service, just through referrals, the student thing and extra space offers like this I'm never going to get to the point where I actually need extra space. I'm sure many people that use dropbox like me to backup code, whole websites and writing/ uni work would feel the same way.

jcfiala 16y ago

I'd love to work for dropbox, if it weren't for the fact that I'd have to move. Great work, though, I'm a big fan.

ivankirigin 16y ago
with great power comes great responsibility

DannoHung 16y ago

Can I just pay for Terabytes of storage? No offense, but I like the job I have.

ivankirigin 16y ago
If you don't want a job, we also accept payment in the form of first borns and souls. Like I mentioned elsewhere, there is a lot of work to do on different pricing plans.
ecuzzillo 16y ago
Seconded. (Dropbox is obviously an awesome place to work, but I still prefer my current situation at the moment.)

davecardwell 16y ago

I’d love to see a write-up of your experiences with this page once it’s been up for a while (assuming your corporate masters would allow it).

ivankirigin 16y ago
It wouldn't be a matter of corporate masters but of basic prudence. We've seen competitors straight copy other user acquisition channels and there are some important details on this page that might not be obvious. Luckily such lack of imagination shows in other ways. Also, it isn't clear at all from this post that the page isn't done. There are important but missing steps, for example. Also, there is no link currently from the normal web experience to /free. Such a write-up would be useful if only for us though. Writing codifies coherent thinking.
- davecardwell 16y ago
  Ah, whoops. I wouldn’t have posted it here if I had known it wasn’t ready for public consumption. I think I came across it on a LifeHacker posting.
  - ivankirigin 16y ago
    It isn't a problem at all. I just wanted to stress that we made it public with a lot more to do. That matters in the context of some kind of write up about our experience.

lionhearted 16y ago

> Ask me anything. Congratulations on all the successes. You guys are doing something way cool. One question - when did you know Dropbox was a winner? And if the answer is "right away," then when did you really know Dropbox was a winner? Any specific events stand out to you?

ivankirigin 16y ago
I wasn't at Dropbox particularly early, so that is more of a question for someone like Drew Houston. The first time I used the product, I knew it was awesome. The first time I talked to Drew about the big ideas, I knew it was going to be much bigger than what most people might think. The Cloud™ is one of those mega trends, and Dropbox is right in the middle of it.
- pavs 16y ago
  It seems to me not a lot is going on from users point of views (features), did I miss something?
  - ugh 16y ago
    Always having access to up to date versions of your files from anywhere independent of the hardware you are using seems like a pretty big deal to me, especially since Dropbox works so effortlessly. Is that not enough?
  - revorad 16y ago
    Isn't that the beauty of Dropbox? It just frickin works, you don't even notice it.

palish 16y ago

How do you like working at Dropbox?

ivankirigin 16y ago
I love it. It has a great culture and is moving extremely fast.

jeremyf 16y ago

Would be way cool if the "connect to Twitter" and "connect to Facebook" from this page allowed for archival of data directly into my Dropbox folder.

ivankirigin 16y ago
You mean your twitter and facebook data?
- jeremyf 16y ago
  Yes. As much as possible - photos, text, etc. Edit: Ivan read my mind. Dropbox API project I now have. :)
  - ivankirigin 16y ago
    That is really interesting. Might I suggest building that with the API? https://www.dropbox.com/developers https://www.dropbox.com/developers
WillyF 16y ago
Backupify offers exactly this service. It would be nice if you could somehow keep the data on your Dropbox.

arfrank 16y ago

Did you guys ever fix the bugs that were there during the initial launch of this page, when you tweeted, or more accurately did you check that the accounts that did this while it was initially broken a few weeks ago got credited? Also keep up the good work!

ivankirigin 16y ago
Yes, we fixed the bugs. I believe everyone was credited. thanks!

ROFISH 16y ago

We use Dropbox here at work and it's great. Future looking, are there going to be tiers above 100GB?

ivankirigin 16y ago
Shoot me an email: ivan@dropbox.com

mdwrigh2 16y ago

Dropbox looks like a pretty amazing company to work for. Any chance you'll be hiring interns this summer?

ivankirigin 16y ago
http://dropbox.com/jobs http://dropbox.com/jobs Apply to something that looks good, but explain you're looking for an internship. Do the challenge problems to get noticed.

YuriNiyazov 16y ago

iirc after tipjoy's demise you went to facebook. Why did you leave for dropbox?

ivankirigin 16y ago
because Dropbox is awesome
- mkramlich 16y ago
  and he wanted a TB of Dropbox space :)

wlesieutre 16y ago

Why does your application request access to the photos and videos I've uploaded to Facebook? I'm fine with you having access to my Twitter information, but this seems unnecessary.

ivankirigin 16y ago
This is in part to survey whether you use those apps but also to enable photo and video sharing. The latter isn't currently available.

almost 16y ago

What info do you get from Facebook? It's not that I don't trust you, I already trust you guys with all my files, but I'm interested. I also don't get why I'd want to post to Facebook from within Dropbox, got any cool use cases I'm missing? 5TB sounds good, but how long does that take to sync? I've got about 20GB in mine now I think and syncing it to a new computer seems like it would take several days (I get the "grab a snickers" message). I usually start of a new machine my rsyncing stuff over so not the end of the world, but it would be useful to download stuff at a speed resembling what my, not that great, connection can handle. Dropbox rules by the way, it's changed how I use my computers :)

ivankirigin 16y ago
Dropbox syncs over a LAN if available and the long sync time is only for initialization. When I get a new computer, I'll just make sure to have the old computer there. This is part of the process of getting a new one already, but people need to move stuff over manually sometimes. As far as what you can do today with facebook, if you download the beta builds from the forums you can get access to a new sharing model. You can publish links of files to facebook & twitter. This page will change a lot when we launch this properly, but you can see what i mean: https://www.dropbox.com/s/owdlzphfhiw2ao4/koalabox.PNG https://www.dropbox.com/s/owdlzphfhiw2ao4/koalabox.PNG Facebook and twitter are great for sharing, so it makes sense for Dropbox to leverage them when people want to share files. Photos is a good example application where sharing often means pushing to a social network.

blakeweb 16y ago

The features page of your website says this about security: >All transmission of file data and metadata occurs over an encrypted channel (SSL). >All files stored on Dropbox servers are encrypted (AES-256). And yet I hear people here saying that Dropbox is "missing encryption." What's the real story? Are there more technical details on your encryption posted somewhere on your site? I'd really like to know, as I actually have a good deal of semi-sensitive information stored in my account right now--a decision I made based on the wording I copied in above and on my trust in the Dropbox folks so far.

ivankirigin 16y ago
When people say Dropbox is missing encryption, they mean encrypting files before they are uploaded so not even Dropbox could look at the files - end to end, so to speak. They do not mean that Dropbox is insecure. Dropbox is secure. The problem with end to end is that it makes sharing or public files unfeasible, and those are important parts of Dropbox.
- zcid 16y ago
  Have you considered making encryption available on a per-folder basis? The encryption would be done on the client side so it wouldn't incur any additional computational expense for your servers, but would still provide the peace of mind that many look for with TrueCrypt containers. This could be even be done in a way to allow the user to choose his implementation.
  - poi98u7y6tryuio 16y ago
    If you want to do that then encrypt the files with truecrypt or something you trust and let DB sync the truecrypt container file. But everytime you slightly change the contents, Dropbox will have to resend the entire container - thats one of the features of good encryption
    - zcid 16y ago
      I do this currently, but I wish there was a more elegant solution. As far as I can tell from my own usage, the only portion that is uploaded is the changed portion. I have a 1GB container currently synced and when I change files in that container, I can assure you that it doesn't upload 1GB of information. It appears to only transfer the delta.

jfb 16y ago

All I want is to be able to buy another 50-100GB, even at a premium.

agscala 16y ago

What happens if you have multiple ters of data in dropbox and you try to sync with a computer with less than that amount of space?

joshzayin 16y ago

The error message given for a message that's too long is somewhat ambiguous. It states, "Message are limited to 140 characters"-but doesn't say that "I love Dropbox because " is included in that. It should say, "Messages are limited to 117 characters" and include a character count--on editing a message, the count doesn't work.

peteforde 16y ago

I'm a passionate amateur photographer, and after a bad crash where I lost years of work I became really neurotic about my multi-site recovery plan. Today I have Drobos and Time Capsules spread around my house and office, plus Dropbox and even a few rsync cron jobs all keeping me calm. Today, my Aperture library is 109GB, because I work with archival scans from medium format film. TL;DR: 100GB is a very small limit. How can I pay you more?

andreyf 16y ago
But do you really want to pull down 109GB on every laptop you install Dropbox on? Or would you manage that via multiple Dropbox accounts? From what I can tell, Dropbox hasn't yet tried out the "backup solutions" space, but I'm also hoping they will, as most of my machines are constantly running out of disk space.
- peteforde 16y ago
  One of the best (and yet seemingly little-known) tricks that Dropbox uses is that it will sync over a local LAN before attempting to download from S3. Between the tight OS integration and the hash table lookups (it checks to see if that MP3 is already in their storage cloud, leading to regular "instant upload" scenarios) I believe that Dropbox is the best new software tool of the decade.
  - andreyf 16y ago
    I'm not talking about upload/download, I'm talking about 109 gigs of movies on my 120/160GB SSD drive on both my home/work laptops, respectively. Or is everyone else walking around with multi-TB spinning drives in their laptops?
- gaelian 16y ago
  > From what I can tell, Dropbox hasn't yet tried out the "backup solutions" space ... I'd really love to see this too. Like a feature where you could choose whether you wanted to sync specific data or just back it up or something.
- 16y ago

greattypo 16y ago

Why does Dropbox expect casual users to understand concepts like symlinks in order to sync their desktops (or any existing folder outside of the dropbox directory for that matter)? Are their plans to make this more intuitive, given this is how you yourself find dropbox most useful?

ivankirigin 16y ago
We don't expect casual users to understand. If there is anything like this built into the basic product, it wont involve anything more than maybe asking if a user wants a feature. Everything should just work.

jodrellblank 16y ago

A dropbox server to run locally for company data that we don't want in the cloud (chargeable or free). Any plans along those lines?

aidanf 16y ago
You could set this up with unison(http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/ http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/) if you want to go the self-host route.
ivankirigin 16y ago
In my personal opinion, there is a big shift towards the cloud. Making tools for companies that haven't yet made the shift isn't a good idea.

mhartl 16y ago

This experiment is awesome. Dropbox is lucky to have you. (So is Luka. :-)

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

SilentMobius 16y ago

Why doesn't that Android client have the option to keep files sync'd? The whole point of Dropbox IMHO is to have your data when you need it, not maybe-if-I've-got-signal-and-I-can-wait-till-it's-transferred. At the moment The Android dropbox client is just a glorified SFTP client

jodrellblank 16y ago

> Ask me anything. Regarding your "voting" system so users can "decide what we work on next", why is it that there are things with tens of thousands of votes from a year ago not "being worked on" (or declined), yet "use application indicator in Ubuntu" with three hundred votes is being worked on? What's the point of a voting system if you don't address the most voted items first? Free storage for following dropbox on twitter has 16 votes. https://www.dropbox.com/votebox/2235/free-storage-space-for-following-dropbox-on-twitter-and-liking-on-facebook- https://www.dropbox.com/votebox/2235/free-storage-space-for-...