31 ms·

The new Dropbox

• manojlds 7y ago
  I have a few qualms with this app...
• timdiggerm 7y ago
  At least the interface is still the same colors, instead of the gross palette of the blog and their rebrand.
  • uasm 7y ago
    The blog looks like one giant acid trip.
    • Operyl 7y ago
      Totally agree. The first thing I found myself doing was staring at the silly animation on the top left for a minute, what a waste of time. EDIT: Oh god the front page is just as much of an acid trip now.
      • dumbfounder 7y ago
        That gif on the blog made me physically ill.
        • Operyl 7y ago
          The "tall letters" on the post title kind of did me in there. I don't know what they were thinking.
    • fphhotchips 7y ago
      The whole thing looks like something out of the 80s. Like a bad VCR science video that you know still gets played when it comes time for the kids to learn about atoms.
  • manuelmagic 7y ago
    I really don't get why they are throwing away a nice, clean, smooth interface to embrace a new big "touchy" UI even on the browser and the desktop. I understand it's important to implement a native App for smartphones and tablets, but I do not like at all the trend to transform the desktop UI with big buttons, huge padding everywhere etc. (GMail style).
  • phaedryx 7y ago
    Agreed. I think it was a step back.
• g_sch 7y ago
  My first reaction: this feels like it's adding a lot of noise and clutter to the interface, but also a lot of powerful collaboration tools. Personally, I've been using Dropbox to sync files between my devices, so this redesign is clearly not targeted toward me. But if it works, it might help Dropbox make inroads in the business/enterprise market that Box seems to be dominating so far.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• workingpatrick 7y ago
  I see these new integrations and all I can think about is the privacy implications.
  • narrowtux 7y ago
    You don't have to enable integrations.
    • workingpatrick 7y ago
      It's nice that they are optional, do you know if they are opt-in or opt-out?
• judge2020 7y ago
  I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but the desktop app is basically an electron app by using QTWebengine (Chromium embedded).
• rrmoelker 7y ago
  Heads up, downloads 20MB and might take a long time to load (for some reason it took over a minute on my laptop)
• danieldk 7y ago
  Me and my wife ended both ended our Dropbox Plus subscriptions last weekend (after being paying users for five years or so). As a side-effect, my mom also cancelled her subscription (since she was using it to share photos with us). The primary reasons: - Constant nagging in the user interface to upgrade to Dropbox Pro or Dropbox Business. Don't want it, don't need it. - Accumulation of a lot of UI clutter over the years. When you used to log in, you just your files. Now you get suggestions, unread comments, or whatever. - Dropping support for file systems outside ext4. One of my machines uses Linux on ZFS, now I need to LD_PRELOAD shims to make Dropbox work. No, I am not switching back to ext4 for you, Dropbox. - The camel that broke the straw's back: raising the prices from 10 to 12 Euro per month. It is not like we can't afford it. But storage and bandwidth gets cheaper, but Dropbox gets more expensive. We do not need the new features: why would I need 2TB if I am only using 200-300GB of space? And no, I don't want Smart Sync, which puts itself in ring-0 through a kernel module. If Dropbox had just stuck to its nice, clean, and simple interface, focusing on syncing across machines with various OSes or file systems, we would still be happy, paying users. They wouldn't have to add anything (though the File Requests feature was nice). Just don't bother me with nonsense and let me do my work and share with family + friends.
  • vorpalhex 7y ago
    Yup, same here. Switched to pCloud which seems nice enough so far though rudimentary.
    • Bombthecat 7y ago
      The lifetime sounds interesting. But I'm not sure if lifetime really means lifetime..
      • slig 7y ago
        Very interesting. The price of the lifetime offer is equivalent of paying 2.5 years in advance. edit: not that interesting anymore, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20164674 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20164674
    • 7y ago
• Traster 7y ago
  I strongly feel this is a bad direction for Dropbox. Many companies have tried to integrate tools together. It's always half-baked simply because those tools aren't designed to be integrated. I find it kind of odd Dropbox would be bragging about a dropdown menu to create a Google doc. Surely if that's important to me I get Google drive - the integration will be better because the same company makes the different tools and you can actually stay within the eco-system. If Dropbox are planning to compete with this it's very difficult to see how they win over Google. The integration with Google makes sense because they already own the tools that you're moving between. It seems really funky to have Dropbox crash that party. If you're trying to integrate with tools outside of the Google eco-system maybe dropbox atleast tries to allow it, I just can't see how it'd be anything other than clunky though. Personally what I value is just basic cloud storage with a decent automatic sync. Obviously storage has turned into a commodity and dropbox are trying to compete on a new level, it just seems boggling to me that this is the direction they've taken.
  • rc-1140 7y ago
    > Personally what I value is just basic cloud storage with a decent automatic sync. Similarly. That was the biggest appeal to me back when I first discovered them and they were giving out bonus space for their free plan depending on the number of people that any one user referred. On top of this shift, didn't Dropbox just limit the number of computers one could have their data synchronized between? These moves seem bad overall.
    • sethhochberg 7y ago
      The limit on number of syncing devices has me exploring other options - I'm an oldschool Dropbox user, I got most of my storage space with referrals years ago, and I consume about 6GB on the free plan. I don't need 2TB. I don't really even want 2TB, and I'm certainly not going to pay over $100 a year for 2TB. I'd pay some smaller amount of money for the ability to sync additional devices without storage that I'll never use nor need, but nobody does a-la-cart pricing. Apple will sell me 50GB on iCloud for $0.99 a month. That fits my needs much better, I just need to go through the exercise of making sure their web interface isn't horrible on my one remaining Linux system. In fairness to Dropbox, I'm probably not the kind of user they want at this point. They got their mileage out of my early referrals, and I've never paid them a cent.
• rangibaby 7y ago
  I like Dropbox again lately. They added smart sync and 1TB extra to “plus” accounts, which is nice after their pathetic use of Finder integration + OS notifications to nag users to upgrade to the next paid tier (on a paid account!). It’s what they should have done in the first place.
  • wingerlang 7y ago
    They also increased the price right? What I want is lower space and lower price.
• ionwake 7y ago
  Can someone summarise the changes in a couple of sentences? I haven't got a clue what the differences are after sepdning a couple of minutes on the site. Thank you
  • vorpalhex 7y ago
    "Enterprise" features including half baked slack integrations, and web shortcuts like it's 1999
• sciurus 7y ago
  It looks like Dropbox is completely focused on the business market and not improving the consumer experience anymore. I've stuck with them for years because of the linux support, but am probably going to jump ship soon. My main complaint is the lack of a way to build a shared photo library with my spouse. Both Google and Apple support this.
  • roel_v 7y ago
    But switch to where? All.the alternatives don't have the features and/or are even more unreliable (Google). If only Fastmail would build a product like this, them I would trust...
    • chrismatheson 7y ago
      What about keybase? Encrypted and synced (I think)
    • sciurus 7y ago
      Switch to Google Drive and Google Photos, most likely. I'd have local backups, so I don't think I'd trust it any less with my data than I trust Dropbox.
• ForzaBlu 7y ago
  Great content for the Emoji Movie sequel :)
• AtlasLion 7y ago
  I left DropBox the minute I read they hired war criminal Condoleezza Rice.
• goodmattg 7y ago
  Does anyone else see "work in progress" at the top of the page?
  • dhruvrrp 7y ago
    that is the name of their company blog i think...
    • goodmattg 7y ago
      Is there some inside joke to the blog name? I really don't get it...
• eyeball 7y ago
  I just want my files backed up and sync’d across device. iCloud changes look promising. May be time to ditch Dropbox. If only Apple would have a good app on Linux and let me run Mac OS time machine into iCloud.
  • randlet 7y ago
    I've been happy with pCloud which has Win/Linux/Mac/Android/iOS clients.
    • FullyFunctional 7y ago
      I pay for both and pCloud is cheap but inferior (for me) in two ways: 1. pCloud doesn't support file permissions or symlinks, thus you can't use it as a real filesystem (eg, building and testing software out of it). 2. pCould is a "cloud fs" (the files aren't on a host filesystem), whereas Dropbox is syncing a host filesystem. The difference is very visible in performance. If the first issue was fixed (I've asked them many times, to no avail), I could live with the second.
      • Shorel 7y ago
        Number 2 pCloud way is to add sync folders, you do that from the Sync tab in the preferences dialog. Sadly the command line client doesn't let you add the sync folders. An alternative for the GUI is to edit the sqlite configuration file. In my experience pCloud works fine for me having the Documents, Music and Pictures folders synced, and having many other folders as cloud only.
      • robyn92 7y ago
        Up vote for pCloud, definitely worth it!
  • Slippery_John 7y ago
    The lack of Time Machine backup into iCloud is just baffling to me. That 2TB package has lots of room for backup. If they're worried about eating too much into shared space then let me pay for a time machine partition.
• s9w 7y ago
  Dropbox is the worst offender of feature creep I know. Why would I possibly want to create new files in Dropbox?
  • ben509 7y ago
    It has some tough competition, e.g. RealPlayer.
• FunnyLookinHat 7y ago
  The blog has a loading icon? It took 10-15 seconds to render for me. Anyone else think this client-side app trend has gotten in the way of recognizing a great case for a server-side render (or even a cached page)?
  • randlet 7y ago
    Page won't load at all for me in Firefox 67. edit: Took 93 seconds to load a couple of the gifs which seems to have blocked rendering of the entire page. <sigh>
  • dreamcompiler 7y ago
    99% of client-side rendered pages would provide a superior user experience with server-side render. SSR is what the web was designed for after all. CSR is merely fashionable, not better.
    • onion2k 7y ago
      99% of client-side rendered pages would provide a superior user experience with server-side render. If you're loading a single page and then unloading it that's right. If you're interacting with a page it's often a lot faster to make a small request to fetch new data and just update the part of the DOM that needs to change rather than unloading everything, fetching the new page and all the associated resources that aren't cached, parsing the new page, and repainting everything. SSR is what the web was designed for after all. That's plain wrong. Using a browser to launch an application was one the use cases in Tim Berners-Lee's original memo about the web in 1989 - "If one sacrifices portability, it is possible so make following a link fire up a special application, so that diagnostic programs, for example, could be linked directly into the maintenance guide." (https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html). There's no suggestion that the user would have to leave their browser when they clicked such a link. Fast forward 10 years from Tim's proposal and Microsoft added XMLHttpRequest (via ActiveX) for fetching fragments of data to IE5 in 1999. We've had 20 years, which is 2/3 of the time the web has existed, of client-side applications. You may well have a preference for server-side rendering but you don't get to claim the web was designed for server-side as a fact. It's not true.
• pihalbrecht 7y ago
  What could be the best alternative to Dropbox?
• pihalbrecht 7y ago
  What are the best alternatives to Dropbox? Is google drive better?
  • randlet 7y ago
    pCloud works well for me (support for all major platforms). Google drive has no Linux support which is a deal killer for me.
    • dcx 7y ago
      pCloud looks pretty good - I happen to be shopping around for a Dropbox replacement too. But just a heads-up, when I checked around online I found these [1] [2] [3] comments. It sounds like they have a tool that runs internally to detect piracy and it sometimes picks up false positives, which might cause your account to be deleted? [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/am2xbn/pcloud_allows_public_to_view_and_report_your/ https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/am2xbn/pcloud_allo... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/pcloud/comments/aedoeq/so_i_want_to_get_lifetime_but_out_of_what_i_read/ej09og1/ https://www.reddit.com/r/pcloud/comments/aedoeq/so_i_want_to... [3] https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/6d9yyb/pcloud_allowing_3rd_parties_to_scan_files/ https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/6d9yyb/pcloud_allo...
      • randlet 7y ago
        Yikes. That is troubling. Thanks for the heads up.
      • ben509 7y ago
        From their terms[1]: "pCloud will have the right to investigate and prosecute breaches of any of the above to the fullest extent of the law. pCloud may involve and cooperate with law enforcement authorities in prosecuting users who breach these Terms. You acknowledge that pCloud has no obligation to monitor your access to or use of the Site or Services or to review or edit any User Content, but has the right to do so for the purpose of operating the Site or Services, to ensure your compliance with these Terms, or to comply with the applicable law or the order or requirement of a court, administrative agency or other governmental body." They also have the usual "we'll take down anything that Disney tells us to" DMCA arrangement. Are other clerd providers better? [1]: https://www.pcloud.com/terms_and_conditions.html https://www.pcloud.com/terms_and_conditions.html
• Four8Five 7y ago
  I still can't get over Dropbox's ugly color scheme and aesthetic.
• rrggrr 7y ago
  This will fail. Drop.io (acquired by Facebook) was the model they should have pursued. I need an environment to share info with clients and this isn't that.
  • laurencei 7y ago
    Drop.io domain is for sale? Did FB close it down when they purchased it?
• dreamcompiler 7y ago
  There's a ridiculous amout of unnecessary dancing monkey Javascript on this page.
• tvanantwerp 7y ago
  My office uses Dropbox Business extensively, and I'm not excited by any kind of "new" Dropbox. Businesses need to trust in the stability of their tools, and this signals to me the exact opposite of stability. I haven't got any clue how this could interfere with the workflows we've already established. Major product changes like this give me anxiety.
• herf 7y ago
  I really love Dropbox Paper, so I get part of the collaboration story. What I don't like is that it's so hard to share a file, or to send an image in a chat -- all paths lead to dropbox links instead. When I get a Dropbox link on mobile chat now, I know it's going to take nearly a minute to see the content. Why?
  • CondensedBrain 7y ago
    They probably think of it in terms of control. One of their big upsells is controlling access to shares. They don't see it as a problem that you have to save it to the device then share from that because it's not for you from their perspective. It's for people sending project assets to collaborators.
    • aianus 7y ago
      I think it makes a lot sense for the dropbox link to be the default, especially on mobile. I almost never want to download the file over LTE to my smartphone and re-upload it to a different web service and waste (2 * filesize) of my limited mobile bandwidth to share a file.
  • jwr 7y ago
    Oh, yes, Dropbox links. I started telling my coworkers that if they share a file via dropbox, I will not even try to open it. The experience is so abysmal (the wait, then their ridiculous interface that turns a PDF into a buggy JavaScript application), that I don't even try to click on those links anymore.
  • stingrae 7y ago
    What I really don't understand is, why I still cant put a dropbox paper document in a folder with my files on dropbox?
• Fiahil 7y ago
  Do they support file versioning ?
  • pwenzel 7y ago
    Yes: https://help.dropbox.com/files-folders/restore-delete/recover-older-versions https://help.dropbox.com/files-folders/restore-delete/recove...
• drageth 7y ago
  Dropbox continues to become bloated but it’s still the only client that supports delta sync across platforms. I tried switching to onedrive and google drive but they all are lacking in sync capability.
• martin_drapeau 7y ago
  So they created a SPA which takes 6MB to 7MB and 220+ requests to list files in a directory?! That's a whole lot of engineering. In fact, they seem to have recreated Google Drive. SharePoint online is also the same - very long time to load. As a user, I just want to view files in directories. The landing page should show me the last documents I worked on. That's pretty much all I need.
• mmargerum 7y ago
  Is there some open source version of something like rsync that is available to just sync between machines on a LAN? No cloud involved.
  • butteroverflow 7y ago
    syncthing? https://syncthing.net/ https://syncthing.net/
    • mmargerum 7y ago
      Thank you!
    • faitswulff 7y ago
      Does anyone use SyncThing on iOS? Last I heard the support was read only from a now defunct app called fsync. Thinking about migrating my family over, but this is a blocker for me.
  • SisRob 7y ago
    Just use rsync + ssh.
    • mmargerum 7y ago
      i forgot to mention one of the machines is windows and I didn't want to go down the cygwin rabbit hole. It is windows 10 though so perhaps I could use WSL.
      • butteroverflow 7y ago
        WSL over NTFS does not preserve file attributes, you'll get 777 everywhere. Plus, the I/O is damn slow currenty, and it's something they are unlikely to fix*; the more files you have, the slower it gets. https://github.com/Microsoft/WSL/issues/873#issuecomment-425272829 https://github.com/Microsoft/WSL/issues/873#issuecomment-425...
• Dwolb 7y ago
  SaaS needs to chill out for like two seconds. What we’re seeing here is a strategic maneuver by Dropbox to move up the UX stack from a single file syncing tool to a meta/coordination layer between SaaS products. The goal is to own the user experience and integrate all the adjacent or overlapping SaaS tools in a user’s workflow so you can control both the user and the suppliers. We’re going to see this more frequently and it’ll look weird coming from different tools trying to level up and pull this off (i.e. what will email look like with this?). One issue is as incumbents partner/buddy-up and competition heats up, we’ll see a bunch of bundling, increasing consumer costs while locking out newcomers.
  • dreamcompiler 7y ago
    Agreed. The beauty of Dropbox used to be their utter invisibility. They just seamlessly synced my files in the background. If they're now going to insist on being "in my face," I'll take my business elsewhere. And whichever Dropbox vice president tried to make his bones with this project can pound sand.
    • andrewjrhill 7y ago
      I audibly "ughed" when they introduced that stupid dropbox floating action button in Office 365.
    • iscrewyou 7y ago
      Yeah. That was the attraction. It was invisible and got the job done. Recently, the notifications about their new products inside Dropbox is simply spammy.
  • pbowyer 7y ago
    And it's not like it's not been tried before. ODrive does it [1], and has revised their offering as (from the outside it seems) people didn't pay what they expected for the convenience. 1. https://www.odrive.com/ https://www.odrive.com/
  • drstewart 7y ago
    >(i.e. what will email look like with this?). Take a look at Front (a YC company I believe) for an example of a place trying to do this
• jressey 7y ago
  Wow, that takes way too long to load. SPAs killed the internet.
• jrs235 7y ago
  From their website: "It’s pretty amazing how much technology helps us accomplish at work. Things that used to take days now take hours, and many small tasks—like updating a spreadsheet cell—are as easy as they should be." Let me fix that for them... It's pretty amazing how much constantly changing the UI and workflows slows us down from getting work done. Things that use to take seconds now take minutes, small tasks-like finding a file-take longer and require more cpu cycles because you need to use search (assuming you know the file name you're searching for) rather than using the previous, familiar directory structure UI which either a) no longer exists or b) takes several extra clicks and minutes to reveal again. As I mentioned in another comment: I contacted support a few weeks ago because I couldn't find the file(s) I was looking for. They keep changing the UI. They told me to use the search feature. That feature is lacking and it doesn't help that I don't know the filename since it was an uploaded photo from my phone. I left them feedback that the UX sucks and that they need to stop changing things for changing sake. Things are/have gotten worse regarding their UX. I think their devs are thinking and selling themselves on their ideas of what improvements are rather than current customers. If they want to try new things, leave the existing product alone and a launch an entirely new(er) product like DHH and basecamp do without disrupting their own existing paying customers![1]. Don't upset happy customers and give them a reason to re-evaluate your offering and other options. [1] https://businessofsoftware.org/2015/10/david-heinemeier-hans.. https://businessofsoftware.org/2015/10/david-heinemeier-hans....
• mbreese 7y ago
  Whatever happened to the philosophy of “do one thing and do it well”? I use Slack and Zoom often, but I have never once thought — gee I really wish I could just open up this presentation in Dropbox directly into my Zoom meeting. I just don’t see the integration working in that direction. Sure, Dropbox should make sure that it’s available as a provider to save/open files for other programs — that make sense. The integration with MS Office makes sense — where Office is aware when you’re working on files that are stored in Dropbox. This just seems like they are trying to do too much. I can’t see the strategy...
  • SamuelAdams 7y ago
    > Whatever happened to the philosophy of “do one thing and do it well”? It's simple: no company wants to pour money into bugfixes. Managers / PMs / "product owners" who advocate for big, new changes (something like "integrate services" to "drive user engagement") get funding. In a business view, if you're standing still you're at risk of being left behind. As long as software is tied to a company, it will never remain simple and do just one thing. The incentives are simply not aligned.
    • asdkhadsj 7y ago
      > In a business view, if you're standing still you're at risk of being left behind. On a related but perhaps off topic note; Is that wrong? I agree with everything you've said. Yet, I do wonder, is that business decision wrong? I've not spent much effort on the business side in my life, but from the outside I feel like I agree with their statement. Maybe not so much as in the "left behind" mantra, but more specifically I feel once a business reaches "success" (however you want to define that), your next objective should be maintaining/expanding the core product, and diversifying entirely. It seems to me that being a one product company runs a risk of another company choking you out in various ways. As an end user I of course love my products to say solely focused on the thing I want. I want Spotify to be my music app, nothing more. But I can sympathize with the decisions to diversify a companies offerings even if unrelated to the original core product. Thoughts?
      • 7y ago
• ycombinete 7y ago
  Is there a good alternative to Dropbox that also does block-level file syncing?
• pier25 7y ago
  WTF is going on at Dropbox? Are they losing so many users they now need to make this ridiculous integrations?
  • lm28469 7y ago
    Gotta keep your oversized engineering team busy. Same thing with airbnb, uber, &c. They constantly release side projects that are forgotten after a month and never used, even internally. Fonts, CSS frameworks, &c.
  • kalleboo 7y ago
    Dropbox is valued at 9 BILLION dollars. With that valuation, they can't just be a file sync app, they are required to have some kind of "take over the world" roadmap.
• perlgeek 7y ago
  I seem to recall that Dropbox once tried to become a platform, and failed miserably. Is this the second attempt? I'd prefer it if they just made file syncing easier.
  • CondensedBrain 7y ago
    Paper is one of the best writing experiences I've ever had, and the export option is solid, but that's about it. It's trying to operate in the space already taken by OneNote. The web-based tools in Office already output to real files you can get at through OneDrive. Even Google's office suite doesn't do that. That's probably where Dropbox sees itself headed: the corporate office suite space Microsoft currently dominates. I don't think Dropbox has much of a chance there. There was a time when Microsoft was in a shaky enough position for someone to knock them down, but then they got a new CEO and convinced people to take another look.
    • chrismorgan 7y ago
      Paper is good at managing collaborative editing, but I find it awful as a general editor: instead of working with what the browser provides, it tries to be clever and implement most things from scratch, and like almost everything that ever takes that approach, fails painfully, sitting firmly in the uncanny valley. (It definitely has various nice features that ameliorate this pain, but I still don’t like it at all.) Over the last year or so I have reported I think five or six distinct bugs (in three messages, I think), mostly ones that are really annoying for me, and I have not heard back from them, nor, to the best of my knowledge, have any of them been fixed. The one I hit the most regularly is selecting text at the start of a paragraph, and starting typing; for example if capitalising a list that someone else typed in lowercase. What you type goes onto a new line, rather than the same line. (I do not recall any of the other bugs I’ve reported off-hand; because I don’t actually use Paper all that much.) And ugh, hanging punctuation is just a bad novelty that is of dubious value in prose, and strongly negative value in other forms of content. I believe it has no place in something like Paper—it feels to me like one of the developers came across the concept and thought “that sounds cool, can I make it work in Paper?” (and did a decent, though not brilliant, job of it, I admit) without stopping and thinking whether they should do it. Oh, and Paper is so slow to load, just like Dropbox is these days. I only open either when I have to, they’re so slow to load and resource-heavy.
• diziet 7y ago
  I do a lot of UI/UX design as a part of what I focus on, both at work and for fun. This page is a juxtaposition of well thought out elements and things that make me go `???`. Like: - Good product marketing messaging - Well done images and GIFs that get to the point - News-site like past first article scrolling, I bet it drives more engagement. I even like how the UI elements change color when you go to another article. What?: - Huge spinning circular thing at the top - Content not taking the whole size of the page but strangely taking the right 2/3rds~ - Non-retina images Would love to see metrics on: - Tweet highlight integration. Does it drive valuable KPIs? - Font: They are using https://sharptype.co/case-studies/dropbox/ . The case study from the foundry that made that font has a section with color `rgb(181, 208, 230);` font on a `linear-gradient( #d20b28 , #d20b28 );` background. That's light blue on somewhere between scarlet, crimson, vermillion or venetian red color space. My brain slightly breaks reading it. Does having your own font drive engagement? What do the KPIs on that look like?
  • sunaden 7y ago
    Coming from a similar background I actually think they over-designed their whole blog. I don't see why they would not put the content to the middle, have a static background so the only thing that changes are the gifs and text as you are scrolling and perhaps pick a more readable, nicer font (though that is probably highly subjective). Overall, I feel like the Dropbox app UI shown in gifs and the blog are from two very different companies.
  • steve_adams_86 7y ago
    This entire launch feels like what you've described. Things like these tool tips are absolutely killing me: https://cl.ly/365a42db2db9 https://cl.ly/365a42db2db9 It feels rough on the edges.
    • TN1ck 7y ago
      Oh wow, thanks for sharing that! Heavy animations are always tricky for productivity apps, as the increase in latency is bad for the day to day usage. This animation doesn't even look good and is just annoying after the third sight. For a productivity app, even a simple fade is sometimes too much. Really wonder how this could get approved.
• syntheticnature 7y ago
  Contrast with: https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Dropbox-more-popular-than-other-programs-with-similar-functionality/answer/Michael-Wolfe https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Dropbox-more-popular-than-other...
  • doodpants 7y ago
    I was thinking the same thing. As I read the page, all I could think was, "No, shut up." :-)
    • lotsofpulp 7y ago
      I think the situation has changed with mobile devices and mobile OS becoming just as important as desktop. For consumers, they want whatever is easiest, results in better battery life, and secure. Presumably, Apple will be better able to integrate folder syncing due to their ownership of iOS, and so Dropbox is wise to be concerned that they can lose their edge there, since switching vendors is a matter of dragging a folder from one window to another for the consumer.
• schnable 7y ago
  You can pay a few bucks more, get cloud storage AND Office from Microsoft.
  • fencepost 7y ago
    Less than that actually if it's personal (O365 Personal 1TB, Home up to 5 I think), or a little more for business and get OneDrive+SharePoint and hosted Exchange email. Works nicely on Windows 10, a little less so on older versions, and probably a lot less well on *nix which is relevant since a lot of folks on this thread are concerned about the loss of ZFS support. Not sure how it is on OS X but hopefully decent.
• redler 7y ago
  Their strategy looks like an attempt in the direction of becoming a sort of third-party Google Wave.
• codingdave 7y ago
  Whenever I see moves like this, I think to myself how little of a real positive impact SharePoint had in the Enterprise world. And that was linking Office products, in large organizations that already used the products, and already collaborated for their jobs, while including the ability to write code against it all. Trying to build the same functional goals, for people who not under a single organization's umbrella, to link together products that are not coming from a single vendor, and not designed to work together... feels like a stretch.
  • geekamongus 7y ago
    MS continues to bungle their whole strategy. After being in Google-centric organizations for a decade, I moved to a Microsoft-centric company 18 months ago, and it's been a challenge. I am continually dismayed at how difficult it is to choose the best way to do a simple task. Sharepoint? OneDrive? Online Word vs. Offline Word? Choose the wrong one? Too bad! You now have to spend 20 minutes figuring out what went wrong and why the doc you sent around to your coworkers is suddenly in this weird purgatory state of part-online, part-offline, and you aren't sure which one to edit anymore.
  • gowld 7y ago
    over a decade later, Google still has nothing comparable to Sharepoint. Everything is slow and bloated web apps preventing users from finding / reading / editing documents that should be synced locally.
    • jimbob45 7y ago
      Except not? Google Docs is simple for finding / reading / editing documents that are synced via the cloud. Why did you pretend to agree with the parent commenter if you were gonna contradict them?
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• rossdavidh 7y ago
  So, it appears that Dropbox is letting feature creep turn a perfectly good product which I would have paid for forever, into one I need to leave. What is the best alternative? Just looking for automatic syncing and backup, and the historical versions available from the server is nice also. Suggestions? Simpler is better.
  • flipcoder 7y ago
    I switched to MEGA. The desktop client MEGAsync is actually quite decent. Very similar to classic dropbox
• maxxxxx 7y ago
  I always get scared when I read “meet the new xxxxx”. Usually either the UI has been reshuffled or features have been dropped. It’s really rare that things get better with such an announcement.
• yoran 7y ago
  I wish Dropbox Paper would adopt some of the features for organization that we see in Notion or Slite. Our team has moved to using one of those services because our Dropbox Paper folders became a mess. At some point, you just stop remembering where you put things and finding documents becomes too much of a friction. The simple sidebar that you can see on Notion or Slite makes a huge difference in getting an overview of the organization.
• meerita 7y ago
  They did a horrible redesign, killing amazing UX and UI in favor of a hypter design fantasy. This one still shows the hangover. I feel really sad and bad for the those amazing guys who made the Dropbox product I've used back then when i valued a good cloud storage, sync and a web screen to manage things when i had any trouble.
• brightball 7y ago
  And the new desktop app is Windows and Mac only. Of course. My primary reason for using Dropbox initially when it first came out was because it was fully cross platform. The longer they go, the farther we get from that. The only Linux updates I’ve seen from them have been deprecating support for things.
  • octorian 7y ago
    And I wonder how long that'll last... I chose Dropbox because of the Linux support, as I actually use all 3 of the major platforms (Windows/Mac/Linux) regularly. If I have to leave Dropbox, I honestly don't know what I'd replace it with. It works well enough on all 3 of the platforms I use it on, that I really don't want to switch to some janky duct-taped alternative. Meanwhile, it seems like every other hot startup product has this somewhere in their FAQ: Q: Will you support Linux? A: Here at Foocorp, we all love Linux! Seriously, we're huge fans! However, we've decided that we can best serve our customers by focusing on our Windows (and maybe Mac) products and giving the middle finger to you annoying Linux users.
    • brightball 7y ago
      Maybe it’s time for ownCloud?
      • josteink 7y ago
        Nextcloud is the proper fork to use these days.
• dvduval 7y ago
  The new Digg redux it seems. They don't seem to have tested the market before launch.
• randy408 7y ago
  That page took 15 seconds to load
• cmg 7y ago
  If I didn't need Dropbox for client work, I'd be dropping my Pro account today. They sent a nice flowery email [0] yesterday talking about some of the new features. I decided this was a good reminder to go and check my Dropbox security settings and logged into the website -- which I rarely ever do. Only then did I see that my yearly price was increasing by nearly $21. [1] That should have been made very clear in the email. [0] https://imgur.com/S04UAtL https://imgur.com/S04UAtL [1] https://imgur.com/Dq4tzW8 https://imgur.com/Dq4tzW8
  • pwenzel 7y ago
    I was a little frustrated by the price increase as well. That said, I have a ton of stuff in there and am not itching to move it. I also don't want to roll the dice with another vendor when I know Dropbox works for me. I'll probably pay the extra $20 and keep on keepin' on.
  • bluetidepro 7y ago
    It seems you missed the original email, or something messed up and you weren't sent it. I got the [0] that you linked to today, but also got this email last Tuesday: http://bluetide.pro/k9NN8v http://bluetide.pro/k9NN8v - Which was the original email from them that was informing the change, and it was very clear. Today's email (your [0]) was just the marketing follow up email saying the plan features were now available.
    • cmg 7y ago
      You're right. I just searched again and that came in a week before yesterday's email. So while I admit I forgot about or glossed over the original email, the flowery marketing email should have had a reminder about that.
• ChrisRR 7y ago
  Jesus, what is this mess? I just want to be able to sync files without any hassle. In fact, I'm willing to pay for that luxury. Why does Dropbox need video conferencing now?
• cwyers 7y ago
  This is the exact opposite of what I'm interested in -- the UI for cloud files should be the UI for files on my local machine. Pretty much every time I have to abandon the Windows file folder UI in OneNote, I feel like something has failed somewhere.
• crad 7y ago
  Anyone else find the design of the page so distracting it was hard to focus on the content? All of the animation behavior, hiding and showing of elements, etc.
• arkitaip 7y ago
  I would be surprised if Dropbox still exists as an independent company in five years. Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive and Apple iCloud are good enough, cheap and integrate well with respective player's eco system that makes it incredibility difficult for competitors.
• mromanuk 7y ago
  Story of a disruptive product 1. make something simple and useful 2. grow big 3. add more features 4. repeat steps 2-3 several times 5. congratulations your product is now bloatware
• geekamongus 7y ago
  Looks like they introduced a higher price, too.
• vnorilo 7y ago
  1. Implement rsync + ftp 2. Take venture capital 3. Gotta jump that shark
• makeszerosense3 7y ago
  Dropbox messed up when they had a chance to buy Quip for $300M.
• iscrewyou 7y ago
  > And don’t worry—you can still organize all your work from the Dropbox folder in Windows File Explorer and macOS Finder. DON’T mess this up, Dropbox. Don’t.
• joshstrange 7y ago
  I don't know what I was expecting but it was not this mess, dear god not a SINGLE feature on this "New Dropbox" is even slightly appealing to me. I just want reliable file-syncing. I enjoy smart sync on my MacBook since I have so many pictures and other large files and smart selection (or whatever it was called) wasn't really cutting it for me. Other than that there isn't anything Dropbox has added in the last 5 years that I have cared about. I have to imagine there are a number of open-source alternatives now that just require a linux server in the cloud. Hell Backblaze B2 storage works out to about $70/yr for 1TB of space with with 100GB of churn (adding 100GB and deleting 100GB) and download each month (way more than I need), couple that with some syncing tool and I think you've got just about everything I need.
  • meesles 7y ago
    I recently stumbled on this project, seems promising: https://syncthing.net/ https://syncthing.net/
• fourier_mode 7y ago
  I am pretty sure, its not going to be well received by HN, for the simple reason that they are appealing to their corporate audiences rather than developers.
• the_af 7y ago
  I use Dropbox to sync my data between home and work computers, both running Ubuntu. I need this to be transparent, and for Dropbox UX to be invisible. So far this has been the case. If they change this, I'll stop using it. I'm not sure from this announcement if I can simply ignore all these new features and continue using it as always.
• amacbride 7y ago
  Do Not Want. (Seriously, I understand the need for companies to broaden product offerings, explore new markets, etc., but it often leads to the original product that made them successful getting neglected, discontinued, or made terrible in some fashion.)
• neverminder 7y ago
  And yet still no changes in pricing. For individuals it's either 2 GB free or 2 TB for 12 euro per month, nothing in between. I'd be fine with 100 GB. Dropbox has native linux client, but shit pricing, Google Drive has better pricing, but no linux client.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• ReedJessen 7y ago
  The load time on that site is bananas.
• jedisct1 7y ago
  This is awful. I'm a Dropbox Pro user, using it to store documents that have to be accessible from all my devices, as well as to share galleries with my clients. None of these integrations with Slack and Zoom make sense. I don't need them, and now that a product I used to trust for its simplicity and reliability has become a horribly bloated beast, I don't trust it any more. This is bad, Dropbox. Maybe sell this as a totally different product, but for people, including corporate users, that only want reliable file syncing, this is a big turn off.
• radimm 7y ago
  Trying to remember the last time I have / wanted to use Dropbox. - backup/photo storage went to iCloud Drive (shared family space) - Notes sharing (Apple Notes or Google Drive) - File storage (iCloud/Google Drive) - Photo storage (Google Photos) There were times when Dropbox was omnipresent. So interesting to see, but no, thank you.
• jchw 7y ago
  Can they just remove Linux support already? It’s been abandoned. I cancelled my Dropbox for this reason, and it gets worse every year. I realize some will appreciate missing this update, but alas, what happened to Skype has made me realize it’s never a good thing.
  • awill 7y ago
    Agree. If you don't care about it, drop it. Then users will immediately get the message rather than be frustrated as support gets worse and worse. I'm glad I use the xfs filesystem on Arch Linux. I dumped Dropbox immediately. Pretty happy with insync for Drive.
• jonstokes 7y ago
  Looks like Zawinski's Law is still 100% true: “Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.” Coined by Jamie Zawinski (who called it the “Law of Software Envelopment”) to express his belief that all truly useful programs experience pressure to evolve into toolkits and application platforms (the mailer thing, he says, is just a side effect of that). It is commonly cited, though with widely varying degrees of accuracy. http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis-Law.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis-Law.html
  • JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
    I've never heard of this, thanks for sharing. So true.
  • mattnewport 7y ago
    So why are there no really good email clients?
    • kevinmgranger 7y ago
      Because email clients can only be as good as email itself, which isn't really good. ;)
      • mattnewport 7y ago
        I know you're being facetious but email clients fail to satisfy me primarily when it comes to search and organization, remaining performant when dealing with large archives of mail, good UI/UX and robustness / reliability. None of these are really problems inherent to email, though they are perhaps inherent to software.
        • joshschreuder 7y ago
          I think the same problems appear in other domains with large libraries. Music players have also been historically terrible with bad UI, slow searching and many of the same issues you mentioned.
• mvexel 7y ago
  The single reason why I prefer Dropbox over the other file storage / sync products is that their sync client works so much better on Mac. It eats fewer resources, is quicker to start and sync once started, doesn't need to 'restart its sync engine', and has the most flexible selective sync. The addition of 'smart sync' to personal accounts is a nice recent addition. I don't care for all this new functionality targeted at collaboration / corporate use, and I hope Dropbox will start offering a barebones 'I only need to sync files between devices' plan. I've been happily paying $120/y for that for years and hope they let me continue to do just that, or at least stay out of my way they way they have in the past.
  • asdff 7y ago
    I think you should explore some of the alternatives every once in a while, or just maintain a free plan and like 1 folder. Just checked activity monitor and onedrive only uses ~60mb of more ram on idle at least, although (and I believe it's since been pached) it had a memory leak bug at one point and would start eagerly consuming my 16gb of ram if left unchecked. The fix for that was just restarting one drive after startup, no big deal. Even on big syncs (I did ~250gb one time) it syncs about as fast as my upload speeds go and didn't seem to bog down my computer at all.
• liyanage 7y ago
  I've been a Dropbox user for many years but I'm looking for a replacement. What drives me nuts and hasn't gotten better over the years is their truly awful Python-based macOS client software. It is constantly burning a ton of CPU/battery. It's always at or near the top of Activity Monitor's list in the Energy tab. It seems like their app constantly reacts to any file system activity, even if that activity is outside the Dropbox directory. My file system is busy all day long from building in Xcode and other things. What I need is for Dropbox to improve that by making an efficient, battery-saving, native macOS client. What I don't need is what is announced in this post. The two other things that I hate are the fact that they don't support symlinks and that they use a kernel extension. All of these things together made me start the search for a replacement. Does anybody know how the CPU/power impact of Microsoft's and Google's offerings are on the Mac?
  • pedroaraujo 7y ago
    Seafile is a wonderful Dropbox replacement: - https://www.seafile.com/en/home/ https://www.seafile.com/en/home/ Open-source and all. :)
    • jwr 7y ago
      Hmm, it is made by a Chinese company. That gives me pause.
    • cmer 7y ago
      Seconded. Significantly better than Nextcloud for file syncing. Nextcloud syncs over Webdav which can be pretty painful.
      • Naac 7y ago
        > Significantly better than Nextcloud for file syncing Can you share numbers?
    • Naac 7y ago
      Only the community edition is open source. Nextcloud has no "Enterprise" edition.
• swalsh 7y ago
  I used to run OpenSuse, when I installed it, I basically just went for the express install, which formatted my drive with xfs. I had dropbox setup, and one day a popup told me it was no longer supported. They decided my file system was not secure enough to store my own files. Their solution was I should repartition my drive using ext4. Then reinstall. That sounded like a bunch of work I didn't want to do, so I googled for competitors. Found one, and was able to import all my files in a few minutes. Haven't had a reason to switch back since. Today I'm an Arch user, and my filesystem is EXT4... but I haven't found a reason to switch back. The new service is working just fine.
  • paride5745 7y ago
    Out of curiosity, what do you use now? I just went full Linux and I am looking for a good Cloud storage for my docs and pics.
• jxdxbx 7y ago
  What a disaster. The entire initial premise of Dropbox was to sync files reliably. Then I can use real, native apps to edit them. The new Dropbox approach on the other hand inherently requires everything to be in the cloud--I already hate that, but even if I didn't, others already do this and do it better. I feel like Microsoft actually has the balance right. OneDrive still behaves just like a normal sync client. But to do certain kinds of real-time collaboration you can just point native, desktop Office apps to the cloud version of the file. But when you're offline you still have the same kinds of access you need. Who ever asked for Dropbox OS?
  • timdorr 7y ago
    The problem is, files are dying. 99% of the documents shared with me nowadays exist only in some cloud product. No one sends files anymore, it's all Google Docs links and such. The only real place where files still live are with developers and designers. And even then, the move is away from locally-hosted content and stuff that only exists on someone else's server. VS Code remoting, Sketch Cloud, etc etc. Dropbox is just fighting against the tide of the entire Internet. I don't disagree that it's disastrous, but what are they going to do? Their core product is going away. It's like being an oil company nowadays.
• tscolari 7y ago
  I've created some much internal hate trying to use their paper and the search function there that I'm not trying dropbox ever again I think.
• josteink 7y ago
  The new Dropbox for me: - the free plan completely gimped with only 3 devices allowed to link - the official Linux client effectively rendered useless as it no longer works on anything except ext4 filesystems (an artificial limitations added years after I’ve gone all in ZFS). The new Dropbox clearly wants me to leave. Which is a shame. I’ve always chosen Dropbox because it was the universal solution which “just worked” everywhere, while all the competitors had a catch here or there. Now Dropbox are intentionally adding limitations making it non-universal, and therefore losing its own unique selling point.
• F00Fbug 7y ago
  Not what we need! When they dropped support for XFS, I was locked out and happily went looking for a replacement. Syncthing ( https://syncthing.net/ https://syncthing.net/ ) does everything I need. Instead of some nameless cloud company hosting my stuff, my 'cloud copy' is a big USB hard drive on a Raspberry Pi. I still have to keep Dropbox because of a couple of multi-org projects I'm involved with use it. I'm done putting my personal stuff on it, though.
  • jxdxbx 7y ago
    I'd be interested in something like Syncthing, but it would have to have an iOS client that worked correctly as a file provider. Both Dropbox and Google Drive have half-implemented Files support (Dropbox doesn't work offline via Files even when Files are saved offline in the app, Google Drive doesn't allow you to create new files via the Files APIs, and both are pretty buggy all around).
• lr 7y ago
  Unrelated to this "new" thing, but what is it with corporate blogs: They almost never have a direct link back to the product website! Why is there not a link to https://www.dropbox.com https://www.dropbox.com at the top of the page?!
• michaelmrose 7y ago
  Already replaced Dropbox with Syncthing when they decided to only support ext4
• asdff 7y ago
  Anyone running nextcloud on their server? Interested in building one now that a year of 2tb dropbox costs as much as a 1tb ssd and a raspberry pi.
• benjaminwootton 7y ago
  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. ;)
• donatj 7y ago
  Is there an alternative to Dropbox that properly handles resource forks? (macOS tags, file comments, custom icons, etc?) My heavy use of them is what has kept me on Dropbox rather than Google Drive for the time being.
• simonebrunozzi 7y ago
  Dropbox doesn't care about individual customers. The real money for them is in the enterprise. There, different priorities are at play. Unfortunately, I've been a Dropbox user for many years but I'm really tempted to switch away.
• timwis 7y ago
  I would have been excited if these were open integration points; instead it's just allowing you to connect your various walled gardens together :(
• tjr225 7y ago
  Was going to use Dropbox pro as my photo handling solution but they don't support NFS!? I keep all of my photos on a NAS by my router. I'm sure there is some way around it but Flickr's auto uploader works fine with my NFS set up. This is related to the post I just made in the google photos post.
• sambe 7y ago
  Unlimited version history is still listed on my account. I recall this was grandfathered indefinitely for all existing users. Does anyone know how this fits with the new announcement? I have only ever used it outside of 30 days, and the "yay! look what we are forcing on you at a large price increase" email is not especially welcome anyway.
• brandon272 7y ago
  I remember the feeling I had when I first used Dropbox - I was excited. The app itself was so unobtrusive and managed to sync my files fast and reliably. It seemed crazy not to use it because there was so little compromise involved. Fast forward to today, years later, where I don't have any syncing solution enabled on my computer. And not because I don't want or need syncing - but because all of the current offerings, including Dropbox, are either bloated or have performance issues or lack reliability. Dropbox chose a path and it is what it is. Maybe this strategy is working for them in with respect to revenue growth, and that's great for them, but when I'm here without a syncing solution that I would gladly pay for, it seems like an opportunity is being missed somewhere.
• mundu_wa_hinya 7y ago
  They lost me when they nuked xfs support (which was working beautifully). I can't rework my nas FS which has TBs of data just to get Dropbox. I'm just waiting for my yearly subscription to expire...
• jpmattia 7y ago
  For all the gnashing of teeth on this thread, I think the bigger point is being missed: Most of the Dropbox post is pitching for collaboration. They have probably recognized that catering to teams has much better revenue growth than mere individual users.
• bin0 7y ago
  Oh yay, a new interface to learn. Just what every body asked for, not. Companies do this all the time to justify higher prices. Some times, a well-done piece of software can just go into maintenance mode for a while. But do you know what I hate about dropbox? Dropping support for most linux filesystems. Seriously, why? That was the one deciding factor for me. I had looked at other options, but that did it. Owncloud does a fine job, and most people at my company like it fine.
• lewis1028282 7y ago
  I hate the new website it's so slow. Even the blog took 10s to render, why does a blog need to be flashy, just show some text.
• gus_massa 7y ago
  Sorry for been negative, but I liked the simplicity of the old Dropbox: You create a magical folder in a machine, a magical folder in another machine, and they are automatically synchronized using pixie dust or something. I don't want a new social media network.
• nostromo 7y ago
  Dropbox's home and landing page design language is so completely different than their actual product -- it's like they're two different companies. Compare their disjointed design to companies that do it well, like Stripe and Apple, and it's night and day.
• usaar333 7y ago
  It's interesting to contrast the comments here to the short stream on /r/dropbox: https://www.reddit.com/r/dropbox/comments/bzfwxv/meet_the_new_dropbox_dropbox_blog/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dropbox/comments/bzfwxv/meet_the_ne... I'm guessing most folks here aren't actually the target market anymore for Dropbox ("teams that use Dropbox as the main workspace" as one commenter phrases it)
• aeonsky 7y ago
  This looks way too much like Jira.
• ketralnis 7y ago
  All I want from Dropbox is a $5/mo plan. $12/mo for 2 TB, maybe 100mb of which I'll ever use, is just too much. $12/mo pays for a whole ec2 instances to host your own on
• miguelmota 7y ago
  Thought it was April 1st for a second
• cabaalis 7y ago
  "We listened to you..." post in 3, 2..
• diegof79 7y ago
  I used to be a Dropbox fan: it was the first program installed on a new machine, and I recommend it to friends and family. However, I never converted to a paying user. That seems to be contradictory and maybe another data point of how hard could be growing a global user base. I live in Argentina. Here any subscription in USD should be considered carefully. Each time that I evaluated to become a paying Dropbox customer, I decided that the cost/value equation didn't work for me: - Photos: Google Photos works very well on mobile, and they give you unlimited space (if you are willing to sacrifice picture quality). - Files: I end using iCloud or Drive for the occasional file sharing in the cloud. When I evaluated subscribing to Dropbox for my father -which is also an Office user- the Microsoft Office365 (that includes OneDrive) was much more convenient. - Backup: A huge chunk of my work files are in Drive (because of GSuite for companies), or in Github. The rest (like iPhone Backup) is by default upload to iCloud. - Mobile Apps: Before iCloud, many apps included the option to sync with Dropbox (and they created an API for that). But after the iCloud improvements, now that option is missing from most of the iOS apps. - Paper: it's a great idea, and for a moment I imagined that Dropbox was going to compete with design sharing tools (like InVision). But when I tried Paper, it wasn't enough to do the switch. I hope that Dropbox is able to find a good product strategy because I used to love their product. This announcement and my personal experience make me think that they are facing a turning point.
• robbiemitchell 7y ago
  This isn't just about Dropbox. Notice the enhanced collaboration with Slack and Atlassian (which is already an equity holder in Slack). This alliance looks like an attempt to displace Microsoft in owning the "office runtime". You have Microsoft's Teams, Office 365, and Github vs. Slack, Dropbox, and Jira. The interesting thing is that Google is actually in a much better position to do this by way of GSuite, but their own internal messaging answer to Slack hasn't gotten out of pre-launch.
• pi-rat 7y ago
  Aha, so that’s why Dropbox now uses half a gb of ram and bundles chromium...
• xu_ituairo 7y ago
  This reminds me of the early web when everyone was obsessed with making one-stop portals.
• runxel 7y ago
  For a moment I was like "oh wait, there STILL alive?" They just got worse and worse in the last years while being somewhat aggressive... "No, shut up!" I don't need no Business Dropbex, who the hell you think I am? Also prices went up – but I can have 10TB locally for 250 bucks meanwhile.
• alpb 7y ago
  Dropbox is constantly getting worse for personal usage. They recently bumped up the prices about $10+ a year. As a photo storage, it fails heavily as well. They turned down the Carousel app which made it super easy to browse photos over time. Google Photos easily dominates this space with the search features. Right now the Photos experience on Dropbox lacks the most basic features and I'm planning to stop renewing my personal Dropbox subscription this year, primarily because of poor photo storage support. For everything else, I'm planning to just go with S3/GCS and just rsync my files in there periodically.
  • orloffm 7y ago
    And what are you planning to do with photos? Are you aware of any mobile app of Google Photos caliber that can just point to a S3 bucket?
• maehwasu 7y ago
  The fact that Dropbox has access to your files is a nightmare waiting to happen. Yes, I know they currently don’t use them for anything bad. No one ever does, until they do. I’m out.
• guggle 7y ago
  Pay more, without my consent, for features I don't care... bye bye dropbox. Rsync will do.
• Mikho 7y ago
  Why would people still use Box, Dropbox, etc. when MS Office subscription provides so much more value, including huge storage, Office apps, and cross-platform integrations for less money. That's basically no brainer.
• darth_skywalker 7y ago
  Storing a directory as a git repo (e.g. on GitHub) is a pretty good alternative to Dropbox.
• dzonga 7y ago
  seems Dropbox is trying to clone an OS. Given that you can do a bunch of office related stuff inside dropbox
• camdenlock 7y ago
  Oh dear: “It’s more than an app, though—it’s a completely new experience.” How to tell when designers have taken over a company...
• rkagerer 7y ago
  Ugh. Do not want. Dropbox used to be a great little tool that did it's job well. Now they're trying to turn it into a Swiss army knife that will do several things with mediocrity. I stopped loving Dropbox when they killed off Public Links, and it's gotten worse from there.
• malchow 7y ago
  I pay Dropbox $199/yr and it's frustrating. I want to share files, photos, videos, and other items with individuals and small audiences all the time –– both for business and personal purposes. But Dropbox is so convinced that it needs to be a social network or a workplace platform that I can no longer reliably share things with others. Dropbox sometimes forces a sign-in or a sign-up before the anonymous end user can view my shared file. Am I crazy, or is that just unacceptable?
• CriticalCathed 7y ago
  Wait. Do people actually routinely use the dropbox web interface? I only ever go there to manage deletion and recovery of files; and that's maybe at most only been necessary a handful of times over the years. I have used dropbox religiously, even on my phone, from the day it became available. It's a folder on my machine that I put things in to sync across devices.
• mark_l_watson 7y ago
  I really don’t like the $20/year price increase. I am used to costs for infrastructure decreasing. I pay for Dropbox, SpiderOak, Google Drive, iCloud, and OneDrive. Now that I have mostly retired, I question needing so much redundancy. I feel like I have to purchase OneDrive because it is so inexpensive for the whole family and also getting Office apps thrown into the deal. I like supporting SpiderOak even though I use it very lightly. I like supporting privacy oriented companies so I am sticking with them. Also, iCloud is very convenient and inexpensive - another keeper. DropBox should offer more plans. Few people need two terabytes of data and it gives them an excuse to charge more.
• edhelas 7y ago
  2019, UI showcase of a multi billion $ company is still done using multi mega-bytes GIF files. What was video compression technologies about already?
• nkkollaw 7y ago
  I'm still waiting for Dropbox to support placeholder files for personal accounts. I feel like there is more functionality to their (now old) core proposition that they could be working on instead of trying to be a better Google Drive for Google products.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• bdz 7y ago
  I was thinking about using Amazon Drive (100 GB for $12 a year is perfect) but for some reason their upload client changes the date properties of every single file (creation and last modified). So for example if you have a file from 2011.01.12 it will be changed to the current day today no matter what. Not sure why is it doing it but kinda breaks the deal for me otherwise I'd switch there...
• siproprio 7y ago
  While we're at it, dropbox paper also refuses to allow users to remove entries from the "recently viewed" history, if the document is owned by someone else.
• m00x 7y ago
  This website is near impossible to read on a large 4k screen. The huge headers and the low contrast makes is very shitty reading experience.
• bane 7y ago
  I'm surprised how few people here have talked about OneDrive. It used to be rubbish, but Microsoft has finally really figured it out. My company basically has everybody just do all of their work out of their OneDrive accounts, syncing hundreds of GB per user without fuss. The integration with their web office apps is pretty flawless, and I've worked with groups of 20 or 30 people on large projects in sharepoint and whatnot without any major fuss. The web versions of the office tools are fairly basic, but you can seamlessly open them in the desktop equivalents and it autosaves back to the one-drive copy. Even better you can email links around to people and they can view the one-drive copy without any problem or having to send attachments all over the place. I haven't used the personal version yet, but it's a very compelling business offering.
  • tw04 7y ago
    They still have weird rules around file names that can break syncing and sharing entirely. Be nice if they could just handle that in the client.
  • kpwags 7y ago
    Does OneDrive encrypt data for personal users? Last I saw they only encrypted business accounts.
• marc_omorain 7y ago
  I have a few qualms with this app: 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. 2. It doesn't actually replace a USB drive. Most people I know e-mail files to themselves or host them somewhere online to be able to perform presentations, but they still carry a USB drive in case there are connectivity problems. This does not solve the connectivity issue. 3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?
• bradam 7y ago
  You should not consider Dropbox a file storage and sync provider, anymore. Dropbox (and almost all other big established storage/sync providers) moved to a new territory (market) called Content Collaboration Platform. This contains applications which provide comprehensive capabilities that support use cases from productivity and collaboration to content protection and infrastructure modernization. As some of you already mentioned, there are several reasons for it: 1. File storage and syncing is commodity. It is quite easy (compared to what was 5-10-15 years ago) to create a sharing & syncing capability software. Also, there are AWS/Azure as infrastructure so no one needs to handle this part of the business. 2. These big providers move to small-medium business and enterprise sector from personal users. It easy to understand, an enterprise contract with 5000+ users a year is much more profitable than acquiring loads of personal users who do not want to pay at all most of the times. 3. Lastly, big companies want to buy an integrated solution, which handles not just one thing well™, but contains extended functionality and support external providers. In Dropbox's case its file commenting, Zoom & Slack integration, etc. Source: I work at an end-to-end Encrypted cloud storage and sync company as an analyst, reading market research and analyzing companies like Dropbox 9to5.
• yangcheng 7y ago
  I don't get why I would save a google doc in Dropbox. I just tried that, and the Dropbox's search can't search content on my google doc. The google doc also takes five more seconds to load compared to if I just create a google doc on google, and it's not available offline either. So what're the real benefits users get?