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Dropbox has slowly but surely gone from a product I enjoyed and recommended to one that I actively dislike using. I find it pretty astonishing that such a matur
by ProfessorLayton 7y ago
Dropbox has slowly but surely gone from a product I enjoyed and recommended to one that I actively dislike using. I find it pretty astonishing that such a mature product:
- Is slow
- Demolishes my MBP's battery
- Has not gotten simpler to use
And worst of all, it is completely out of line with what their competition are charging. They want $12.50-15/mo for their most basic plan when their competition is charging $0-10 for their core feature set.
I wish them well, but once iCloud launches file sharing I'm 100% done with them.
- bitL 7y agoDropbox uses very sophisticated binary diff nobody else provides to minimize inbound/outbound traffic; this has some CPU/battery cost though. Competitors usually provide very dumb upload/download that might be less CPU/battery intense but much heavier on the bytes transferred. You simply might not be their target group.
- deanCommie 7y agoWhich may be a feature that belongs in the bygone era of lower network speeds and bandwidth limits.
- bitL 7y agoDo you like higher bills on your iPhone when accessing your shared data? Not sure why would efficiency belong to bygone era. I'd rather expect CPU to handle this diff process with some dedicated instructions more efficiently in the future.
- anyfoo 7y agoI genuinely don't know, but are you sure that others don't provide this?
- bitL 7y agoGDrive uses something internally but they don't expose it to public clients, so do they really provide it? (I might be outdated here, it's been a while I last checked)
- tbrock 7y agoYeah, I don't think so. Their target group must be people with 10mb of files or less. Why would you need to binary diff when syncing dropbox to a new computer? Yet setting up dropbox for the first time on a new machine uses 100% of my CPU. The same S3 sync operation is barely noticible. When updating files, first check for changes with something ultra cheap like an md5 then, if changed, do the "sophisticated" stuff.
- guitarbill 7y agoonboarding cost might be annoying, but at least it's upfront. i'd take 100% at the start for more efficient sync later.
- tbrock 7y agoYeah, if only it did that...
- bitL 7y agoThey need to store your data somewhere, they need to be able to reuse/serve chunks from other users that share the same file to make its storage cost efficient etc.
- function_seven 7y agoI very much doubt that Dropbox's target group are users with bandwidth limitations. Yes, it's nice to have features that minimize waste on the network link, but I'd bet far more people would trade that away in exchange for laptop battery life and a smaller hit on their CPU. If they're only targeting that niche, then they have a business model problem. Make it an option ("Minimize bandwidth or battery usage?")
- manicdee 7y agoThose who do not study ~~history~~ ~~Unix~~ rsync are doomed to repeat it poorly.
- bitL 7y agoI used rsync to mirror one encrypted 14TB drive to another one. It took ~2 weeks. I wouldn't call rsync "good enough".
- manicdee 7y agoWhat was the bottleneck?
- mynegation 7y agoI am not bitl but my guesses, in order of probability would be: * using filesystem that is not natively supported on one or both drives, like fuse ntfs on Linux or ext3 on Mac. * copying over slower network like wifi * lots and lots of small files especially in a single directory * usb 2.0
- michaelcampbell 7y agoSomething is very, very wrong then. rsync will use 100% of the bandwidth provided. It won't be any slower than anything else you might try over the same network. If you found that to be the case, it's almost certainly something else.
- bitL 7y agoI guess if you have many overlapping files on both drives and you force rsync to actually look inside and compare them, its efficiency might suffer? It wasn't just a simple copy from one full drive to another empty one, rather two drives with overlapping files that had to be synced. I experimented with rsync to see if I could replace RAID with it, i.e. one primary drive, one backup drive synced on the background instead of mirroring directly (and getting the same low-level bugs spread to both drives or getting both drives to die at around the same time). Both drives were encrypted on the device level (dm-crypt AES128) with standard ext4 on top of mapped drive. I previously ran configs with RAID-1 as well as BTRFS RAID-5 (horribly buggy and dangerous) and wanted to see if rsync makes sense for this purpose (it doesn't). I couldn't use ZFS as that NAS didn't have ECC.
- hellofunk 7y agoI find the fairly recent Smart Sync feature to be really nice, has definitely made many things simpler and more flexible.
- valleyjo 7y agoOnedrive has it for free
- jonknee 7y agoSteve Jobs was early, but not wrong about Dropbox being a feature and not a product. I just want a folder that syncs extremely reliably, that's it. They've gone down the corporate rabbithole and now call themselves a "smart workspace" whatever that means.
- fullshark 7y agoWell the corporate rabbithole was the only way they could turn it into a business, and not a feature as you say.
- cortesoft 7y agoOnly if they wanted VC expected growth..... they could have just stopped adding new features, only had a few employees, and continued to make money charging a small amount for their single feature.
- npo9 7y agoIt’s very hard to have solid product, engineering, marketing, sales, and support on any scale without taking VC money.
- toomuchtodo 7y agoBackblaze and Basecamp have, to name two.
- scarface74 7y agoBackblaze does have one VC backer, but they aren’t pushing for exponential growth. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21016598 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21016598 They are cash flow positive though. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21006216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21006216
- 7y ago
- defen 7y ago> once iCloud launches file sharing I'm 100% done with them. Do you mean something other than this? https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/share-files-with-icloud-file-sharing-mchl91854a7a/mac https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/share-files-with-ic...
- fitzroy 7y agoPerhaps parent commenter meant folder-level sharing which is slated to be introduced in iOS13.x / macOS 10.15.x.
- defen 7y agoAh, very cool, I guess I missed that announcement.
- lotsofpulp 7y agoThey mean folder sharing, which is coming in Catalina.
- bigiain 7y agoWhich is going to be great, except for the older MacOS devices I have which won't update to Catalina. My old MacMini file/media server is doing a sterling job, in spite of having been left behind by Apple. Lucky cron and rsync is still a thing...
- aaomidi 7y agoAnd then the random client limit to 3. I've stopped using them since then.
- apple4ever 7y agoI did as well. I actually wouldn't have been opposed to paying more for more clients, but they wanted $20 a month for a ton of space, which I didn't need. There was no in-between. I switched to OneDrive which as actually been really amazing, even on Macs & iOS devices.
- keyle 7y agoMy main issue with Dropbox is that the UI got lighter but not more useful, and I found some anti-patterns trying to share something with my friends without them being signed in dropbox.
- fortran77 7y agoFor 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 In all seriousness, have you looked at OneDrive + Office365? For $70/year you get 1 TB of storage, a client that works on all platforms, plus Microsoft Office 365 (online) and two licences for the desktop install of Microsoft Office plus the Office apps for iOS/Android. It's a great deal and works well.
- cannonedhamster 7y agoDoesn't work on Linux which is what the quote you're referencing is talking about. Office365 comes with it's own challenges. Plus your documents are all scanned and there is no privacy protection, especially not from the US government.
- eloff 7y agoDropbox is a US company, I don't see how you get better privacy protection there. Plus Microsoft has a petty good track record, they've challenged US government requests for information in court, and fought to prevent the government from accessing data stored outside the country.
- dmix 7y agoDropbox has equal access to your files as Microsoft does. Which is why Syncthing/Bittorrent sync is very useful. It's also limited to just being a shared folder feature.
- stevesimmons 7y agoThat $70/year gets you the 1TB of storage and everything else you mention, per person, for up to five people. That's a total of up to 5TB. Perfect for a family. (at least, that's the standard offering here in Europe...)
- aseipp 7y ago
- lacker 7y agoDropbox has slowly but surely gone from a product I enjoyed and recommended to one that I actively dislike using. Over that same time period, they have gone from being a consumer product to an enterprise product, because the money in file sharing software is in enterprise. Slowness, battery use, complexity, none of these are as important to Dropbox nowadays as they used to be, because they are not as important for enterprise sales.
- asdff 7y agoSwimming with the big fish is flawed from the start. Why do businesses use one drive? Because they have enterprise office and outlook for their email, and one drive was thrown in. Why do businesses use google drive? They use the google suite and gmail for their email and google drive was thrown in. If dropbox wants to compete with enterprise software they'd need to reinvent the office/g suite AND email services. They tried the former with dropbox paper, but it's clear that they've bitten off far more than they can ever chew, especially when your direct competition is google and microsoft.
- scarface74 7y agoOffice 365 for personal use is $80 a year and comes with OneDrive with a total of 6TB of storage - 1 per user. Unlike Dropbox, when you use a shared folder, it isn’t subtracted from your storage.
- notyourday 7y ago> Dropbox has slowly but surely gone from a product I enjoyed and recommended to one that I actively dislike using. I find it pretty astonishing that such a mature product: That's what happens when the "Enterprise sales" mosquito bites a B2C company.
- r-bryan 7y agoSounds like a perfectly classic version of the growth trajectory characterized in "Innovator's Dilemma" (Clayton Christensen). Company grows into a big fat dinosaur, leaving a soft underbelly for a scrappy little mammal to claw at. Except in this case the scrappy little mammals are big fat dinosaurs themselves.
- mixmastamyk 7y agoIt’s a continuous process.
- hnick 7y agoMy wife uses Gmail for her side business and it's nearly full (15GB for free is the current standard apparently). If she ends up paying for that service it might just be the thing that makes us drop Dropbox. Google drive is good enough for her needs (we don't really sync anyway, just upload and share).
- michaelcampbell 7y agoI stopped paying and went to the free Syncthing. My one issue is that the windows client silently fails and doesn't restart. Often. On multiple Windows 10 machines I own. The Apple and Linux clients have been rock solid, but the Windows one not, and since I use(d) this app as a way to get files easily to my partner who uses only a Windows box, this was the hard stop to my use case.
- balladeer 7y ago> once iCloud launches file sharing As an iPhone and MacBook user I'd have happily done that iff it was useful or accessible to my friends and family who are not in the fruit company ecosystem (and that's the majority in my case). Because I really don't think Apple is going cross platform anytime soon https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204174 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204174 https://support.apple.com/kb/ph2609 https://support.apple.com/kb/ph2609
- alphabettsy 7y agoYou just posted a link for how to setup iCloud on Windows. I agree that support on other platforms hasn’t been great.
- balladeer 7y ago> To use iCloud, you first need to set it up on an iOS device, an iPadOS device or Mac True. But, this is the first line on page and this is the line why I posted the link :)
- hdra 7y agoI have been trying to move to iCloud as well, though unfortunately theres still no Android app for it till now