32 ms·
Dropbox Transfer
- ongezoutenboter 7y agoBeen a loyal user for years. Recently switched to pcloud for better pricing and Linux compatibility. They also offer a free 5gb transfer tool: https://transfer.pcloud.com/ https://transfer.pcloud.com/
- geekamongus 7y agoNot sure how I feel that security is casually referenced as a passing thought on that page. Compare it with something else, like Firefox Send, which puts security and privacy front-and-center in its description. https://send.firefox.com/ https://send.firefox.com/ Why should I trust Dropbox Transfer over Firefox Send?
- saagarjha 7y agoDoes normal Dropbox have “download notifications”? Is this any different than just emailing a link to a shared Dropbox file?
- aliceryhl 7y agoThis can be password protected and have an expiration date. I don't think Dropbox normally has download notifications, and this is possibly more friendly to receivers without a Dropbox account and can be company branded.
- bayindirh 7y agoFor all the bells and whistles, you need to be a "Pro" user. I'm using "Plus", and it's fixed to one week, without any password and branding.
- bayindirh 7y agoDropbox transfer notifies you of views and downloads. I'm a paying user and using transfer to send files to friends. It's very useful. Transfers auto-expire after a week and links invalidate so it's maintenance is minimal for the normal user.
- jweather 7y agoThe annoying thing is that you can't turn off those notifications, which pop up in your tray and e-mail box. If there were options for turning off notifications it would be perfect for my use case.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoGood to see them finally doing something addressing actual user needs for a change, instead of chasing greener pastures. Given my informal observations over the years, I wouldn't be surprised if transferring large files was the main need that drives users to Dropbox - when dealing with individuals and companies outside tech, I frequently saw them giving the advice to "get a Dropbox" when someone needed to send them more files than fit in an e-mail.
- josteink 7y agoAgreed. This actually looks useful, something providing actual value to existing (and new) users. This also looks like it has (viable?) plan for monetising: branded pages for company accounts.
- tyingq 7y agoI suspect the bundled OneDrive in Office365 is hurting them. Dropbox is better, but hard to justify if you already have something that's good enough.
- datashow 7y agoI left Dropbox because they count shared space against everyone involved, which makes me cannot share the "photos" folder with my wife (unless we both purchase the 1T plan). Not sure whether they changed this practice. I am a satisfied OneDrive+Office365 user now.
- jsjohnst 7y ago> Not sure whether they changed this practice. Nope, just confirmed again. The only way around it is to go with a business account, which even the cheapest option costs 2x the price of just you and your wife both having Plus accounts of your own.
- ant6n 7y agoOr share one account with your wife.
- deith 7y agoWhy so many animations, pastel colours, big fonts? Is this a service aimed at children?
- saagarjha 7y agoIt’s Dropbox’s new aesthetic, and it was already been discussed to death when it came out.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- hakanensari 7y agoWetransfer, the competition this seems to be directly aimed at, also has a rich, designy aesthetic.
- jeen02 7y agoGlad I'm not your coworker.
- Piskvorrr 7y ago"Angry fruit salad" seems to be the hot design trend for 2020 :(
- festivilia 7y agoHahahaha.. I was wondering that myself.
- stjohnswarts 7y agoPeople seem to be designing for mobile devices now rather than for desktops. So they greatly simplify the layout and optimize it for skittles colors and one column display
- pier25 7y agoDropbox did a design facelift a couple of years ago and everyone on the internet hated it. It was a big thing when it happened. It think they have moderated it gradually and come back to their blue/white/black branding.
- fiatjaf 7y agoIt's cool that they're doing something obvious and obviously useful this time. It's sad that we don't have a better way to send files to other people than to create a Dropbox account, upload files, then send a link over email. I've written https://filemap.xyz/ https://filemap.xyz/ so people are able to send files and links without having to send URLs, instead you just agree on a common geographical location -- but of course this isn't the best possible solution yet.
- trevyn 7y agoThat’s... interesting. Could you share a bit about how you arrived at this approach?
- 1f60c 7y agoThere's also the problem that anyone who knows your address will be able to download your files, whereas most other services either seem to have strong access control or unguessable links. That said, it's an interesting and novel approach.
- Piskvorrr 7y agoThere's a password option...and the world is large. (Although I agree that inhabited regions are far smaller, people are likely to choose their own address, and possible address data collection is a concern: even though it doesn't seem to happen here, not sure if I want to share my location with the recipient)
- StavrosK 7y agoMaybe that's exactly the point.
- FreeInFlorida 7y agoTheir answer to Firefox Send? send.firefox.com
- flixic 7y agoAnd WeTransfer, probably the leader in the market.
- johnchristopher 7y agoUnlikely. I have seen 0 send links around and wetransfer is still king of the office. I'd like to see some numbers, though.
- kmlx 7y agosame. first time i'm hearing of firefox send. is this something new that mozilla is offering?
- johnchristopher 7y agoCame out in march. Easy to install on a $5 droplet or a VPS. Dropbox and wetransfer/send don't serve the same needs and don't offer the same experience. I could see Dropbox getting back into the office with that tool, they have a brand to capitalize on after all, if they drop the mandatory login.
- dddw 7y ago? elaborate plz. you don't need a droplet to use ff send
- johnchristopher 7y agoI self host a ff send instance. See https://github.com/mozilla/send https://github.com/mozilla/send
- bachmeier 7y ago
- mcjiggerlog 7y ago"try for free" - can't see what the pricing for this is anywhere. Does it require Dropbox plus?
- 1123581321 7y agoYou need Pro to change the expiration date or set a password.
- mcjiggerlog 7y agoThanks! Looks like Firefox Send is the better free tool for now then.
- bayindirh 7y agoFor occasional uses and normal transfers, Firefox send is really better. Dropbox transfer becomes useful when you want to share files that you already have in your Dropbox. I use both and they both have their users.
- StavrosK 7y agoFirefox send is also encrypted locally, right? Dropbox doesn't look encrypted, but I've never used it.
- avh02 7y agowhat annoys me is the password part used to be a plus feature[1]. This is why I've started to try to move things to be self-hosted. Unfortunately I've been struggling with nextcloud + my NAS due to filesystem constraints. And it's to avoid silly crap like that that we enjoyed the cloud services. Ah, what a loop! [1]: https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Files-folders/Was-the-ability-to-password-protect-a-shared-folder-removed-from/td-p/248212 https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Files-folders/Was-the-abilit...
- neurostimulant 7y agoWhat kind of filesystem constraints problem you run into? I've been using nextcloud on a vps using docker and resizing/moving storage used by nextcloud is quite easy on this setup (simply update the container volume config)
- Hackbraten 7y agoDropbox is not going to win me back as a user. Not after they chose to drop support for non-APFS/HFS+ filesystems on macOS without sufficient explanation.
- angry_octet 7y agoWhat filesystem are you using? ZFS? You don't have any HFS+ or APFS volumes?
- Hackbraten 7y agoCorrect, I use ZFS for my home directory. I do use APFS for everything else. But I’d have preferred to keep my Dropbox folder under my home so I got rid of Dropbox altogether.
- angry_octet 7y agoTo be honest the market for ZFS support must be quite small, and the semantics just different enough to cause unpleasant bugs, so I wouldn't blame them for that. Interestingly, there are signs that they have been working on support for a wider range of file systems: https://itsfoss.com/dropbox-brings-back-linux-filesystem-support/ https://itsfoss.com/dropbox-brings-back-linux-filesystem-sup...
- Hackbraten 7y agoGood point.
- eebynight 7y agoMy company (Fortune 500 Aerospace/Defense) has implemented something like this for years now. I’ve personally used it to send CAD files to outside manufacturers/suppliers who are under an NDA. I’ve really grown to like the service and always wished I could use it for personal stuff so I will definitely be trying this out.
- kop316 7y agoIf you want to self-host, Nextcloud has this service and it works incredibly well.
- heavymark 7y agoThis was from back in July right? Or is this something different? https://blog.dropbox.com/topics/product-tips/send-large-files-transfer https://blog.dropbox.com/topics/product-tips/send-large-file...
- sidcool 7y ago100 GB is a great value proposition. Is it E2E encrypted?
- newscracker 7y agoI doubt it would be. Dropbox’s model for file storage has always been to encrypt the data with its own key on the server.
- narsil 7y ago.. and to also de-duplicate files across users to avoid repeatedly storing the same file.
- pier25 7y agoProbably not since AFAIK Dropbox uses deltas to transfer file changes. It's entirely possible they worked on a totally new tech for this, but I doubt it.
- ericflo 7y agoThis is the first thing Dropbox has done in a long while that makes sense to me as an external observer. Great product idea and totally reinforces the prime Dropbox use cases.
- soapdog 7y agoIf you need to send large files to someone, you can use Firefox Send: https://send.firefox.com/ https://send.firefox.com/ The file is encrypted, the urls are expiring, it costs nothing.
- pointillistic 7y agoYou should treat other businesses with respect, this is not a Firefox fan board. Dropbox is also an alternative product, even connected to this board and their service is superb. It is premium.
- cpach 7y agoHey, easy there :) Nothing wrong with linking to an alternative.
- pointillistic 7y agoyes wrong, it's what google does, flooding with the free service when others trying to make a buck. Anyone here knows about FF send anyway this is stupid cheer-leading.
- pengstrom 7y agoI'm not sure I follow your reasoning. Are you saying that suggesting a relevant and free alternative by a non-profit is disrespectful towards Dropbox, and should not be allowed?
- iDemonix 7y agoI'd not heard of FF Send before this comment, and will now make use of it, so I think your comment is a bit misguided.
- fuckyah 7y agoI say what say I
- klohto 7y agoSo? Are we not allowed to suggest alternatives? Let the customer choose and stop doing it for them. Especially by censoring.
- festivilia 7y agoSo I need to have a Dropbox account to be able to use Dropbox Transfer. And Firefox requires me to sign up to be able to use Firefox Send. Why not MiDrive Transfer. https://transfer.midrive.io https://transfer.midrive.io
- ataylor32 7y agoFirefox Send can be used without signing up. The limitations are 1 GB instead of 2.5 GB, a maximum of 1 download instead of 100 downloads, and a maximum of 1 day instead of 7 days. So it's still useful in certain circumstances. Why not MiDrive Transfer? I haven't heard of it and don't know how reputable it is. And is it in beta? So it could be buggy?
- puranjay 7y agoI do music production as a side hobby. Virtually all the producers and studios I've worked with use WeTransfer. It's fast, efficient, and free. I can't see any reason to switch.
- ihuman 7y agoThis might be more to stop people from switching away from Dropbox, not convincing people to switch to Dropbox.
- rtsil 7y agoAgreed. It's one less account to deal with for me.
- joeblau 7y agoThanks for commenting on your use case. I primarily do software engineering and outside of sending large machine learning data sets, I couldn't think of a personal reason to use this.
- puranjay 7y agoWeTransfer's users are localized in the creative fields. Their website even features and promotes new artists and musicians. It's massively useful when you want to send a track (which can often run into hundreds of MB even after compression) to another producer or audio engineer
- te_chris 7y agoAgree about that, but I actually do all my prod work in DB, so always synced, and one click to share a file link
- PascLeRasc 7y agoThat's a really nice service, thanks for the rec. From the name I expected it to feel cheap like WeChat but I'm very glad to be wrong, it seems pretty much perfect.
- Faaak 7y agoI use https://www.swisstransfer.com/ https://www.swisstransfer.com/, which even if it only supports 50Gb and not 100Gb, it is totally free and doesn't need a account to upload the files. Way easier
- kenneth 7y agoHow does Swiss Transfer make money? (As a Swiss, I love the sound of it. But need to figure out what their model is, otherwise surely if I'm not the customer, I'm the product)
- Faaak 7y agoThey hope you'll use their other products (it's infomaniak.ch, a hosting provider, that operates the service)
- gravitas 7y agoI found a news article from February with a bunch of info: https://news.infomaniak.com/en/swiss-alternative-wetransfer/ https://news.infomaniak.com/en/swiss-alternative-wetransfer/
- laurentdc 7y ago100 GB only in the Professional plan though ($19.99/mo)
- angry_octet 7y agoDoesn't really seem good when Google has: $ 1.99 100GiB $ 2.99 200GiB $12.99 2000GiB
- dtech 7y agoThat's a different plan, for storage instead of transferring. Dropbox has $12.99 for 1TB in the comparible plan.
- stjohnswarts 7y agoBut doesn't google scan the files and use them for advertising and profiling you? Yeah I know you can encrypt the data, but my point still stands for "regular" users.
- lotsofpulp 7y agoI can't imagine Dropbox won't do the same once they get into a tight financial spot. Or whoever buys Dropbox, but same difference.
- severaldayz 7y agoI've never heard this before. Is there any evidence (not speculation) that this is true?
- rurp 7y agoIs there any proof that Google does not? Scanning user's private data to target them with ads is the primary reason Google offers services. Absent other evidence, the default assumption should be that Google scans as much data as they can.
- 7y ago
- spoown 7y agoCan we really trust Dropbox for such activity ? Just wondering... I Get it , we can of course encrypt file before sending anything to dropbox, but anyway... Just curious on your opinion ! There is also send file from Firefox, with lower limit of course....https://send.firefox.com/ https://send.firefox.com/
- cpach 7y agoThat depends entirely of your threat model. One can’t simply issue a blanket statement that could suit any potential user of Dropbox. E.g. if a marketing firm would like to send over a company presentation video to a client, perhaps that artifact isn’t sensitive at all. It all depends on the specific circumstances, IMHO.
- angry_octet 7y agoWhen I saw this I thought, Finally, A Way to Transfer Large Files. But alas, it is only for small files, up to 100GB. And it gives no indication of using resumable and fault tolerant transfer. If you want to transfer a large amount of data (like backups or any big data collection, like a couple of years of RAW photos) via the cloud (e.g. because of NAT and firewalls) it is still better to rent a machine from Linode/Digital Ocean/OVH and use a tool like BT Sync or rsync (simple but low bandwidth).
- cpach 7y agoI agree. But maybe that kind of size was not what Dropbox set out to solve with this service.
- chrisseaton 7y ago> And it gives no indication of using resumable ... transfer Don’t you get that from HTTP? And while I’m sure 100 GB is small for your domain whatever that is, surely you can’t be so unaware to know that this is going to be sufficient for the vast majority of consumers, businesses, and academics? I don’t think I’ve ever handled a file that was 100 GB and I’m not a non-technical person.
- angry_octet 7y agoIndividual files sure but apart from sending one file there are many more transfer jobs. People can buy 4TB HDDs from their office supplies store, and the fastest way to transfer data remains putting it in the mail, not because of bandwidth but lack of services. Cloud backup is much cheaper than buying a tape array and administrator, but at present that is all you can do with it -- backup. You should easily be able to have TB of personal data in the cloud and send any file/directory, without worrying about how big it is. Resumable transfers seem to fail a lot with http. Block level differencing (like dedup) can also make things a lot faster.
- anderspitman 7y agoSeems useful, and a step in the right direction. I think the future of file sharing is permanent URLs to files stored on decentralized hard drives, with dead simple access control settings (ie here's the list of email addresses that can access this file). You need either ipv6 (plus an ISP that allows port 80), or some sort of proxy for this to work. Range requests must be supported. Also I think it needs to be designed from the ground up for sharing not just with people, but also with apps, just like you can access Google drive data using their API. It's surprising to me that WebDAV is the closest thing we have to an open protocol for doing this sort of thing. I think we need something simpler, with a standardized auth protocol. Maybe RemoteStorage, but honestly it still looks complicated to me.
- mtzaldo 7y agoThis is a great idea. We can named it hftp :p
- Causality1 7y agoI'm done with Dropbox. I spent years preaching the Dropbox gospel to my family and friends. When Dropbox decided to fuck their free users by limiting them to three devices I got over a dozen pissed-off phonecalls blaming me.
- lotsofpulp 7y agoI would have asked them why they felt entitled to space, bandwidth, and computing power on someone else's computers.
- damontal 7y agoWhy offer it only to yank it?
- lotsofpulp 7y agoI don't know what the offerer's motivations are, but I do know from experience that there's no reason to expect an indefinite supply of free stuff.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- elamje 7y agoCheck out https://send.firefox.com https://send.firefox.com
- giarc 7y agoI've used that a few times to send myself files. I like the option to set max downloads. However, the dropbox option seems to add the custom logo option which is kind of cool for SMBs.
- toomuchtodo 7y agoFirefox Send is open source, so you could brand it yourself if you want to self-host. Dropbox wins if you want to provide a payment method and let someone else deal with running it though.
- gravitas 7y agoCollected alternatives from the comments here: https://wetransfer.com/ https://wetransfer.com/ https://swisstransfer.com/ https://swisstransfer.com/ https://transfer.midrive.io/ https://transfer.midrive.io/ https://send.firefox.com/ https://send.firefox.com/ https://transfer.sh/ https://transfer.sh/ ps: I really wish HN supported basic markdown so we can make bullet lists and other simple formatting controls, nothing wild like citation/footnote support just the top 5-10 markups. Trying to make a list of URLs to share looks like ass here.
- gist 7y agoI like the idea of summaries (like you did) and wish HN would figure a way to do this also for points that people make in comments. Even if not same day or later.
- qrv3w 7y agoIf you are interested in self-hosting, there are a lot of options available too: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#single-clickdrag-n-drop-upload https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#sin...
- matheusmoreira 7y agoThere's also the magic wormhole: https://github.com/warner/magic-wormhole https://github.com/warner/magic-wormhole It depends on a central relay server but the planned Tor hidden service feature could change everything.
- app4soft 7y ago- https://wetransfer.com/ https://wetransfer.com/ - website UI & upload non-usable without JavaScript - https://swisstransfer.com/ https://swisstransfer.com/ - website UI & upload non-usable without JavaScript - https://transfer.midrive.io/ https://transfer.midrive.io/ - website UI & upload non-usable without JavaScript - https://send.firefox.com/ https://send.firefox.com/ - website UI & upload non-usable without JavaScript - https://transfer.sh/ https://transfer.sh/ - website UI & upload non-usable without JavaScript, BUT there are instructions on uploading using cURL or alias.
- awinter-py 7y agothat endoplasmic reticulum staircase animation was totally worth turning on JS for, can't wait for someone to make one of these IRL
- kresten 7y agoHa. I could do this with git, an ec2 instance, sftp a few Perl scripts and 200 lines of JavaScript. Why would I use this service?
- leovander 7y agoJab at this... right? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
- maximente 7y agoi'm a huge fan of magic wormhole for simpler workflows (e.g. send some files in a dir within a local network). it's CLI based, so not for your average computer laborer but it's easy, secure, compact, and awesome for moving things around. https://github.com/warner/magic-wormhole https://github.com/warner/magic-wormhole
- aehtyb 7y agoi prefer https://glft.gucci.com:3443/ https://glft.gucci.com:3443/
- esquire_900 7y agoNice hidden internet gem
- istillwritecode 7y agoI dropped my paid Dropbox account when they instituted "two factor authentication" because it broke the use case of file transfer between trusted parties using a single account. Now I'm going to drop my OneDrive account for the same reason.
- dtech 7y agoYou can also share the MFA private key if you really want to, and it's excellent security for 99,999999% of the use cases otherwise. Or just use 2 accounts and share the file...
- istillwritecode 7y agoI don't use MFA because it requires me to provide a phone number. SMS is not a reliable authentication method anyway - it's only an improvement for people who can't manage passwords.
- sorokod 7y agoSo like Firefox Send with a bigger quota?
- foobaw 7y agoThis is amazing, but I wonder if traditional enterprises would accept Dropbox to be secure. In the startup world, this will be great though.
- ymerkli 7y agoSounds great, what about E2E encryption though?
- lamnk 7y agoWhat's wrong with GG Drive? In my country people use GG Drive to share all kind of files.
- viksit 7y agoIs this specific to Eastern Europe? I’ve never had anyone send me a GG link!