5 ms·

Amazon Cloud Drive Is Not Dropbox

89 points by semanticist 16y ago

narkee 16y ago
>It’s going to do something better: release an API and become a platform. Isn't that what Amazon S3 already is?
- staunch 16y ago
  Somebody should create a simple little app on top of S3 that runs on all your devices and creates an automatically synced folder. They should make it free for the first couple GB too. Then Cloud Drive would seem kind of lame.
  - phamilton 16y ago
    For those who missed the sarcasm... https://www.dropbox.com/help/7 https://www.dropbox.com/help/7
- bcrawford 16y ago
  Yes it is. Amazon beta tested it for years in the enterprise and is now releasing it as a consumer service.
  - pero 16y ago
    Beta test in enterprise? I don't think that's how it works...
baddox 16y ago
I don't know if I like the idea of a "Dropbox V2" that directly uses your separately-purchased Cloud Drive storage. I use Dropbox for portable backups of a few small but important files (my resume, todo lists, school assignments, etc.). How would this proposed Dropbox work? Would it just put a separate Dropbox folder in your Cloud Drive, separate from your music or whatever else you put directly into Cloud Drive? Or would you purchase Dropbox and then use all of your Cloud Drive for Dropbox? I think it would be weird to use Dropbox for all your music/photos/videos.
- semanticist 16y ago
  I know several people who keep their iTunes Music folder on Dropbox so they can use iTunes/sync iDevices across multiple machines.
trotsky 16y ago
I wouldn’t be surprised if a version of Dropbox that plays nicely with the Cloud Drive is one of the first Cloud Drive apps on the scene. It makes a great deal of sense. Instead of paying Dropbox for storage and syncing, we could just pay them for syncing. It seems rather unlikely to me that people would pay dropbox for their syncing service to store things on someone else's paid storage. I would think that the dropbox software exists to drive people to their relatively high margin de-duplicated cloud storage subscriptions. In a similar fashion it seems likely to me that Cloud Drive exists to drive adoption & volume to Amazon digital music, a market that dwarfs the size of the online storage game.
- redstripe 16y ago
  I agree, that's something that https://www.jungledisk.com/ https://www.jungledisk.com/ already does and frankly I just prefer dealing with one entity because the experience is better.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
- dcposch 16y ago
  Cloud Drive is one thing, but I think that Cloud Player has the really interesting, disruptive potential with respect to services like Pandora, Last.fm, and even Youtube and ITunes. People listen to a lot of music on each of those services. The way I see it, each is just an approximation of the holy grail: the ability to listen to any song, anytime, on demand, for free. Youtube comes close, but it has quite a lot of music that's only available in low quality and quite a bit that's blocked on copyright grounds. ITunes fulfills the other requirements, but is not free. Pandora is free, on-demand, and high-quality, but you have limited control over what you listen to and they have fairly disruptive audio ads. Cloud player could come closer to goal. I think Cloud Player could benefit indirectly but massively from the fact that music piracy is common. Many people I know (and, I'd venture, many people on HN) have music libraries in the tens of GB--obviously not obtained by paying $0.99 per song. How could Amazon offer, say, 100GB for a small enough price (much smaller than the current $100/year for Cloud Drive) ? You mentioned that Dropbox does deduplication. There's huge overlap between most people's music collections. Quite a few IPods I've seen contain exactly the same 500MB Beatles' discography. It's an awesome use case for deduplication. I think that as long as they restrict uploads to music (and, perhaps, movies), they could pull this off for surprisingly little storage cost on their end. Combine it with the aggressive CDN strategy they already have (to reduce bandwidth costs), and you could have the the next killer music app. Imagine your own curated, high quality music collection, streamed to you anywhere for a buck or so per month, with the app available for free on all the major platforms.
dangero 16y ago
This article is kind of backwards to me. Dropbox has an API, and Amazon didn't release one with their Cloud Drive. It's also kind of silly to say that Amazon has mastered storage, but give Dropbox no credit. They obviously have data storage as a core technology. Syncing isn't that valuable to me as a technology. Dropbox didn't invent it. They borrowed it from elsewhere and Amazon could do the same if they wanted to.
- sorbus 16y ago
  > It's also kind of silly to say that Amazon has mastered storage, but give Dropbox no credit. They obviously have data storage as a core technology. Dropbox buys their storage from Amazon, using S3.
  - dangero 16y ago
    Doh! I did not know that.
u48998 16y ago
If Dropbox has picture viewer, why can't it have audio player?
- phlux 16y ago
  And a webserver!
  - andreyf 16y ago
    And a text editor, spreadsheet, and an IDE!
    - phlux 16y ago
      no, that's just stupid. You're confusing files and apps with services.
- vidar 16y ago
  They don't want to make the music industry mad is my guess, same for video and movies.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - u48998 16y ago
    Well, what would Amazon be doing with their 5 gig free? People will be uploading their files, are they going to check if they're all legit? Dropbox could provide audio player for private files.
    - kin 16y ago
      According to the terms, Amazon's only allowing DRM free music. Also, Dropbox has got https://droptun.es/login https://droptun.es/login Although I think the real comparison is between Amazon and bigger players like iTunes and Google Drive.
  - 16y ago
phlux 16y ago
I would like to see a hybrid between DropBox/Cloud Drive and AWS. I would like a /sites/ folder into which I can drop webpages and have them autohosted. It has the following structure: /Sites/ -->/root/ <-- primary page @ in DNS -->/site1/ <-- Subdomain1 -->/site2/ <-- Subdomain2 -->/siteN/ <-- Different DNS Putting sites in /sites/ are actually hosted on AWS so that traffic surges can be accounted for. etc...
- trotsky 16y ago
  I think it'd be fairly easy to put together a v1 quality script hosted on an AWS instance to do that, provided the subdomains have been pre-provisioned or you're ok with them all spinning up on a single instance.
  - phlux 16y ago
    <Picard> Make it so. </Picard> --I agree, but I think that this is a viable actual service model as well - as opposed to a duct-tape scripting hack.
- famfamfam 16y ago
  Now that Amazon S3 provides Website Endpoints and index documents [1][2], it is probably fairly trivial to set this up either using an S3 sync tool, or an S3 mount such as ExpanDrive, without resorting to CloudDrive or EC2. You would need to set-up CNAMES for your subdomains though, and it will not work with the primary (non-www.) domain. [1] http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/WebsiteHosting.html http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/Websit... [2] http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/02/host-your-static-website-on-amazon-s3.html http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/02/host-your-static-website-...
strickjb9 16y ago
Is this typical of cloud storage? I read through their ToS and found that they retain the right to access your files. 5.2.Our Right to Access Your Files. You give us the right to access, retain, use and disclose your account information and Your Files: to provide you with technical support and address technical issues; to investigate compliance with the terms of this Agreement, enforce the terms of this Agreement and protect the Service and its users from fraud or security threats; or as we determine is necessary to provide the Service or comply with applicable law.
- khafra 16y ago
  Tarsnap doesn't do that, but other cloud storage providers seem to--like, say, Dropbox: https://dl.dropbox.com/s/3vyon6umixkxu02/Dropbox%20Terms%20of%20Service.pdf?dl=1 https://dl.dropbox.com/s/3vyon6umixkxu02/Dropbox%20Terms%20o...
  - joakin 16y ago
    What the hell, never knew about this: Consent to Access Your Files BY UTILIZING THE SITE, CONTENT, FILES AND/OR SERVICES, YOU CONSENT TO ALLOW DROPBOX TO ACCESS YOUR COMPUTER TO ACCESS ANY FILES THAT ARE PLACED IN THE 'MY DROPBOX', 'DROPBOX' FOLDERS, AND/OR ANY OTHER FOLDER WHICH YOU CHOOSE TO LINK TO DROPBOX. Is this intended for the program to access the files and send them to the server? Or does this mean the bad thing, that nothing is really private?
    - calloc 16y ago
      Read it again, you will see that "Your computer" is then limited to "Files placed in" a certain location. This is required for their service to work ...
      - joakin 16y ago
        I see the difference between Dropbox and Amazon terms, but I cant avoid asking myself If legally they are just the same.
alexg0 16y ago
The version 2 of dropbox he refers to already exists, it's called JungleDisk. It works on bring your own storage (S3 and now few others), and you get to keep your own crypto key. It added sync while back. Been using it for few years, since I was not that comfortable put all my files in the cloud.
podperson 16y ago
Um: DropBox has an API. DropBox does version control. DropBox syncs. Cloud Drive has no API yet. Doesn't do version control. Doesn't sync. (But it is half as much per GB as DropBox.) Oh and it has a half-assed media player. The problem is that unless you give us 50GB+ for free, the space difference and cost difference are pretty much irrelevant.
- kunjaan 16y ago
  I don't think what Dropbox does can be considered a version control. It has versioning of some kind but is very mediocre. I have had problems syncing large files using Dropbox between computers. Plus I would never be able to afford $99 for 50GB for a year.
  - nhangen 16y ago
    Plus I would never be able to afford $99 for 50GB for a year. huh?
    - kanak 16y ago
      If your needs aren't met by dropbox's free plan, the cheapest plan they offer is $99 for 50 GB a year. In comparison, amazon is offering 100 GB for the same $100 a year, and even has cheaper paid plans (e.g. $20 per year for 20 gb). So, dropbox is currently expensive on two fronts; Amazon gives more GB/$ and also has lower-priced plans for more modest needs. This is a big win for some users, like kunjaan and me, because we haven't been too thrilled with Dropbox's syncing abilities (tons of "conflicted copies" everywhere). Furthermore, a large portion of our data doesn't need to be synced; it simply needs to be available. This includes data like ebooks, music collection, pictures.
      - nhangen 16y ago
        $99/year, regardless of whether Amazon is cheaper, is not expensive.
        16y ago
girishkolari 16y ago
According to me Amazon Cloud Drive -- is targeting to the users who have data in cloud and want to get some better services around their data -- more towards the amazon services, this is good for people who use amazon services. Dropbox do more then what Amazon Cloud Drive does --- it is more concentrated at data in your system and cloud storage as way to make it work. Amazon CloudDrive is more on data at your cloud and Dropbox is a solution to the data at you system. I still use my system as my primary storage for my data -- for me Dropbox/IDrivesync make lot of value.
jrockway 16y ago
I'm looking forward to an API that lets third parties add files to your Cloud Drive. Buy music, get it in your Cloud Drive. Buy a netbook, get the restore CD image in your Cloud Drive. Buy a DVD, get it in your Cloud Drive, etc. Amazon seems to be thinking about this in terms of "when you buy music from your phone it ends up in Cloud Drive", but what I want is for every bit of data I ever pay for to end up here. Because upload speeds are super-slow: it would take hours for me to upload that restore CD. But downloads are fast. So do the uploads Somewhere Else once, and let everyone else download it from their Cloud Drive.
brackin 16y ago
If the labels ask, it's Dropbox. If the users ask it's Grooveshark.

89 points by semanticist 16y ago

narkee 16y ago

>It’s going to do something better: release an API and become a platform. Isn't that what Amazon S3 already is?

staunch 16y ago
Somebody should create a simple little app on top of S3 that runs on all your devices and creates an automatically synced folder. They should make it free for the first couple GB too. Then Cloud Drive would seem kind of lame.
- phamilton 16y ago
  For those who missed the sarcasm... https://www.dropbox.com/help/7 https://www.dropbox.com/help/7
bcrawford 16y ago
Yes it is. Amazon beta tested it for years in the enterprise and is now releasing it as a consumer service.
- pero 16y ago
  Beta test in enterprise? I don't think that's how it works...

baddox 16y ago

I don't know if I like the idea of a "Dropbox V2" that directly uses your separately-purchased Cloud Drive storage. I use Dropbox for portable backups of a few small but important files (my resume, todo lists, school assignments, etc.). How would this proposed Dropbox work? Would it just put a separate Dropbox folder in your Cloud Drive, separate from your music or whatever else you put directly into Cloud Drive? Or would you purchase Dropbox and then use all of your Cloud Drive for Dropbox? I think it would be weird to use Dropbox for all your music/photos/videos.

semanticist 16y ago
I know several people who keep their iTunes Music folder on Dropbox so they can use iTunes/sync iDevices across multiple machines.

trotsky 16y ago

I wouldn’t be surprised if a version of Dropbox that plays nicely with the Cloud Drive is one of the first Cloud Drive apps on the scene. It makes a great deal of sense. Instead of paying Dropbox for storage and syncing, we could just pay them for syncing. It seems rather unlikely to me that people would pay dropbox for their syncing service to store things on someone else's paid storage. I would think that the dropbox software exists to drive people to their relatively high margin de-duplicated cloud storage subscriptions. In a similar fashion it seems likely to me that Cloud Drive exists to drive adoption & volume to Amazon digital music, a market that dwarfs the size of the online storage game.

redstripe 16y ago
I agree, that's something that https://www.jungledisk.com/ https://www.jungledisk.com/ already does and frankly I just prefer dealing with one entity because the experience is better.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
dcposch 16y ago
Cloud Drive is one thing, but I think that Cloud Player has the really interesting, disruptive potential with respect to services like Pandora, Last.fm, and even Youtube and ITunes. People listen to a lot of music on each of those services. The way I see it, each is just an approximation of the holy grail: the ability to listen to any song, anytime, on demand, for free. Youtube comes close, but it has quite a lot of music that's only available in low quality and quite a bit that's blocked on copyright grounds. ITunes fulfills the other requirements, but is not free. Pandora is free, on-demand, and high-quality, but you have limited control over what you listen to and they have fairly disruptive audio ads. Cloud player could come closer to goal. I think Cloud Player could benefit indirectly but massively from the fact that music piracy is common. Many people I know (and, I'd venture, many people on HN) have music libraries in the tens of GB--obviously not obtained by paying $0.99 per song. How could Amazon offer, say, 100GB for a small enough price (much smaller than the current $100/year for Cloud Drive) ? You mentioned that Dropbox does deduplication. There's huge overlap between most people's music collections. Quite a few IPods I've seen contain exactly the same 500MB Beatles' discography. It's an awesome use case for deduplication. I think that as long as they restrict uploads to music (and, perhaps, movies), they could pull this off for surprisingly little storage cost on their end. Combine it with the aggressive CDN strategy they already have (to reduce bandwidth costs), and you could have the the next killer music app. Imagine your own curated, high quality music collection, streamed to you anywhere for a buck or so per month, with the app available for free on all the major platforms.

dangero 16y ago

This article is kind of backwards to me. Dropbox has an API, and Amazon didn't release one with their Cloud Drive. It's also kind of silly to say that Amazon has mastered storage, but give Dropbox no credit. They obviously have data storage as a core technology. Syncing isn't that valuable to me as a technology. Dropbox didn't invent it. They borrowed it from elsewhere and Amazon could do the same if they wanted to.

sorbus 16y ago
> It's also kind of silly to say that Amazon has mastered storage, but give Dropbox no credit. They obviously have data storage as a core technology. Dropbox buys their storage from Amazon, using S3.
- dangero 16y ago
  Doh! I did not know that.

u48998 16y ago

If Dropbox has picture viewer, why can't it have audio player?

phlux 16y ago
And a webserver!
- andreyf 16y ago
  And a text editor, spreadsheet, and an IDE!
  - phlux 16y ago
    no, that's just stupid. You're confusing files and apps with services.
vidar 16y ago
They don't want to make the music industry mad is my guess, same for video and movies.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- u48998 16y ago
  Well, what would Amazon be doing with their 5 gig free? People will be uploading their files, are they going to check if they're all legit? Dropbox could provide audio player for private files.
  - kin 16y ago
    According to the terms, Amazon's only allowing DRM free music. Also, Dropbox has got https://droptun.es/login https://droptun.es/login Although I think the real comparison is between Amazon and bigger players like iTunes and Google Drive.
- 16y ago

phlux 16y ago

I would like to see a hybrid between DropBox/Cloud Drive and AWS. I would like a /sites/ folder into which I can drop webpages and have them autohosted. It has the following structure: /Sites/ -->/root/ <-- primary page @ in DNS -->/site1/ <-- Subdomain1 -->/site2/ <-- Subdomain2 -->/siteN/ <-- Different DNS Putting sites in /sites/ are actually hosted on AWS so that traffic surges can be accounted for. etc...

trotsky 16y ago
I think it'd be fairly easy to put together a v1 quality script hosted on an AWS instance to do that, provided the subdomains have been pre-provisioned or you're ok with them all spinning up on a single instance.
- phlux 16y ago
  <Picard> Make it so. </Picard> --I agree, but I think that this is a viable actual service model as well - as opposed to a duct-tape scripting hack.
famfamfam 16y ago
Now that Amazon S3 provides Website Endpoints and index documents [1][2], it is probably fairly trivial to set this up either using an S3 sync tool, or an S3 mount such as ExpanDrive, without resorting to CloudDrive or EC2. You would need to set-up CNAMES for your subdomains though, and it will not work with the primary (non-www.) domain. [1] http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/WebsiteHosting.html http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/Websit... [2] http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/02/host-your-static-website-on-amazon-s3.html http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/02/host-your-static-website-...

strickjb9 16y ago

Is this typical of cloud storage? I read through their ToS and found that they retain the right to access your files. 5.2.Our Right to Access Your Files. You give us the right to access, retain, use and disclose your account information and Your Files: to provide you with technical support and address technical issues; to investigate compliance with the terms of this Agreement, enforce the terms of this Agreement and protect the Service and its users from fraud or security threats; or as we determine is necessary to provide the Service or comply with applicable law.

khafra 16y ago
Tarsnap doesn't do that, but other cloud storage providers seem to--like, say, Dropbox: https://dl.dropbox.com/s/3vyon6umixkxu02/Dropbox%20Terms%20of%20Service.pdf?dl=1 https://dl.dropbox.com/s/3vyon6umixkxu02/Dropbox%20Terms%20o...
- joakin 16y ago
  What the hell, never knew about this: Consent to Access Your Files BY UTILIZING THE SITE, CONTENT, FILES AND/OR SERVICES, YOU CONSENT TO ALLOW DROPBOX TO ACCESS YOUR COMPUTER TO ACCESS ANY FILES THAT ARE PLACED IN THE 'MY DROPBOX', 'DROPBOX' FOLDERS, AND/OR ANY OTHER FOLDER WHICH YOU CHOOSE TO LINK TO DROPBOX. Is this intended for the program to access the files and send them to the server? Or does this mean the bad thing, that nothing is really private?
  - calloc 16y ago
    Read it again, you will see that "Your computer" is then limited to "Files placed in" a certain location. This is required for their service to work ...
    - joakin 16y ago
      I see the difference between Dropbox and Amazon terms, but I cant avoid asking myself If legally they are just the same.

alexg0 16y ago

The version 2 of dropbox he refers to already exists, it's called JungleDisk. It works on bring your own storage (S3 and now few others), and you get to keep your own crypto key. It added sync while back. Been using it for few years, since I was not that comfortable put all my files in the cloud.

podperson 16y ago

Um: DropBox has an API. DropBox does version control. DropBox syncs. Cloud Drive has no API yet. Doesn't do version control. Doesn't sync. (But it is half as much per GB as DropBox.) Oh and it has a half-assed media player. The problem is that unless you give us 50GB+ for free, the space difference and cost difference are pretty much irrelevant.

kunjaan 16y ago
I don't think what Dropbox does can be considered a version control. It has versioning of some kind but is very mediocre. I have had problems syncing large files using Dropbox between computers. Plus I would never be able to afford $99 for 50GB for a year.
- nhangen 16y ago
  Plus I would never be able to afford $99 for 50GB for a year. huh?
  - kanak 16y ago
    If your needs aren't met by dropbox's free plan, the cheapest plan they offer is $99 for 50 GB a year. In comparison, amazon is offering 100 GB for the same $100 a year, and even has cheaper paid plans (e.g. $20 per year for 20 gb). So, dropbox is currently expensive on two fronts; Amazon gives more GB/$ and also has lower-priced plans for more modest needs. This is a big win for some users, like kunjaan and me, because we haven't been too thrilled with Dropbox's syncing abilities (tons of "conflicted copies" everywhere). Furthermore, a large portion of our data doesn't need to be synced; it simply needs to be available. This includes data like ebooks, music collection, pictures.
    - nhangen 16y ago
      $99/year, regardless of whether Amazon is cheaper, is not expensive.
      - 16y ago

girishkolari 16y ago

According to me Amazon Cloud Drive -- is targeting to the users who have data in cloud and want to get some better services around their data -- more towards the amazon services, this is good for people who use amazon services. Dropbox do more then what Amazon Cloud Drive does --- it is more concentrated at data in your system and cloud storage as way to make it work. Amazon CloudDrive is more on data at your cloud and Dropbox is a solution to the data at you system. I still use my system as my primary storage for my data -- for me Dropbox/IDrivesync make lot of value.

jrockway 16y ago

I'm looking forward to an API that lets third parties add files to your Cloud Drive. Buy music, get it in your Cloud Drive. Buy a netbook, get the restore CD image in your Cloud Drive. Buy a DVD, get it in your Cloud Drive, etc. Amazon seems to be thinking about this in terms of "when you buy music from your phone it ends up in Cloud Drive", but what I want is for every bit of data I ever pay for to end up here. Because upload speeds are super-slow: it would take hours for me to upload that restore CD. But downloads are fast. So do the uploads Somewhere Else once, and let everyone else download it from their Cloud Drive.

brackin 16y ago

If the labels ask, it's Dropbox. If the users ask it's Grooveshark.