38 ms·

Open-source Dropbox client, with multi-account, no-device-limit and M1 support

428 points by daniel_iversen 5y ago

shortformblog 5y ago
I’ve used Maestral a few times and find it works best with narrower folder limits—I ultimately went with the official Dropbox client for my M1 but I use it on an x86 machine in which I only need a handful of folders. The creator is doing good stuff.
est31 5y ago
> Maestral uses the public Dropbox API which, unlike the official client, does not support transferring only those parts of a file which changed ("binary diff"). Maestral may therefore use more bandwidth that the official client.
- refulgentis 5y ago
  Save 60 MB on Electron, burn 10 TB of bandwidth
  - arthurcolle 5y ago
    imagine using Dropbox with those storage requirements...
    - refulgentis 5y ago
      The "imagine $X" construct has colloquially grown to mean "$X is irrational", which is strange to me here - the lack of binary diffing means if you change a single bit of your video editing project, the whole thing gets synced to the cloud. Dropbox is a common solution for small business VCS that's not VCS, I've seen it used for born exactly that way a half dozen times the past decade.
      - arthurcolle 5y ago
        I just think that Dropbox is an inappropriate file storage mechanism (especially for heavy artifacts being generated locally) for someone moving that much stuff in and out of a long term storage system, especially at those levels. I'm not someone that generates 500GB of CAD artifacts a day, or anything even remotely similar, but I ingest about 15GB of global market data and news a day and I laughed a little bit reading your response (I understand how you were responding to GP, and your response makes sense) because its just nonsensical to use consumer focused products for anything serious. Just because I slap on a "business tier" sticker on a water bottle doesn't mean the water bottle is better equipped at solving enterprise needs.
      - kalleboo 5y ago
        > the lack of binary diffing means if you change a single bit of your video editing project, the whole thing gets synced to the cloud I know someone using Dropbox for video editing, they've been using the Synology Dropbox client which also uses the API. It hasn't been a problem. The large video files (tens or hundreds of GB) are ingested once and never edited, the only edits to files are the small project files (megabytes), and some graphics files (hundreds of megabytes). Re-exports of rendered video causes the whole file to change anyway due to the nature of video compression so binary diff doesn't help there anyway.
    - kalleboo 5y ago
      I know someone with a 60 TB Dropbox...
    - manigandham 5y ago
      How is this any different than storing data in S3? Companies have petabytes in the cloud now. If their networking supports their usage then Dropbox is a good solution given all the features it provides.
  - SilverRed 5y ago
    Works for my workflow. I work on reasonably small files (my whole cloud storage is about 20 gb) and I like to have the storage available in my file manager at all times. Wouldn't want to run proprietary software or waste memory on it. The biggest problem I have with these 3rd party clients is sometimes things just don't work right. Like for example gimp just fails to open files in the synced folder (google drive not the OP project) until I copy them out and open them. Not sure what the issue is though.
  - elwesties 5y ago
    I would make that tradeoff in a second.
    - refulgentis 5y ago
      Nonsense. You're saying you'd prefer shaving 125 Mbps off your Internet connection over 60 MB of your 8+ GB of RAM.
      - remram 5y ago
        125Mbps? 60 MB?
        refulgentis 5y ago
        > 125 Mbps? 10 TB / 1 month. > 60 MB? In the post they replied to.
        delroth 5y ago
        > > 125 Mbps? > 10 TB / 1 month. That's ~32Mbps.
        remram 5y ago
        60 MB was the download not RAM usage
      - killingtime74 5y ago
        I’m on gigabit fibre, yes
      - danillonunes 5y ago
        I have 32GB of RAM and I would still do that trade off. The 60MB is there all day long doing nothing for me. The internet connection is actually being used for something useful which is synchronizing my files (the actual purpose of the software). I feel like I'm wasting more resources with the first option. Also it's not even that bandwidth expensive with most users' workflow. Maybe this should be a concern for video editors. Majority of people who are just editing word documents (or code, for what I believe is most HN's audience), wouldn't notice the difference.
  - nyanpasu64 5y ago
    It's a good tradeoff since it lets me escape the official Dropbox client trying to upload my drives, photos, etc. to the cloud, and spam me with upsell offers on a daily basis (if you're operating with a nearly full Dropbox in steady-state).
sylens 5y ago
I was a very early Dropbox adopter but eventually switched to OneDrive a few years back because they bundled Office 365 with 1 TB of storage. I just went and looked at the official Dropbox plans to see if there was a family plan similar to the 5 users I get with Office 365/OneDrive...and found their plan/pricing page overwhelming. There's rows upon rows of features to compare across versions like "Traffic and Insights" and the "Plus button" forcing me to keep scrolling just to see that a family plan costs $16.99 a month for 2 TB. No option for a cheaper plan with less storage. I feel like they are missing the mark when it comes to marketing to consumers here.
- MuffinFlavored 5y ago
  > There's rows upon rows of features to compare across versions After you grow as a company and hire lots of engineers and your core product is "good enough", you have to try to pivot/stay relevant/compete/innovate I guess. Lots of manpower (I have no idea how large their engineering team is) need to be kept busy I guess?
  - remram 5y ago
    That doesn't necessarily mean that each of those features should appear as a different row, or even be different between plans. If you can't figure out a way to make a comprehensive pricing page, the amount of features is not really an excuse. This one is over 5 pages, with 5 different sections which don't even look triangle-shaped as you can usually expect from increasingly-priced plans.
  - asaddhamani 5y ago
    They have 2500 employees. Why does a single product company with a product that is mostly “done” need those many people?
    - Salgat 5y ago
      This horrible obsession with exponential growth. It's not enough to maintain a core team of engineers and pass on those savings on the price in order to gain more customers.
tra3 5y ago
I wonder what's stopping dropbox from revoking their API tokens. Isn't this competing directly with the "official" clients?
- encryptluks2 5y ago
  Why would it matter to them? They are already more expensive than other providers. Rclone connects to multiple cloud hosting solutions already too. If they revoked API access I'm pretty sure the backlash would be the final straw.
- CrazyCatDog 5y ago
  He only supports platforms that Dropbox does not officially support. They won’t revoke tokens, they’ll do something far worse—they’ll hire him!
- Seattle3503 5y ago
  What does Dropbox gain here?
  - q-rews 5y ago
    Companies bundle everything into their flagship product to force everyone to use it. Direct API access means Dropbox can’t advertise either. Ask Twitter what they think about that.
- ec109685 5y ago
  What API token are you referring to? Given it is open source, how are they keeping the token secure?
sorry_outta_gas 5y ago
what is dropbox paper?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- arthurcolle 5y ago
  New Age neo-hypertext document type (proprietary, of course) that supports collaboration using the Dropbox™ suite of services
  - SilverRed 5y ago
    So a competitor to google docs / office?
    - ents 5y ago
      Theoretically. I don't know a single person that uses it.
      - brightball 5y ago
        I use it. I find it to be a great option for my note taking.
      - slantyyz 5y ago
        I use it for some stuff. The markdown shortcuts are great for formatting.
    - jazzyjackson 5y ago
      To me it seems to want to be Google Wave. A union of documents and chat channels so your workspace can be all-inclusive, but I think it has a bit of a fax machine problem in that I don't know anyone else to use it with. Edit: the toolbar on a new "Paper" doc allow me to insert an image, media, dropbox file, table, timeline, to do list, and code blocks. I can link a calendar event to a doc, Oh, I can hit a button to switch to "Presentation Mode"... and I can highlight text to comment on it. So on second thought it seems very similar to google docs.
jazzyjackson 5y ago
Would be cool to get around a limitation of Dropbox's native client: filenames with emojis (and other utf8 I assume) won't upload. If their filesystem doesn't like utf8, maybe the client could convert the offending filenames to base64 or punycode, and convert filenames back from the cloud... maybe I can find a place in the code to try this out, thanks for open sourcing. I notice you're using type hints in python and I've been wanting to learn more about that, would love to hear what toolchain is hip these days.
- cerved 5y ago
  what kind of psychopath puts emojis in filenames??
  - beepboop43 5y ago
    screenshots of a browser where your screenshots are automatically named by the application window you're taking a screenshot of. if that tab is an article or forum post or anything that has an emoji in its title, you're getting emojis in the filename. you only find out when you go to find the screenshot later and it's missing. fun stuff
  - wiether 5y ago
    I'm usually not a "you have to go the hard way before going the easy way"-guy, and I started the easy way actually, but using CLI every definitely changes the way you name your files. And I can't see (and don't want to) how you would manage files through CLI that contains emojis in their name...
    - eropple 5y ago
      It's distinctly not the easiest thing in the world, but on a Mac the emoji panel is "tap Fn" and on Windows it's Win-;. Also, tab completion.
      - djrogers 5y ago
        The default keyboard shortcut for the emoji picker in macOS is Ctrl+Cmd+Space, Fn is not used…
mastrsushi 5y ago
What about this client is M1 specific?
- NiekvdMaas 5y ago
  Maestral provides a universal binary on macOS, so it runs natively on arm64. The official Dropbox client is x64-only, so it needs to run in an emulation layer (Rosetta) on a M1. For something low-level as a file syncing service, that's very unfortunate. There are loads of request on the Dropbox forum to support arm64, but no sight of it being added anytime soon.
  - mastrsushi 5y ago
    That either reads “we don’t have the resources to support our second largest OS platform” or there are too little users still using the native desktop client. Mind you, this is a company that went out of their way to port a Linux client in 2011. To see them hesitate with m1 is shocking
    - gtirloni 5y ago
      I bet M1 users aren't nowhere near "the second largest OS platform". Unless you're bundling x86 macOS users together. Just pointing out that it's not as critical (yet) as it might appear.
      - Macha 5y ago
        I suspect even combined, macOS is fourth after Windows, Android and iOS.
        mastrsushi 5y ago
        Regardless, they’re ignoring a massive demographic. Besides gaming, when consumer software stops support for macOS, it doesn’t look good.
NoPicklez 5y ago
I joined Dropbox in around 2010 and used it religiously through University to ensure all my work was being backed up as I worked on assignments. I used it for group projects and it was fantastic, at the time it was the most reliable cloud storage and I tried Microsoft Live Mesh, Live drive etc and found they were unreliable in syncing changes to edited files. Dropbox was flawless. I then shifted into using it to also back up my photos from my mobile and camera, however my photo storage started to grow and this year I switched to Google Drive & Photos for much much less than Dropbox was offering per month. I think 100GB of Google Drive & Photos is $25.99 per year opposed to $184 per year for 1TB with DropBox. I don't need 1TB but 100GB is perfect compared to 10GB with Dropbox (that I had).
- cerved 5y ago
  It really bothers me how hard it is to download all your photos
  - lazide 5y ago
    How so? If you use takeout it’s decently smooth. I have over a terabyte in G photos.
    - cerved 5y ago
      didn't know about Google takeout still I'd prefer if it was just accessibile from Drive
  - NoPicklez 5y ago
    I find it quite easy, with Dropbox and Google Photos you just install the app and enable background sync. It's never let me down.
- citizenkeen 5y ago
  Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe Google Photos stores pictures in original size anymore.
greazy 5y ago
I am extremely happy that my institution has it's own cloud storage and uses ownCloud. I have never had to deal with Dropbox, OneDrive or gDrive bullshit.
- Hamuko 5y ago
  I used ownCloud for like a month before giving up and moving to Google Drive. It was so slow and clumsy.
- pizza234 5y ago
  I'm fairly happy of the OwnCloud/NextCloud alternative, but they're not very well-engineered products (although they got better over the last years). Definitely much better than Dropbox on Linux though, which is clearly a third-class citizen for the Dropbox company. The NC client (and I assume also OC) can still generate conflicts even on a single machine, when the network/server connection is not stable. I also remember the Nginx default settings for OwnCloud being suboptimal. Long ago, the NC/OC client was slow to sync, but now it's snappy.
  - SilverRed 5y ago
    Nextcloud works decent for normal file stuff but doesn't really have a solution for photos. You can turn on the auto photo sync for a folder but after a few thousand files it gets unusably slow.
joelbondurant 5y ago
According to the USA Fact-Check algorithm, you must submit your home address and semen viscosity to keep your YCombinator News account.
philippgerard 5y ago
Sam is doing an awesome job. On an M1 mac, the official dropbox client is a total no-go from a resource usage point of view. Maestral is a lifesaver for me/my memory usage.
toxik 5y 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?
- renewiltord 5y ago
  Considering the history of the Dropbox YC announcement on HN, surely you must be joking with #1. It is possibly the most famous HN incident of all time.
  - toxik 5y ago
    It's a word-for-word copy of that glorious comment.
    - renewiltord 5y ago
      Huh, I misremembered that one as being more complex for some reason. Now I look like an idiot HAHA
      - scns 5y ago
        > Now I look like an idiot HAHA I respectfully disagree. You got trolled and you can laugh about it, thats a win in my book.
      - gus_massa 5y ago
        Note that most of the times people quote only the first item that is very technical. The second one is legit. Most of the times I must give a presentation I'm requested to send the file earlier. (And I go with a USB drive just in case.) And the third, ... I think it's still a problem.
agys 5y ago
I’m looking forward to test this client…! Dropbox was an exceptional product with perfect OS integration and interesting features like the “public folder” with an added web server, a versioning system, etc. My use case was not storing big backup files in the cloud but synchronise files between several machines: keeping compatibility with older systems/devices and smaller but cheaper DropBox (100GB?) sizes would have kept me as client. At every update the OS plugin has become more bloated and incomprehensible…
- omniscient_oce 5y ago
  This is me exactly too.
- iamcreasy 5y ago
  > features like the “public folder” with an added web server I thought Dropbox disabled this feature? From here: https://help.dropbox.com/files-folders/share/public-folder https://help.dropbox.com/files-folders/share/public-folder Excerpt: Using the public folder to render HTML content :: As of October 3, 2016 Dropbox Basic (free) users can no longer use public links to render HTML content in a web browser. If you're a Basic user, and you created a website that directly displays HTML content from your Dropbox account, it will no longer render in the browser. Effective September 1, 2017, Dropbox Plus and Business users can no longer render HTML content, and the Public folder and its sharing functionality have been disabled.
  - agys 5y ago
    That’s why I wrote “Dropbox was…” in my lament.
    - iamcreasy 5y ago
      Right. Sorry, I misread it.
gullevek 5y ago
Dropbox is still the best OneDrive (I use it at work): if one file fails, all files stop syncing. It sometimes tries to sync some files from teams and just never finishes. It also has very strange file name restrictions. if the file name is bad (eg whitespace at the end) it will just stop syncing anything. Still better than Google Drive as it is a standard folder. if it crashes your data is HERE. google drive (I used that at work): on MacOS is it is utter crap as it is not a folder but a mounted thing. So it is not "there" when you login. So every application that tries to open a file on google drive just fails. Because it is not an apple FS a lot of apple apps will complain. MySQL Workbench will often fail to save and often destroy files. If not running it is not mounted and none of your files are here. you also can't copy out google files (writer, spreadsheet, etc). For whatever reason. iCloud: some strange folder nested hundred levels deep. I only use it because of some ios stuff. So yeah, Dropbox might be pricey but through all the years it really worked very well for me. (And I really don't care about any of the other services they have)
- simonh 5y ago
  >google drive (I used that at work): on MacOS is it is utter crap as it is not a folder but a mounted thing. That's Google File Stream. There is also a client called Backup and Sync that works like Dropbox, I'm using it now. These are apparently being merged into a single client to be called Google Drive Desktop.
  - Macha 5y ago
    It felt like when they went from the original Google Drive desktop client to Google File Stream + Backup and Sync, they really wanted to push people to File Stream so they could eventually discontinue backup and sync with extra lock in for users. But that didn't turn out the way they wanted, with most users opting for the relatively unbranded Backup and Sync, so we're moving back to the single program. I wonder if this is a retreat from that strategy, or if the single program will be used as a way to nudge Backup and Sync users to adopt the File Stream flow.
- bayindirh 5y ago
  I use all of them (Google, OneDrive, Dropbox) due to various needs, but Dropbox is my primary account too. I've found that inSync is a wonderful client for GoogleDrive and OneDrive for all major platforms. It has some nice features like out of tree syncing (sync a cloud folder to anywhere on the filesystem and keep it synced), and .gitignore like ignore syntax. I'd recommend it heavily. It's a one-time-payment application with no limitations. They've added dropbox support recently.
rbut 5y ago
If you're looking for an open-source self-hosted alternative to Dropbox, I've found Seafile to be flawless. Seadrive is also nice if you want to access your data as if it were a network drive. * Not affiliated with seafile, just really like their software. https://www.seafile.com/ https://www.seafile.com/
- Joeri 5y ago
  I use syncthing. Open source peer to peer folder sync. There is no cloud copy, but for me this is a feature, and the rare times I want to share a file with someone else I manually upload it to cloud storage (onedrive or gdrive). https://syncthing.net/ https://syncthing.net/
- infinitezest 5y ago
  I'm actually surprised to see this comment so far down on HN. I switched after Dropbox started imposing a device limit. There was a but of a learning curve to get it all set up and the quality of the client software can be hit-or-miss. That said, the core functionality (syncing files between devices) has been rock solid.
knxl 5y ago
Well that's how you make companies angry!
Causality1 5y ago
Does using this to bypass Dropbox's device limit violate the EULA? is it possible this could get a Dropbox account banned?
matthewmacleod 5y ago
I really, really want to like Dropbox – but man it feels like they're trying as hard as possible to drive me away with the Mac client. I honestly just want an app that sits there any syncs a folder of files to cloud storage for me. Add some settings and status information, keep the nice features like partial/"smart" sync—along with some shell integration so I can share stuff easily—and it would be absolutely great. I just want to give them some money in exchange for providing some useful services. But it takes genuine effort to make a UI this unappealing. Why is it using it's own non-system font?? Why is the text blurry – in some places, and not in others? Why are all the checkbox icons broken? Why does it include a terrible file manager application?? Bah, I know I'm just yelling at clouds and the reasons are more complex. But I am definitely finding more and more apps that I've used for ages are just getting _actively worse_ for my use-cases and it's so frustrating.
kasperset 5y ago
Dropbox remains for me the best syncing software especially with Delta sync. No issues like file name restrictions that I have encountered in OneDrive. I like Google Photos and it remains my favorite photo storage solution. I find Dropbox more user friendly with features like folder rewind. For sure, I would like cheaper pricing plan with 200GB Storage.
GekkePrutser 5y ago
I would love to have something like this for OneDrive!! Open Source OneDrive support is so poor right now. There's https://github.com/abraunegg/onedrive https://github.com/abraunegg/onedrive which is OK (I don't mind it being console-only) but it lacks virtual files and syncing my entire box to every system is just not an option. Even if MS would build a client it would probably be Linux only which still won't help me for FreeBSD.
whydid 5y ago
Can we all take a moment to discuss how Dropbox, the publicly-traded company with a 1b market cap, still doesn't have a native m1 client for MacOS? Does anyone have insight on what's taking them so long? I assume they forked an older version of Electron that doesn't support m1.
- gwbas1c 5y ago
  The new Dropbox client is written in Rust. You can't build a file sync client with Electron. You need very granular filesystem access, which is something that Electron does poorly.
  - coreyward 5y ago
    Rust got M1 support in November, 2020. There are many other Rust apps that work on M1. This isn't a viable excuse for a publicly traded behemoth that keeps taking on new verticals while ignoring the one feature users care about.
zug_zug 5y ago
Now all we need is the ability to set a client-side encryption key file that applies transparently before upload and on download. This would then be emailed to yourself as a backup. Then you can be secure in your effects.
pgtruesdell 5y ago
Dropbox is great, but their app? Not so much these days. This is absolutely awesome. Now can someone do this for OneDrive? As bad as we might complain about the new Dropbox app, OneDrive is a giant garbage fire.
phendrenad2 5y ago
Now we just need an open-source server to go with it.
dc3k 5y ago
This looks to be a nice alternative to the official app, which I mostly dislike due to its non-standard gigantic popup that appears when I click on it in the system tray. I only use Dropbox to store my 1password vault so I don't really care about any bandwidth concerns.
michelb 5y ago
I would love to see a performance comparison with the regular Dropbox client, in terms of cpu/ram use.
guard0g 5y ago
Nextcloud is an open-source Dropbox-like system with clients for multiple OS and decent security.

I’ve used Maestral a few times and find it works best with narrower folder limits—I ultimately went with the official Dropbox client for my M1 but I use it on an x86 machine in which I only need a handful of folders. The creator is doing good stuff.

est31 5y ago

> Maestral uses the public Dropbox API which, unlike the official client, does not support transferring only those parts of a file which changed ("binary diff"). Maestral may therefore use more bandwidth that the official client.

refulgentis 5y ago
Save 60 MB on Electron, burn 10 TB of bandwidth
- arthurcolle 5y ago
  imagine using Dropbox with those storage requirements...
  - refulgentis 5y ago
    The "imagine $X" construct has colloquially grown to mean "$X is irrational", which is strange to me here - the lack of binary diffing means if you change a single bit of your video editing project, the whole thing gets synced to the cloud. Dropbox is a common solution for small business VCS that's not VCS, I've seen it used for born exactly that way a half dozen times the past decade.
    - arthurcolle 5y ago
      I just think that Dropbox is an inappropriate file storage mechanism (especially for heavy artifacts being generated locally) for someone moving that much stuff in and out of a long term storage system, especially at those levels. I'm not someone that generates 500GB of CAD artifacts a day, or anything even remotely similar, but I ingest about 15GB of global market data and news a day and I laughed a little bit reading your response (I understand how you were responding to GP, and your response makes sense) because its just nonsensical to use consumer focused products for anything serious. Just because I slap on a "business tier" sticker on a water bottle doesn't mean the water bottle is better equipped at solving enterprise needs.
    - kalleboo 5y ago
      > the lack of binary diffing means if you change a single bit of your video editing project, the whole thing gets synced to the cloud I know someone using Dropbox for video editing, they've been using the Synology Dropbox client which also uses the API. It hasn't been a problem. The large video files (tens or hundreds of GB) are ingested once and never edited, the only edits to files are the small project files (megabytes), and some graphics files (hundreds of megabytes). Re-exports of rendered video causes the whole file to change anyway due to the nature of video compression so binary diff doesn't help there anyway.
  - kalleboo 5y ago
    I know someone with a 60 TB Dropbox...
  - manigandham 5y ago
    How is this any different than storing data in S3? Companies have petabytes in the cloud now. If their networking supports their usage then Dropbox is a good solution given all the features it provides.
- SilverRed 5y ago
  Works for my workflow. I work on reasonably small files (my whole cloud storage is about 20 gb) and I like to have the storage available in my file manager at all times. Wouldn't want to run proprietary software or waste memory on it. The biggest problem I have with these 3rd party clients is sometimes things just don't work right. Like for example gimp just fails to open files in the synced folder (google drive not the OP project) until I copy them out and open them. Not sure what the issue is though.
- elwesties 5y ago
  I would make that tradeoff in a second.
  - refulgentis 5y ago
    Nonsense. You're saying you'd prefer shaving 125 Mbps off your Internet connection over 60 MB of your 8+ GB of RAM.
    - remram 5y ago
      125Mbps? 60 MB?
      - refulgentis 5y ago
        > 125 Mbps? 10 TB / 1 month. > 60 MB? In the post they replied to.
        delroth 5y ago
        > > 125 Mbps? > 10 TB / 1 month. That's ~32Mbps.
        remram 5y ago
        60 MB was the download not RAM usage
    - killingtime74 5y ago
      I’m on gigabit fibre, yes
    - danillonunes 5y ago
      I have 32GB of RAM and I would still do that trade off. The 60MB is there all day long doing nothing for me. The internet connection is actually being used for something useful which is synchronizing my files (the actual purpose of the software). I feel like I'm wasting more resources with the first option. Also it's not even that bandwidth expensive with most users' workflow. Maybe this should be a concern for video editors. Majority of people who are just editing word documents (or code, for what I believe is most HN's audience), wouldn't notice the difference.
- nyanpasu64 5y ago
  It's a good tradeoff since it lets me escape the official Dropbox client trying to upload my drives, photos, etc. to the cloud, and spam me with upsell offers on a daily basis (if you're operating with a nearly full Dropbox in steady-state).

sylens 5y ago

I was a very early Dropbox adopter but eventually switched to OneDrive a few years back because they bundled Office 365 with 1 TB of storage. I just went and looked at the official Dropbox plans to see if there was a family plan similar to the 5 users I get with Office 365/OneDrive...and found their plan/pricing page overwhelming. There's rows upon rows of features to compare across versions like "Traffic and Insights" and the "Plus button" forcing me to keep scrolling just to see that a family plan costs $16.99 a month for 2 TB. No option for a cheaper plan with less storage. I feel like they are missing the mark when it comes to marketing to consumers here.

MuffinFlavored 5y ago
> There's rows upon rows of features to compare across versions After you grow as a company and hire lots of engineers and your core product is "good enough", you have to try to pivot/stay relevant/compete/innovate I guess. Lots of manpower (I have no idea how large their engineering team is) need to be kept busy I guess?
- remram 5y ago
  That doesn't necessarily mean that each of those features should appear as a different row, or even be different between plans. If you can't figure out a way to make a comprehensive pricing page, the amount of features is not really an excuse. This one is over 5 pages, with 5 different sections which don't even look triangle-shaped as you can usually expect from increasingly-priced plans.
- asaddhamani 5y ago
  They have 2500 employees. Why does a single product company with a product that is mostly “done” need those many people?
  - Salgat 5y ago
    This horrible obsession with exponential growth. It's not enough to maintain a core team of engineers and pass on those savings on the price in order to gain more customers.

tra3 5y ago

I wonder what's stopping dropbox from revoking their API tokens. Isn't this competing directly with the "official" clients?

encryptluks2 5y ago
Why would it matter to them? They are already more expensive than other providers. Rclone connects to multiple cloud hosting solutions already too. If they revoked API access I'm pretty sure the backlash would be the final straw.
CrazyCatDog 5y ago
He only supports platforms that Dropbox does not officially support. They won’t revoke tokens, they’ll do something far worse—they’ll hire him!
Seattle3503 5y ago
What does Dropbox gain here?
- q-rews 5y ago
  Companies bundle everything into their flagship product to force everyone to use it. Direct API access means Dropbox can’t advertise either. Ask Twitter what they think about that.
ec109685 5y ago
What API token are you referring to? Given it is open source, how are they keeping the token secure?

sorry_outta_gas 5y ago

what is dropbox paper?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
arthurcolle 5y ago
New Age neo-hypertext document type (proprietary, of course) that supports collaboration using the Dropbox™ suite of services
- SilverRed 5y ago
  So a competitor to google docs / office?
  - ents 5y ago
    Theoretically. I don't know a single person that uses it.
    - brightball 5y ago
      I use it. I find it to be a great option for my note taking.
    - slantyyz 5y ago
      I use it for some stuff. The markdown shortcuts are great for formatting.
  - jazzyjackson 5y ago
    To me it seems to want to be Google Wave. A union of documents and chat channels so your workspace can be all-inclusive, but I think it has a bit of a fax machine problem in that I don't know anyone else to use it with. Edit: the toolbar on a new "Paper" doc allow me to insert an image, media, dropbox file, table, timeline, to do list, and code blocks. I can link a calendar event to a doc, Oh, I can hit a button to switch to "Presentation Mode"... and I can highlight text to comment on it. So on second thought it seems very similar to google docs.

jazzyjackson 5y ago

Would be cool to get around a limitation of Dropbox's native client: filenames with emojis (and other utf8 I assume) won't upload. If their filesystem doesn't like utf8, maybe the client could convert the offending filenames to base64 or punycode, and convert filenames back from the cloud... maybe I can find a place in the code to try this out, thanks for open sourcing. I notice you're using type hints in python and I've been wanting to learn more about that, would love to hear what toolchain is hip these days.

cerved 5y ago
what kind of psychopath puts emojis in filenames??
- beepboop43 5y ago
  screenshots of a browser where your screenshots are automatically named by the application window you're taking a screenshot of. if that tab is an article or forum post or anything that has an emoji in its title, you're getting emojis in the filename. you only find out when you go to find the screenshot later and it's missing. fun stuff
- wiether 5y ago
  I'm usually not a "you have to go the hard way before going the easy way"-guy, and I started the easy way actually, but using CLI every definitely changes the way you name your files. And I can't see (and don't want to) how you would manage files through CLI that contains emojis in their name...
  - eropple 5y ago
    It's distinctly not the easiest thing in the world, but on a Mac the emoji panel is "tap Fn" and on Windows it's Win-;. Also, tab completion.
    - djrogers 5y ago
      The default keyboard shortcut for the emoji picker in macOS is Ctrl+Cmd+Space, Fn is not used…

mastrsushi 5y ago

What about this client is M1 specific?

NiekvdMaas 5y ago
Maestral provides a universal binary on macOS, so it runs natively on arm64. The official Dropbox client is x64-only, so it needs to run in an emulation layer (Rosetta) on a M1. For something low-level as a file syncing service, that's very unfortunate. There are loads of request on the Dropbox forum to support arm64, but no sight of it being added anytime soon.
- mastrsushi 5y ago
  That either reads “we don’t have the resources to support our second largest OS platform” or there are too little users still using the native desktop client. Mind you, this is a company that went out of their way to port a Linux client in 2011. To see them hesitate with m1 is shocking
  - gtirloni 5y ago
    I bet M1 users aren't nowhere near "the second largest OS platform". Unless you're bundling x86 macOS users together. Just pointing out that it's not as critical (yet) as it might appear.
    - Macha 5y ago
      I suspect even combined, macOS is fourth after Windows, Android and iOS.
      - mastrsushi 5y ago
        Regardless, they’re ignoring a massive demographic. Besides gaming, when consumer software stops support for macOS, it doesn’t look good.

NoPicklez 5y ago

I joined Dropbox in around 2010 and used it religiously through University to ensure all my work was being backed up as I worked on assignments. I used it for group projects and it was fantastic, at the time it was the most reliable cloud storage and I tried Microsoft Live Mesh, Live drive etc and found they were unreliable in syncing changes to edited files. Dropbox was flawless. I then shifted into using it to also back up my photos from my mobile and camera, however my photo storage started to grow and this year I switched to Google Drive & Photos for much much less than Dropbox was offering per month. I think 100GB of Google Drive & Photos is $25.99 per year opposed to $184 per year for 1TB with DropBox. I don't need 1TB but 100GB is perfect compared to 10GB with Dropbox (that I had).

cerved 5y ago
It really bothers me how hard it is to download all your photos
- lazide 5y ago
  How so? If you use takeout it’s decently smooth. I have over a terabyte in G photos.
  - cerved 5y ago
    didn't know about Google takeout still I'd prefer if it was just accessibile from Drive
- NoPicklez 5y ago
  I find it quite easy, with Dropbox and Google Photos you just install the app and enable background sync. It's never let me down.
citizenkeen 5y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe Google Photos stores pictures in original size anymore.

greazy 5y ago

I am extremely happy that my institution has it's own cloud storage and uses ownCloud. I have never had to deal with Dropbox, OneDrive or gDrive bullshit.

Hamuko 5y ago
I used ownCloud for like a month before giving up and moving to Google Drive. It was so slow and clumsy.
pizza234 5y ago
I'm fairly happy of the OwnCloud/NextCloud alternative, but they're not very well-engineered products (although they got better over the last years). Definitely much better than Dropbox on Linux though, which is clearly a third-class citizen for the Dropbox company. The NC client (and I assume also OC) can still generate conflicts even on a single machine, when the network/server connection is not stable. I also remember the Nginx default settings for OwnCloud being suboptimal. Long ago, the NC/OC client was slow to sync, but now it's snappy.
- SilverRed 5y ago
  Nextcloud works decent for normal file stuff but doesn't really have a solution for photos. You can turn on the auto photo sync for a folder but after a few thousand files it gets unusably slow.

joelbondurant 5y ago

According to the USA Fact-Check algorithm, you must submit your home address and semen viscosity to keep your YCombinator News account.

philippgerard 5y ago

Sam is doing an awesome job. On an M1 mac, the official dropbox client is a total no-go from a resource usage point of view. Maestral is a lifesaver for me/my memory usage.

toxik 5y 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?

renewiltord 5y ago
Considering the history of the Dropbox YC announcement on HN, surely you must be joking with #1. It is possibly the most famous HN incident of all time.
- toxik 5y ago
  It's a word-for-word copy of that glorious comment.
  - renewiltord 5y ago
    Huh, I misremembered that one as being more complex for some reason. Now I look like an idiot HAHA
    - scns 5y ago
      > Now I look like an idiot HAHA I respectfully disagree. You got trolled and you can laugh about it, thats a win in my book.
    - gus_massa 5y ago
      Note that most of the times people quote only the first item that is very technical. The second one is legit. Most of the times I must give a presentation I'm requested to send the file earlier. (And I go with a USB drive just in case.) And the third, ... I think it's still a problem.

agys 5y ago

I’m looking forward to test this client…! Dropbox was an exceptional product with perfect OS integration and interesting features like the “public folder” with an added web server, a versioning system, etc. My use case was not storing big backup files in the cloud but synchronise files between several machines: keeping compatibility with older systems/devices and smaller but cheaper DropBox (100GB?) sizes would have kept me as client. At every update the OS plugin has become more bloated and incomprehensible…

omniscient_oce 5y ago
This is me exactly too.
iamcreasy 5y ago
> features like the “public folder” with an added web server I thought Dropbox disabled this feature? From here: https://help.dropbox.com/files-folders/share/public-folder https://help.dropbox.com/files-folders/share/public-folder Excerpt: Using the public folder to render HTML content :: As of October 3, 2016 Dropbox Basic (free) users can no longer use public links to render HTML content in a web browser. If you're a Basic user, and you created a website that directly displays HTML content from your Dropbox account, it will no longer render in the browser. Effective September 1, 2017, Dropbox Plus and Business users can no longer render HTML content, and the Public folder and its sharing functionality have been disabled.
- agys 5y ago
  That’s why I wrote “Dropbox was…” in my lament.
  - iamcreasy 5y ago
    Right. Sorry, I misread it.

gullevek 5y ago

Dropbox is still the best OneDrive (I use it at work): if one file fails, all files stop syncing. It sometimes tries to sync some files from teams and just never finishes. It also has very strange file name restrictions. if the file name is bad (eg whitespace at the end) it will just stop syncing anything. Still better than Google Drive as it is a standard folder. if it crashes your data is HERE. google drive (I used that at work): on MacOS is it is utter crap as it is not a folder but a mounted thing. So it is not "there" when you login. So every application that tries to open a file on google drive just fails. Because it is not an apple FS a lot of apple apps will complain. MySQL Workbench will often fail to save and often destroy files. If not running it is not mounted and none of your files are here. you also can't copy out google files (writer, spreadsheet, etc). For whatever reason. iCloud: some strange folder nested hundred levels deep. I only use it because of some ios stuff. So yeah, Dropbox might be pricey but through all the years it really worked very well for me. (And I really don't care about any of the other services they have)

simonh 5y ago
>google drive (I used that at work): on MacOS is it is utter crap as it is not a folder but a mounted thing. That's Google File Stream. There is also a client called Backup and Sync that works like Dropbox, I'm using it now. These are apparently being merged into a single client to be called Google Drive Desktop.
- Macha 5y ago
  It felt like when they went from the original Google Drive desktop client to Google File Stream + Backup and Sync, they really wanted to push people to File Stream so they could eventually discontinue backup and sync with extra lock in for users. But that didn't turn out the way they wanted, with most users opting for the relatively unbranded Backup and Sync, so we're moving back to the single program. I wonder if this is a retreat from that strategy, or if the single program will be used as a way to nudge Backup and Sync users to adopt the File Stream flow.
bayindirh 5y ago
I use all of them (Google, OneDrive, Dropbox) due to various needs, but Dropbox is my primary account too. I've found that inSync is a wonderful client for GoogleDrive and OneDrive for all major platforms. It has some nice features like out of tree syncing (sync a cloud folder to anywhere on the filesystem and keep it synced), and .gitignore like ignore syntax. I'd recommend it heavily. It's a one-time-payment application with no limitations. They've added dropbox support recently.

rbut 5y ago

If you're looking for an open-source self-hosted alternative to Dropbox, I've found Seafile to be flawless. Seadrive is also nice if you want to access your data as if it were a network drive. * Not affiliated with seafile, just really like their software. https://www.seafile.com/ https://www.seafile.com/

Joeri 5y ago
I use syncthing. Open source peer to peer folder sync. There is no cloud copy, but for me this is a feature, and the rare times I want to share a file with someone else I manually upload it to cloud storage (onedrive or gdrive). https://syncthing.net/ https://syncthing.net/
infinitezest 5y ago
I'm actually surprised to see this comment so far down on HN. I switched after Dropbox started imposing a device limit. There was a but of a learning curve to get it all set up and the quality of the client software can be hit-or-miss. That said, the core functionality (syncing files between devices) has been rock solid.

knxl 5y ago

Well that's how you make companies angry!

Causality1 5y ago

Does using this to bypass Dropbox's device limit violate the EULA? is it possible this could get a Dropbox account banned?

matthewmacleod 5y ago

I really, really want to like Dropbox – but man it feels like they're trying as hard as possible to drive me away with the Mac client. I honestly just want an app that sits there any syncs a folder of files to cloud storage for me. Add some settings and status information, keep the nice features like partial/"smart" sync—along with some shell integration so I can share stuff easily—and it would be absolutely great. I just want to give them some money in exchange for providing some useful services. But it takes genuine effort to make a UI this unappealing. Why is it using it's own non-system font?? Why is the text blurry – in some places, and not in others? Why are all the checkbox icons broken? Why does it include a terrible file manager application?? Bah, I know I'm just yelling at clouds and the reasons are more complex. But I am definitely finding more and more apps that I've used for ages are just getting _actively worse_ for my use-cases and it's so frustrating.

kasperset 5y ago

Dropbox remains for me the best syncing software especially with Delta sync. No issues like file name restrictions that I have encountered in OneDrive. I like Google Photos and it remains my favorite photo storage solution. I find Dropbox more user friendly with features like folder rewind. For sure, I would like cheaper pricing plan with 200GB Storage.

GekkePrutser 5y ago

I would love to have something like this for OneDrive!! Open Source OneDrive support is so poor right now. There's https://github.com/abraunegg/onedrive https://github.com/abraunegg/onedrive which is OK (I don't mind it being console-only) but it lacks virtual files and syncing my entire box to every system is just not an option. Even if MS would build a client it would probably be Linux only which still won't help me for FreeBSD.

whydid 5y ago

Can we all take a moment to discuss how Dropbox, the publicly-traded company with a 1b market cap, still doesn't have a native m1 client for MacOS? Does anyone have insight on what's taking them so long? I assume they forked an older version of Electron that doesn't support m1.

gwbas1c 5y ago
The new Dropbox client is written in Rust. You can't build a file sync client with Electron. You need very granular filesystem access, which is something that Electron does poorly.
- coreyward 5y ago
  Rust got M1 support in November, 2020. There are many other Rust apps that work on M1. This isn't a viable excuse for a publicly traded behemoth that keeps taking on new verticals while ignoring the one feature users care about.

zug_zug 5y ago

Now all we need is the ability to set a client-side encryption key file that applies transparently before upload and on download. This would then be emailed to yourself as a backup. Then you can be secure in your effects.

pgtruesdell 5y ago

Dropbox is great, but their app? Not so much these days. This is absolutely awesome. Now can someone do this for OneDrive? As bad as we might complain about the new Dropbox app, OneDrive is a giant garbage fire.

phendrenad2 5y ago

Now we just need an open-source server to go with it.

dc3k 5y ago

This looks to be a nice alternative to the official app, which I mostly dislike due to its non-standard gigantic popup that appears when I click on it in the system tray. I only use Dropbox to store my 1password vault so I don't really care about any bandwidth concerns.

michelb 5y ago

I would love to see a performance comparison with the regular Dropbox client, in terms of cpu/ram use.

guard0g 5y ago

Nextcloud is an open-source Dropbox-like system with clients for multiple OS and decent security.