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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 lo

by 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.
    - smilespray 5y ago
      I completely agree with your sentiment, but it puts the company in a difficult position when your competition offers similar functionality for "free" (because you already paid for Office or their primary revenue model is different).
    - MuffinFlavored 5y ago
      > This horrible obsession with exponential growth I don't know if I would call it horrible. Money makes the world turn. Capitalism and all that.
  - SilverRed 5y ago
    Because Google would have more dedicated to the software/sales/datacenters/etc for Google One/Drive/Photos. They need to compete with what the competition is doing.
  - baby 5y ago
    I would guess security is a huge part of dropbox and you’re never “done” there. The first dropbox-like that gets breached can say good bye to their spot on the market.
SilverRed 5y ago
Similar experience. I pay for the 100GB Google one plan which comes with the excellent google photos service and I went to see what dropbox offers and found their cheapest plan was extremely expensive comparatively and they offer less features. I'm just not sure how they even compete at this point when they do the same thing as every other cloud storage product but cost more. And you even have to pay extra for family sharing which is just free with Google.
- Spooky23 5y ago
  If you make a lot of changes, the Dropbox sync works. Google drive or OneDrive choke in a variety of situations. The product sucks in lots of other ways.
  - burnte 5y ago
    I hate OneDrive, and I don't even USE it. I hate it because my corporate users taht use it have a constant stream of issues with it. It fails to sync constantly, the agent fails to load properly, or needs to be logged in again for some reason, etc. It's a never ending stream of failures with the heaviest users.
    - Kimitri 5y ago
      Yup. That’s my experience, too. Also, on macOS the client UI is horrible. It’s slow and I’ve yet to find a way to open local files that it displays in the list of recently synced files.
    - WastingMyTime89 5y ago
      I hate OneDrive because Office apps have some extremely strange interaction with it. They are not always in sync with the main client. There is nothing like changing an excel file, having it correctly modified locally but still seeing the old data in a linked PowerPoint because OneDrive didn't update. It also managed to lose me a day of work once despite having saved the file regularly. None of my modifications were properly synched to the history. I also hate how it pauses itself when I'm sharing my phone connection and tends to struggle when I restart it. I used to really dislike Google Drive before my company migrated but between that and the abysmal outlook search I really miss Google.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
Dropbox always feels like it peaked early and has steadily gotten worse as they try to add more and more features to it. > I feel like they are missing the mark when it comes to marketing to consumers here. I get the impression they're relying on name recognition and first mover advantage to keep the simple users flowing in, while all of the extra features and GUI fluff are built out to attract some other audience that makes decisions by counting up how many different features are listed on each product page. These days, I'm just happy that I haven't had to force-kill the Dropbox client in many months. I wish there was some way to go back to the days where they just synced my files for me, let me share a few things, and I didn't have to fight with their GUI all the time.
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
  In my impression, they are removing useful features and adding unnecessary ones. Since I joined over a decade ago, they have removed an extremely useful Public folder with the capability to generate direct links, limited the number of devices, and added a ton of features I never wanted from them, like Paper.
  - baby 5y ago
    Yeah agree, public folders were great. I’m still a user of dropbox since early days but: - I’m stupid and I kept a git repo in there, it became corrupt. Doesn’t surprise me but wondering what else is fragile in dropbox. - Uploading pictures on mobile is really really slow. For some reason google photos on iOS is so much faster, like incomparably faster. - Google photos also allows you to quickly get to all your pictures. Dropbox is… at best cumbersome, at worst really slow at fetching lots of pictures. - make public folders a thing again for paying users. I’m sure this would create an awesome ecosystem of websites.
    - Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
      I think that they removed public folders because some people started storing static files for their websites in it. As for why google photos are faster... I think it is because Photos resize images on device, while Dropbox uploads them in original size.
homero 5y ago
I left too for that reason
codecutter 5y ago
I left Dropbox when they stopped supporting Linux client. I didn't want to go to either Google or Microsoft, so I went with Mega.nz and I am very happy with them. I pay around $30/year for 400 GB storage. (most likely a grandfathered plan, not sure of current pricing).
- jez 5y ago
  For what it’s worth (not trying to convince you to switch back, just want to provide my perspective), I still use Dropbox on Linux (Pop!_OS 20.04) via their official installer and it works completely fine: https://www.dropbox.com/install-linux https://www.dropbox.com/install-linux
  - defensem3ch 5y ago
    It should also perhaps be noted that you can't sync to a Dropbox folder on an NTFS drive in Linux with the official client. You can however do this with Maestral.
    - jmrm 5y ago
      That's weird, because until a couple years ago I kept syncing the same folder in a NTFS partition in a dual-boot (Linux + Windows) configuration.
- OnlyLys 5y ago
  > I left Dropbox when they stopped supporting Linux client. Wait a second. Did they? My Dropbox client is currently working on my Arch system.
  - cycomanic 5y ago
    At some point they build in a filesystem check and stopped running on anything but ext4 (or btrfs?). IIRC they were constantly giving some notification as well. It didn't really make sense either and I know several people moved away from Dropbox because they were using xfs. I'm using pCloud with their lifetime 1TB plan.
canistel 5y ago
Same story here too, except that we moved to Syncthing. Periodic cloud back-ups with Rclone, in addition.
- hannofcart 5y ago
  Love Syncthing. Use it extensively across my Linux-Android-Windows devices. Where I really miss it is on iOS (I have just one Apple device - an iPad) and can't find a reliable Syncthing implementation/wrapper on the App Store. That doesn't stop me using Syncthing though. I just use my iPad less. Which is a shame. I like the handwriting recognition it has. There's an app called Mobius Sync which promises Syncthing support but doesn't work quite as well.
  - solarkraft 5y ago
    Thanks for teh suggestion. I was surprised to find out there don’t even seem to be efforts to get the binary running on jailboken devices (unfortunately my knowledge of iOS internals is too limited for that).
gumby 5y ago
Are you on windows? Because I tried OneDrive and found it quite slow and a bit flakey when I tried it a few years ago on my Mac: it would get confused about sync state and just stop syncing (much better than losing data!) until I exited and restarted the app. Also it would silently refuse to sync some files which eventually I realised were not valid windows filenames though they were perfectly fine under Unix. Has it gotten better? It’s free so I’d be willing to use it if I could trust it.
- LeonB 5y ago
  Dropbox fails to sync some files that have valid names in Windows. Unicode is hard.
  - cerved 5y ago
    ASCII on the other hand is easy
- sylens 5y ago
  I would say my primary device is a Windows desktop for the storage but I also use it to sync to a Macbook Air.
cerved 5y ago
Dropbox at least has a Linux client and unlike OneDrive didn't delete all data because some plan expired. The problem is Dropbox is too expensive by comparison.
manigandham 5y ago
Dropbox still has the best syncing tech [1][2] which handles complex situations with lots of files and responds instantly. That alone is worth it if you need it. However the rest of the product is crap. Dropbox had a solid business with a "magic folder that syncs" but has been chasing new features and product lines with little success. Even the enterprise offering was far behind Box.com for years and now has tons of competition. 1. https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/rewriting-the-heart-of-our-sync-engine https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/rewriting-the-heart-of-o... 2. https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure
- scns 5y ago
  There is a plugin for Thunderbird thats integrates with box.com to upload huge attachments there and paste a generated download link into the mail.
- shapefrog 5y ago
  > Dropbox still has the best syncing tech Can confirm without any references etc that I have found it to be vastly superior to all other syncs. Top of the pile for me is that it handles small changes in large files without reuploading the entire thing. That said, I havent used it for years.
- gajjanag 5y ago
  Maybe Dropbox's is the best out of a bunch of mediocre syncing solutions. However, I do wish to add that Dropbox struggles with scale: lots of small files slow down sync to a crawl and spin CPU at 100%. Concretely, I had a certain folder with 100,000+ small files for some research I was doing with a collaborator. It took my laptop 24 hours to sync this folder, and throughout my CPU was at 100% throughout. For comparison, rsync got the same job done in a few minutes. See https://help.dropbox.com/accounts-billing/space-storage/file-storage-limit https://help.dropbox.com/accounts-billing/space-storage/file... , the above terrible experience is in line with this caveat.
  - manigandham 5y ago
    Sure, but Rsync and Dropbox are very different. There's really no software option that handles that many small files well with the same features (realtime sync, folder moves, binary diffs, file history, etc). Rsync is great for taking a snapshot and replicating it elsewhere, which is probably a better fit for research projects anyway.
japanuspus 5y ago
Similar experience here: the paid options are way too expensive for private use, when none of the new features has any value to you. Seems to me that the correct strategy for Dropbox would have been to be super focused on the core product and on not hiring in too many people/taking in too much capital. That would of course have introduced a market cap, but if 1% of everyone had ended up on a reasonably priced personal plan it would have been a roomy cap. As it was, Dropbox has grown into yet-another ms-office-in-the-sky and there is no way they will make it against their competitors who can burn the cash, and who are slowly catching up on sync technology. This is really a shame too: Dropbox is just the gold standard for sync. Before Dropbox I was using unison[0] and tried every other sync product, but nothing came close. TBH I am still using Dropbox every day, getting around the device limit by sharing stuff with multiple free accounts... [0]: https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/ https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/
- omniscient_oce 5y ago
  I'm looking to setup Unison to replace Dropbox because I think their service is a bit overpriced, how did you find it?
tome 5y ago
Does anyone understand how OneDrive and Dropbox can be so cheap compared to S3? - 2 TB on Dropbox is £7.99 / month - 1 TB OneDrive is £59.99 / year - 1 TB on S3 is $23.99 / month How can Dropbox and OneDrive be cheaper than S3 at all, let alone after providing value add on top? Is it something to do with lower reliability and availability guarantees? Is it possible to buy direct access to their underlying storage? https://www.dropbox.com/individual https://www.dropbox.com/individual https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-365/onedrive/compare-onedrive-plans?activetab=tab:primaryr1 https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-365/onedrive/compa... https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/
- oefrha 5y ago
  Most users aren’t storing anywhere close to 1TB. For every user using 1TB there are probably a hundred using 1GB or less. Case in point: I subscribe to Office 365 reluctantly but don’t use OneDrive.
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago
    yeah the gym model, in other words I have 4 O365 accounts and I have 700GB on it myself but the other 3 accounts have nothing. I doubt the average usage is more than 100GB.
- tuananh 5y ago
  because most of ppl buy 1tb/2tb plan on Dropbox and OneDrive do not use all the space? whereas s3 is pay as you go model.
- Dylan16807 5y ago
  For a personal product with so few size options, most of the capacity won't be used. Glacier is worth noting as a comparison point, $4 or $1 per TB per month with more limits. Backblaze said a couple years ago their cost to provide a low-redundancy TB per month was a bit over $3.
- tyingq 5y ago
  Mostly actual use billing vs potential use billing.
rcarmo 5y ago
I did exactly that. I work at Microsoft now, but two years before I joined I went through the same process but kept Dropbox for many years solely for Linux support. Then they botched that, so I moved my Linux/Mac working trees into SyncThing (since I only need local sync anyway).
- gtirloni 5y ago
  How have they botched Linux support? It works flawlessly for me and GDrive/OneDrive don't even come close.
  - rcarmo 5y ago
    This was back when they removed support for some filesystems. I never went back.
jl6 5y ago
I’m a happy Dropbox customer because I use all of the 2TB space, they have a Linux client, and their syncing works far better than Google Drive and OneDrive. I can do things like modify git repositories, add and delete thousands of files, have files open for editing, rearrange large folders… - all within the Dropbox folder - and Dropbox manages to sync it without any issue, whereas when I tried the other two, there was a low threshold of “file change complexity” above which they choked. I don’t use any of the add-on services like Paper. I used to be disappointed that I couldn’t get an account larger than 2TB at a reasonable price, but then I adapted my workflow to split my data into hot/cold, with hot staying in Dropbox and cold going elsewhere. Because of this I could probably adapt to a smaller Dropbox account now.
- gtirloni 5y ago
  Dropbox has the best Linux client of all. That's the only reason I keep paying.
leokennis 5y ago
My strategy: - Stuff I am working on, documents, small stuff: iCloud Drive - Stuff I want to consume (lossless music, movies) and larger files I occasionally need but that I don't need to update: https://www.transip.nl/stack/ https://www.transip.nl/stack/ - Stuff I want to archive and maybe need to retrieve at some point in the future: B2
secondaryacct 5y ago
Yeah I found it genius to have so much space anywhere I was for basically free when I was a poor student. But then I got richer and with a 40TB NAS, a few $ per year hostname, an ip refresh script for the registrar and a vpn server included in the nas, well I have a monster dropbox equivalent and now that I have 5G, I dont even understand anymore why people dont just do that. You lose the ability to access docs offline but then you have massive space online without having to share it with american people (Im in China). In terms of reliability, modern NASes are really good and I only ever lost stuff when I got caught in trying btrfs lol And with the recent temptation to scan cloud stuff for dangerous data, I feel more at ease with the NAS solution.
bsharitt 5y ago
I used to be a big fan of Dropbox, but my problem is that they don't have a lower paid tier like Google, Microsoft and Apple have for $2-$3. I need a little more than the free plan offers, but I don't need terabytes of space.
wiether 5y ago
Dropbox user for personal stuff for many years, I'm definitely not happy about them adding weird add-ons like Paper or even worse, Passwords. Just focus on file sync/storage/sharing. And I absolutely don't understand the family plan, like you have the same storage (2TB) than a Premium account, but you have to share it between multiple people AND pay more. What ? Also, I use OneDrive at work and even if I like its integration directly within Office (especially Excel), I have issues daily with the sync. Lots of conflicts, lots of "can't sync"... And even if I keep removing it, I keep getting two or three shortcuts on the left sidebar in Explorer and it annoys me quite a lot. So for now I'm staying with Dropbox but I will have no issue switching ship if I see something better elsewhere or, worse, if they make bad choices.
caymanjim 5y ago
I don't see Dropbox surviving. They're supposedly breaking even for the first time this month, after ten years, but growth is slowing dramatically. They have over 700 million users, but only 15 million paying users. Growth in paying users from 2019-2020 was only 8%, down from 12% the year before, and the numbers are more dramatic the farther back you go. They're at cost parity with their primary competitors for the most basic plan ($9.99 for 1TB), but there are cheaper alternatives, especially for family plans. Dropbox doesn't have the economies of scale that Microsoft, Google, et. al. have, so storage remains a loss-leader for them. The only way they can make money is trying to upsell addons that most people don't want. If not for the inertia of being first to market, they wouldn't have many paying users. The year-over-year growth in paying customers says it all.
rootsudo 5y ago
For most users, the 1TB limit is gone and it's almost unlimited now.
michaelcampbell 5y ago
Yeah, me too (early adopter, paid version). My breaking point was the Windows client kept dying, SILENTLY. When I used it for keeping data in sync with my wife on her Windows machine, this was a total deal breaker. Using Syncthing now, and it's been solid.

by sylens 5y ago

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.
  - smilespray 5y ago
    I completely agree with your sentiment, but it puts the company in a difficult position when your competition offers similar functionality for "free" (because you already paid for Office or their primary revenue model is different).
  - MuffinFlavored 5y ago
    > This horrible obsession with exponential growth I don't know if I would call it horrible. Money makes the world turn. Capitalism and all that.
- SilverRed 5y ago
  Because Google would have more dedicated to the software/sales/datacenters/etc for Google One/Drive/Photos. They need to compete with what the competition is doing.
- baby 5y ago
  I would guess security is a huge part of dropbox and you’re never “done” there. The first dropbox-like that gets breached can say good bye to their spot on the market.

SilverRed 5y ago

Similar experience. I pay for the 100GB Google one plan which comes with the excellent google photos service and I went to see what dropbox offers and found their cheapest plan was extremely expensive comparatively and they offer less features. I'm just not sure how they even compete at this point when they do the same thing as every other cloud storage product but cost more. And you even have to pay extra for family sharing which is just free with Google.

Spooky23 5y ago
If you make a lot of changes, the Dropbox sync works. Google drive or OneDrive choke in a variety of situations. The product sucks in lots of other ways.
- burnte 5y ago
  I hate OneDrive, and I don't even USE it. I hate it because my corporate users taht use it have a constant stream of issues with it. It fails to sync constantly, the agent fails to load properly, or needs to be logged in again for some reason, etc. It's a never ending stream of failures with the heaviest users.
  - Kimitri 5y ago
    Yup. That’s my experience, too. Also, on macOS the client UI is horrible. It’s slow and I’ve yet to find a way to open local files that it displays in the list of recently synced files.
  - WastingMyTime89 5y ago
    I hate OneDrive because Office apps have some extremely strange interaction with it. They are not always in sync with the main client. There is nothing like changing an excel file, having it correctly modified locally but still seeing the old data in a linked PowerPoint because OneDrive didn't update. It also managed to lose me a day of work once despite having saved the file regularly. None of my modifications were properly synched to the history. I also hate how it pauses itself when I'm sharing my phone connection and tends to struggle when I restart it. I used to really dislike Google Drive before my company migrated but between that and the abysmal outlook search I really miss Google.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

Dropbox always feels like it peaked early and has steadily gotten worse as they try to add more and more features to it. > I feel like they are missing the mark when it comes to marketing to consumers here. I get the impression they're relying on name recognition and first mover advantage to keep the simple users flowing in, while all of the extra features and GUI fluff are built out to attract some other audience that makes decisions by counting up how many different features are listed on each product page. These days, I'm just happy that I haven't had to force-kill the Dropbox client in many months. I wish there was some way to go back to the days where they just synced my files for me, let me share a few things, and I didn't have to fight with their GUI all the time.

Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
In my impression, they are removing useful features and adding unnecessary ones. Since I joined over a decade ago, they have removed an extremely useful Public folder with the capability to generate direct links, limited the number of devices, and added a ton of features I never wanted from them, like Paper.
- baby 5y ago
  Yeah agree, public folders were great. I’m still a user of dropbox since early days but: - I’m stupid and I kept a git repo in there, it became corrupt. Doesn’t surprise me but wondering what else is fragile in dropbox. - Uploading pictures on mobile is really really slow. For some reason google photos on iOS is so much faster, like incomparably faster. - Google photos also allows you to quickly get to all your pictures. Dropbox is… at best cumbersome, at worst really slow at fetching lots of pictures. - make public folders a thing again for paying users. I’m sure this would create an awesome ecosystem of websites.
  - Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
    I think that they removed public folders because some people started storing static files for their websites in it. As for why google photos are faster... I think it is because Photos resize images on device, while Dropbox uploads them in original size.

homero 5y ago

I left too for that reason

codecutter 5y ago

I left Dropbox when they stopped supporting Linux client. I didn't want to go to either Google or Microsoft, so I went with Mega.nz and I am very happy with them. I pay around $30/year for 400 GB storage. (most likely a grandfathered plan, not sure of current pricing).

jez 5y ago
For what it’s worth (not trying to convince you to switch back, just want to provide my perspective), I still use Dropbox on Linux (Pop!_OS 20.04) via their official installer and it works completely fine: https://www.dropbox.com/install-linux https://www.dropbox.com/install-linux
- defensem3ch 5y ago
  It should also perhaps be noted that you can't sync to a Dropbox folder on an NTFS drive in Linux with the official client. You can however do this with Maestral.
  - jmrm 5y ago
    That's weird, because until a couple years ago I kept syncing the same folder in a NTFS partition in a dual-boot (Linux + Windows) configuration.
OnlyLys 5y ago
> I left Dropbox when they stopped supporting Linux client. Wait a second. Did they? My Dropbox client is currently working on my Arch system.
- cycomanic 5y ago
  At some point they build in a filesystem check and stopped running on anything but ext4 (or btrfs?). IIRC they were constantly giving some notification as well. It didn't really make sense either and I know several people moved away from Dropbox because they were using xfs. I'm using pCloud with their lifetime 1TB plan.

canistel 5y ago

Same story here too, except that we moved to Syncthing. Periodic cloud back-ups with Rclone, in addition.

hannofcart 5y ago
Love Syncthing. Use it extensively across my Linux-Android-Windows devices. Where I really miss it is on iOS (I have just one Apple device - an iPad) and can't find a reliable Syncthing implementation/wrapper on the App Store. That doesn't stop me using Syncthing though. I just use my iPad less. Which is a shame. I like the handwriting recognition it has. There's an app called Mobius Sync which promises Syncthing support but doesn't work quite as well.
- solarkraft 5y ago
  Thanks for teh suggestion. I was surprised to find out there don’t even seem to be efforts to get the binary running on jailboken devices (unfortunately my knowledge of iOS internals is too limited for that).

gumby 5y ago

Are you on windows? Because I tried OneDrive and found it quite slow and a bit flakey when I tried it a few years ago on my Mac: it would get confused about sync state and just stop syncing (much better than losing data!) until I exited and restarted the app. Also it would silently refuse to sync some files which eventually I realised were not valid windows filenames though they were perfectly fine under Unix. Has it gotten better? It’s free so I’d be willing to use it if I could trust it.

LeonB 5y ago
Dropbox fails to sync some files that have valid names in Windows. Unicode is hard.
- cerved 5y ago
  ASCII on the other hand is easy
sylens 5y ago
I would say my primary device is a Windows desktop for the storage but I also use it to sync to a Macbook Air.

cerved 5y ago

Dropbox at least has a Linux client and unlike OneDrive didn't delete all data because some plan expired. The problem is Dropbox is too expensive by comparison.

manigandham 5y ago

Dropbox still has the best syncing tech [1][2] which handles complex situations with lots of files and responds instantly. That alone is worth it if you need it. However the rest of the product is crap. Dropbox had a solid business with a "magic folder that syncs" but has been chasing new features and product lines with little success. Even the enterprise offering was far behind Box.com for years and now has tons of competition. 1. https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/rewriting-the-heart-of-our-sync-engine https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/rewriting-the-heart-of-o... 2. https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure

scns 5y ago
There is a plugin for Thunderbird thats integrates with box.com to upload huge attachments there and paste a generated download link into the mail.
shapefrog 5y ago
> Dropbox still has the best syncing tech Can confirm without any references etc that I have found it to be vastly superior to all other syncs. Top of the pile for me is that it handles small changes in large files without reuploading the entire thing. That said, I havent used it for years.
gajjanag 5y ago
Maybe Dropbox's is the best out of a bunch of mediocre syncing solutions. However, I do wish to add that Dropbox struggles with scale: lots of small files slow down sync to a crawl and spin CPU at 100%. Concretely, I had a certain folder with 100,000+ small files for some research I was doing with a collaborator. It took my laptop 24 hours to sync this folder, and throughout my CPU was at 100% throughout. For comparison, rsync got the same job done in a few minutes. See https://help.dropbox.com/accounts-billing/space-storage/file-storage-limit https://help.dropbox.com/accounts-billing/space-storage/file... , the above terrible experience is in line with this caveat.
- manigandham 5y ago
  Sure, but Rsync and Dropbox are very different. There's really no software option that handles that many small files well with the same features (realtime sync, folder moves, binary diffs, file history, etc). Rsync is great for taking a snapshot and replicating it elsewhere, which is probably a better fit for research projects anyway.

japanuspus 5y ago

Similar experience here: the paid options are way too expensive for private use, when none of the new features has any value to you. Seems to me that the correct strategy for Dropbox would have been to be super focused on the core product and on not hiring in too many people/taking in too much capital. That would of course have introduced a market cap, but if 1% of everyone had ended up on a reasonably priced personal plan it would have been a roomy cap. As it was, Dropbox has grown into yet-another ms-office-in-the-sky and there is no way they will make it against their competitors who can burn the cash, and who are slowly catching up on sync technology. This is really a shame too: Dropbox is just the gold standard for sync. Before Dropbox I was using unison[0] and tried every other sync product, but nothing came close. TBH I am still using Dropbox every day, getting around the device limit by sharing stuff with multiple free accounts... [0]: https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/ https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/

omniscient_oce 5y ago
I'm looking to setup Unison to replace Dropbox because I think their service is a bit overpriced, how did you find it?

tome 5y ago

Does anyone understand how OneDrive and Dropbox can be so cheap compared to S3? - 2 TB on Dropbox is £7.99 / month - 1 TB OneDrive is £59.99 / year - 1 TB on S3 is $23.99 / month How can Dropbox and OneDrive be cheaper than S3 at all, let alone after providing value add on top? Is it something to do with lower reliability and availability guarantees? Is it possible to buy direct access to their underlying storage? https://www.dropbox.com/individual https://www.dropbox.com/individual https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-365/onedrive/compare-onedrive-plans?activetab=tab:primaryr1 https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-365/onedrive/compa... https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/

oefrha 5y ago
Most users aren’t storing anywhere close to 1TB. For every user using 1TB there are probably a hundred using 1GB or less. Case in point: I subscribe to Office 365 reluctantly but don’t use OneDrive.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  yeah the gym model, in other words I have 4 O365 accounts and I have 700GB on it myself but the other 3 accounts have nothing. I doubt the average usage is more than 100GB.
tuananh 5y ago
because most of ppl buy 1tb/2tb plan on Dropbox and OneDrive do not use all the space? whereas s3 is pay as you go model.
Dylan16807 5y ago
For a personal product with so few size options, most of the capacity won't be used. Glacier is worth noting as a comparison point, $4 or $1 per TB per month with more limits. Backblaze said a couple years ago their cost to provide a low-redundancy TB per month was a bit over $3.
tyingq 5y ago
Mostly actual use billing vs potential use billing.

rcarmo 5y ago

I did exactly that. I work at Microsoft now, but two years before I joined I went through the same process but kept Dropbox for many years solely for Linux support. Then they botched that, so I moved my Linux/Mac working trees into SyncThing (since I only need local sync anyway).

gtirloni 5y ago
How have they botched Linux support? It works flawlessly for me and GDrive/OneDrive don't even come close.
- rcarmo 5y ago
  This was back when they removed support for some filesystems. I never went back.

jl6 5y ago

I’m a happy Dropbox customer because I use all of the 2TB space, they have a Linux client, and their syncing works far better than Google Drive and OneDrive. I can do things like modify git repositories, add and delete thousands of files, have files open for editing, rearrange large folders… - all within the Dropbox folder - and Dropbox manages to sync it without any issue, whereas when I tried the other two, there was a low threshold of “file change complexity” above which they choked. I don’t use any of the add-on services like Paper. I used to be disappointed that I couldn’t get an account larger than 2TB at a reasonable price, but then I adapted my workflow to split my data into hot/cold, with hot staying in Dropbox and cold going elsewhere. Because of this I could probably adapt to a smaller Dropbox account now.

gtirloni 5y ago
Dropbox has the best Linux client of all. That's the only reason I keep paying.

leokennis 5y ago

My strategy: - Stuff I am working on, documents, small stuff: iCloud Drive - Stuff I want to consume (lossless music, movies) and larger files I occasionally need but that I don't need to update: https://www.transip.nl/stack/ https://www.transip.nl/stack/ - Stuff I want to archive and maybe need to retrieve at some point in the future: B2

secondaryacct 5y ago

Yeah I found it genius to have so much space anywhere I was for basically free when I was a poor student. But then I got richer and with a 40TB NAS, a few $ per year hostname, an ip refresh script for the registrar and a vpn server included in the nas, well I have a monster dropbox equivalent and now that I have 5G, I dont even understand anymore why people dont just do that. You lose the ability to access docs offline but then you have massive space online without having to share it with american people (Im in China). In terms of reliability, modern NASes are really good and I only ever lost stuff when I got caught in trying btrfs lol And with the recent temptation to scan cloud stuff for dangerous data, I feel more at ease with the NAS solution.

bsharitt 5y ago

I used to be a big fan of Dropbox, but my problem is that they don't have a lower paid tier like Google, Microsoft and Apple have for $2-$3. I need a little more than the free plan offers, but I don't need terabytes of space.

wiether 5y ago

Dropbox user for personal stuff for many years, I'm definitely not happy about them adding weird add-ons like Paper or even worse, Passwords. Just focus on file sync/storage/sharing. And I absolutely don't understand the family plan, like you have the same storage (2TB) than a Premium account, but you have to share it between multiple people AND pay more. What ? Also, I use OneDrive at work and even if I like its integration directly within Office (especially Excel), I have issues daily with the sync. Lots of conflicts, lots of "can't sync"... And even if I keep removing it, I keep getting two or three shortcuts on the left sidebar in Explorer and it annoys me quite a lot. So for now I'm staying with Dropbox but I will have no issue switching ship if I see something better elsewhere or, worse, if they make bad choices.

caymanjim 5y ago

I don't see Dropbox surviving. They're supposedly breaking even for the first time this month, after ten years, but growth is slowing dramatically. They have over 700 million users, but only 15 million paying users. Growth in paying users from 2019-2020 was only 8%, down from 12% the year before, and the numbers are more dramatic the farther back you go. They're at cost parity with their primary competitors for the most basic plan ($9.99 for 1TB), but there are cheaper alternatives, especially for family plans. Dropbox doesn't have the economies of scale that Microsoft, Google, et. al. have, so storage remains a loss-leader for them. The only way they can make money is trying to upsell addons that most people don't want. If not for the inertia of being first to market, they wouldn't have many paying users. The year-over-year growth in paying customers says it all.

rootsudo 5y ago

For most users, the 1TB limit is gone and it's almost unlimited now.

michaelcampbell 5y ago

Yeah, me too (early adopter, paid version). My breaking point was the Windows client kept dying, SILENTLY. When I used it for keeping data in sync with my wife on her Windows machine, this was a total deal breaker. Using Syncthing now, and it's been solid.