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Just curious - why are there so many Dropbox alternative posting lately? Is re-doing an already elegant solution really a top priority for people? I haven't loo

Just curious - why are there so many Dropbox alternative posting lately? Is re-doing an already elegant solution really a top priority for people? I haven't looked at this post at all (so I'm not trying to make any judgement on it), I'm just curious as to why so many people are interested in making Dropbox alternatives lately.

Karunamon 15y ago
I'd assume the short version is that Dropbox: 1) Isn't free 2) Is accessible to $stateAuthority if they come knocking 3) Makes your data access reliant on a third party who may or may not be up in an emergency or: 4) Could disappear at any time and take your data with them So basically, the same problems that affect every cloud solution provider ever.
- FigBug 15y ago
  I've been looking for an alternative mostly because of #1. It's actually quite expensive for a small team. I have yet to find anything that works as well as DropBox. I don't agree with #4. All your data is stored locally, it DropBox goes away the data just stops syncing. (You would lose version history, but it's only 30 days so not useful)
  - sleet 15y ago
    Unless you have pack-rat, in which case you have unlimited history: http://www.dropbox.com/help/113 http://www.dropbox.com/help/113
- slowpoke 15y ago
  I'd be interested in which `free` you are talking about. Beer or speech (or both)? Because for me, the prime reason I refuse to use Dropbox[1] is that it's unfree software as per the speech definition. I am not running software on my computer that needs internet access and transmits files when I can not verify what this program does, in addition to my personal policy of reducing my usage of unfree software to an absolute, unavoidable minimum. [1] I'm studying CS and it's really annoying how ubiquitous Dropbox has become among the student crowds. I stopped counting after about the first three dozen attempts of people trying to get me to use Dropbox.
  - Karunamon 15y ago
    Mostly as in beer. You have to cough up cash to get a respectable quota. Personally, I think you're being rather paranoid on the whole free software (as in speech) thing, but hey, whatever works for you :)
    - RKearney 15y ago
      18.2GB for free isn't enough? I guess not when companies like box.net are giving out 50GB for free. =/
- RKearney 15y ago
  1) You can get up to 18.2GB of storage for free 2) This is a problem with just about any service unless you use something based in another country, but then you play by that governments rules 3) That third party is Amazon S3/EBS/EC2 which, if used correctly, provides a solution thousands of times better than you can with the same budget (redundant datacenters, high availability, etc) 4) If they do disappear, you still have all your data on your computers with Dropbox installed.
  - darklajid 15y ago
    I'm a dropbox user, although I like the GP's standpoint. For practical reasons I don't refuse to use it like he does. Now, help me understand point 1) please. I assume for now that you're talking about the 'get someone to sign up' bonus? Which would be very shady in my world and is probably part of the reason why the GP gets annoyed by people at his university, trying to sift through the masses and find those that didn't sign up yet and could offer them a slight bonus. It's spamming your own network.
    - RKearney 15y ago
      Or use a $100 AdWords coupon to run a campaign with your affiliate URL to the Dropbox signup page instead of spamming people.
jakubw 15y ago
One reason may be that it actually has interesting engineering aspects. The other one may have to do with some sort of self-validation: "Hey, Dropbox is a massive success, can I build something like this?". It's what usually happens to popular services like Twitter, GitHub - they all have had numerous "me too" attempts.
tommi 15y ago
The alternatives try to address the biggest problem of Dropbox: the Dropbox company knows the content of my files. That in turn means that various US agencies can browse and analyze my files without my knowledge, approval and a warrant.
- hyperbovine 15y ago
  Encryption seems like a much better solution to this problem than reinventing the entire Dropbox wheel.
  - drewcrawford 15y ago
    The problem is to get the simplicity of Dropbox (the filesystem is the UI) into your encryption system. Sure, you can just put a Truecrypt disk image in a Dropbox folder, but you're missing the granularity of Dropbox (e.g. to sync certain files to my SSD) and that granularity also affords you protection against race conditions (if both machines have the encrypted drive mounted and are writing, sounds like trouble). Not an insolvable problem by any means, but not one that has yet been solved either.
    - xlevus 15y ago
      You could use EncFS. But this then this isn't multi-platform friendly.
      - mike-cardwell 15y ago
        Neither is TrueCrypt. I'd love to use it with Dropbox on my Android phone, but that's just not possible. I use EncFS on Dropbox for certain files that I know I will not need to access on my phone. That's an annoying compromise though. I'd much rather encfs the entire thing.
  - darklajid 15y ago
    For example https://spideroak.com/ https://spideroak.com/ (not affiliated, not a user). Unfortunately the one time I installed it the user experience and interface was miserable..
zem 15y ago
I think it's part of a general push by the bleeding edge away from hosted-cloud solutions and towards controlling bits of the stack themselves. dropbox is a good candidate for replacement because storing a few personal documents to sync with your various devices sounds like something you should be doing for yourself, unlike, say, email which is manifestly harder to do right.
- miles_matthias 15y ago
  Good point.

Karunamon 15y ago

I'd assume the short version is that Dropbox: 1) Isn't free 2) Is accessible to $stateAuthority if they come knocking 3) Makes your data access reliant on a third party who may or may not be up in an emergency or: 4) Could disappear at any time and take your data with them So basically, the same problems that affect every cloud solution provider ever.

FigBug 15y ago
I've been looking for an alternative mostly because of #1. It's actually quite expensive for a small team. I have yet to find anything that works as well as DropBox. I don't agree with #4. All your data is stored locally, it DropBox goes away the data just stops syncing. (You would lose version history, but it's only 30 days so not useful)
- sleet 15y ago
  Unless you have pack-rat, in which case you have unlimited history: http://www.dropbox.com/help/113 http://www.dropbox.com/help/113
slowpoke 15y ago
I'd be interested in which `free` you are talking about. Beer or speech (or both)? Because for me, the prime reason I refuse to use Dropbox[1] is that it's unfree software as per the speech definition. I am not running software on my computer that needs internet access and transmits files when I can not verify what this program does, in addition to my personal policy of reducing my usage of unfree software to an absolute, unavoidable minimum. [1] I'm studying CS and it's really annoying how ubiquitous Dropbox has become among the student crowds. I stopped counting after about the first three dozen attempts of people trying to get me to use Dropbox.
- Karunamon 15y ago
  Mostly as in beer. You have to cough up cash to get a respectable quota. Personally, I think you're being rather paranoid on the whole free software (as in speech) thing, but hey, whatever works for you :)
  - RKearney 15y ago
    18.2GB for free isn't enough? I guess not when companies like box.net are giving out 50GB for free. =/
RKearney 15y ago
1) You can get up to 18.2GB of storage for free 2) This is a problem with just about any service unless you use something based in another country, but then you play by that governments rules 3) That third party is Amazon S3/EBS/EC2 which, if used correctly, provides a solution thousands of times better than you can with the same budget (redundant datacenters, high availability, etc) 4) If they do disappear, you still have all your data on your computers with Dropbox installed.
- darklajid 15y ago
  I'm a dropbox user, although I like the GP's standpoint. For practical reasons I don't refuse to use it like he does. Now, help me understand point 1) please. I assume for now that you're talking about the 'get someone to sign up' bonus? Which would be very shady in my world and is probably part of the reason why the GP gets annoyed by people at his university, trying to sift through the masses and find those that didn't sign up yet and could offer them a slight bonus. It's spamming your own network.
  - RKearney 15y ago
    Or use a $100 AdWords coupon to run a campaign with your affiliate URL to the Dropbox signup page instead of spamming people.

jakubw 15y ago

One reason may be that it actually has interesting engineering aspects. The other one may have to do with some sort of self-validation: "Hey, Dropbox is a massive success, can I build something like this?". It's what usually happens to popular services like Twitter, GitHub - they all have had numerous "me too" attempts.

tommi 15y ago

The alternatives try to address the biggest problem of Dropbox: the Dropbox company knows the content of my files. That in turn means that various US agencies can browse and analyze my files without my knowledge, approval and a warrant.

hyperbovine 15y ago
Encryption seems like a much better solution to this problem than reinventing the entire Dropbox wheel.
- drewcrawford 15y ago
  The problem is to get the simplicity of Dropbox (the filesystem is the UI) into your encryption system. Sure, you can just put a Truecrypt disk image in a Dropbox folder, but you're missing the granularity of Dropbox (e.g. to sync certain files to my SSD) and that granularity also affords you protection against race conditions (if both machines have the encrypted drive mounted and are writing, sounds like trouble). Not an insolvable problem by any means, but not one that has yet been solved either.
  - xlevus 15y ago
    You could use EncFS. But this then this isn't multi-platform friendly.
    - mike-cardwell 15y ago
      Neither is TrueCrypt. I'd love to use it with Dropbox on my Android phone, but that's just not possible. I use EncFS on Dropbox for certain files that I know I will not need to access on my phone. That's an annoying compromise though. I'd much rather encfs the entire thing.
- darklajid 15y ago
  For example https://spideroak.com/ https://spideroak.com/ (not affiliated, not a user). Unfortunately the one time I installed it the user experience and interface was miserable..

zem 15y ago

I think it's part of a general push by the bleeding edge away from hosted-cloud solutions and towards controlling bits of the stack themselves. dropbox is a good candidate for replacement because storing a few personal documents to sync with your various devices sounds like something you should be doing for yourself, unlike, say, email which is manifestly harder to do right.

miles_matthias 15y ago
Good point.