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The best thing about this is that it will finally force Dropbox to offer more storage at a cheaper price point. $200 bucks for 100GB of personal storage per yea

The best thing about this is that it will finally force Dropbox to offer more storage at a cheaper price point. $200 bucks for 100GB of personal storage per year? I've long thought it's ridiculously high for mass adoption and so many more would be using it if the price was a bit more reasonable. For me: 1. I need much more space than 100GB - I'd ideally like a TB+ on the cloud. 2. The price has to be more acceptable. Say the cost of a TB hard drive on an annual basis. I'm not even going to talk about the likely $1000+ bill for a TB of space at the current price point. 3. I have to admit that Dropbox is pretty cool when it comes to a smooth, painless experience.

luser001 14y ago
Agreed about high dropbox pricing. But it isn't too bad imho. There are three inter-related concepts: backup (mirror of your hdd), archiving (extension of your hdd), sync (subset of files on multiple devices) and sharing. But if you're ok with using different services for different purposes, you can easily get what you want. To archive non-media files, 5 GB should be sufficient. To archive media files, pay $60/yr to Vimeo for video and $25/yr to Flickr for unlimited storage. For backup, pay $50/yr to Backblaze. If you try to use a service optimized for sharing and sync (Dropbox) for archival and backup, you're going to experience friction. Just my two cents.
- elithrar 14y ago
  > To archive non-media files, 5 GB should be sufficient. To archive media files, pay $60/yr to Vimeo for video and $25/yr to Flickr for unlimited storage. Note that Flickr will only archive certain types of media—you can't store your RAW files or other related stuff (presets, actions) with them. I believe Smugmug and a few of the other services do this, though.
soupboy 14y ago
I get the feeling that this is also going to force Amazon to lower their S3 prices. To store 100GB on S3's standard storage costs around $12/month right now [http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/]. Even if Dropbox were getting the best price on that page, it would still cost them $3.7/month to store 100GB.
- encoderer 14y ago
  AWS prices are negotiable. They're certainly getting a better price than what's on that page.
- samstave 14y ago
  It would be interesting if you could map an S3 drive locally - then do a custom install of dropbox and point it at the S3 mapping on whatever machine you have then you'd be using dropbox to sync to S3

luser001 14y ago

Agreed about high dropbox pricing. But it isn't too bad imho. There are three inter-related concepts: backup (mirror of your hdd), archiving (extension of your hdd), sync (subset of files on multiple devices) and sharing. But if you're ok with using different services for different purposes, you can easily get what you want. To archive non-media files, 5 GB should be sufficient. To archive media files, pay $60/yr to Vimeo for video and $25/yr to Flickr for unlimited storage. For backup, pay $50/yr to Backblaze. If you try to use a service optimized for sharing and sync (Dropbox) for archival and backup, you're going to experience friction. Just my two cents.

elithrar 14y ago
> To archive non-media files, 5 GB should be sufficient. To archive media files, pay $60/yr to Vimeo for video and $25/yr to Flickr for unlimited storage. Note that Flickr will only archive certain types of media—you can't store your RAW files or other related stuff (presets, actions) with them. I believe Smugmug and a few of the other services do this, though.

soupboy 14y ago

I get the feeling that this is also going to force Amazon to lower their S3 prices. To store 100GB on S3's standard storage costs around $12/month right now [http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/]. Even if Dropbox were getting the best price on that page, it would still cost them $3.7/month to store 100GB.

encoderer 14y ago
AWS prices are negotiable. They're certainly getting a better price than what's on that page.
samstave 14y ago
It would be interesting if you could map an S3 drive locally - then do a custom install of dropbox and point it at the S3 mapping on whatever machine you have then you'd be using dropbox to sync to S3