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I was an early adopter at dropbox, got all my friends/family/etc on it. Maxed out the free affiliate space when I added my .edu email to it for a grand total of

I was an early adopter at dropbox, got all my friends/family/etc on it. Maxed out the free affiliate space when I added my .edu email to it for a grand total of 16.125GB, technically over the max, but, whatever I guess. I eventually got into a 'make decisions' IT roll, and, Dropbox was an easy choice, did everything we needed it to, price was fair, and we used it for years. Everyone had access to the webUI that needed it, and, everyone else had access to an SMB share where dropbox actually ran. All was good until suddenly nothing would sync. Tech support was useless for about a month until I finally got a call with some kind of higher level tech, who told me that what we were doing wouldn't work, and never should have worked. Mind you, we'd been doing this for years, and stuck with dropbox because of it. So I dropped them like a bad habit and never looked back. Our portal system had half-ass but usable remote file sharing, so, we used that while we rolled our own system. Was a rocky 6 months, but, now, we have extremely tight, easy, automated, simple to manage file sharing. So really I should thank them for the impetus, and I would if they weren't so abundantly unhelpful. Personally, well, my personal account continued to slowly lose features over time, and it finally got to the point where the messaging from them was "Pay or Leave", so, I left and did my own thing, which is a combo of Syncthing and Nextcloud that works extremely well, and I own 100% of my data. So dropbox might have some glitz, but I wouldn't touch it with a 10ft poll, they're too big for their britches, and have been for awhile, and worse, they seem to want you to believe that file synchronization is hard, cloud storage is hard, and file sharing is hard. None of that is true anymore, so what you're buying is a name and a logo with them with a free side of smoke blown up your ass. No thanks, I'm allergic.

sureIy 2y ago
Could you explain the setup? Who would access the SMB and who’d access Dropbox’ web interface? If it’s running on a server with a network-shared folder, I don’t see how that’s an issue for Dropbox. If you were passing around Dropbox credentials for a single user, that’s definitely a breach of ToS.
- jtriangle 2y ago
  Had a business account, multiple users in charge of their little zones. Worker bees do work, drop it in a dropbox folder as they go. When they're finished, they tell the person in charge of their zone it's ready, and that person ships it off to the client. Nothing was TOS breaking there, just that it couldn't detect changes to the folders, so, it would never sync. Triggering a manual re-sync would just hang indefinitely and never finish.
  - sureIy 2y ago
    > Had a business account, multiple users It’s right there in the ToS: “Don’t share your account credentials or give others access to your account.” You might consider “one company” as a single entity, but it’s extremely clear from the nature of the product that Dropbox is meant to share files between accounts, not “one account for all” If you had multiple accounts as designed, you wouldn’t need SMB. I’m only saying this because it sounds like you’re blaming a company for not bending their ToS to your liking. I stopped using Dropbox myself a long time ago as well.
cynicalsecurity 2y ago
The ownership of data is super important. Dropbox' vague EULA allows them to ban you for whatever reasons they want while keeping your data hostage. Good luck taking it back. Switched to Nextcloud and never look back. Dropbox memory consumption on PC a few years ago was a nightmare, taking roughly 50-70% of RAM. Dropbox mobile apps were slow and clunky while having if not the worst UI for such a simple functionality.
berdon 2y ago
Yep, dropbox was a great company until it wasn't. I made their first "unofficial" android client and they "allowed" it for a year or so up until they wanted to sue the pants off me. (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27036593 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27036593)
- jakjak123 2y ago
  suing sounds very extreme, but as someone who has worked on a similar service, unofficial clients are actually pretty annoying to deal with. They often end up using ancient APIs, dodgy secrets handling, we don't know what trackers they use, they do not follow our policies for usage that our official clients do. But they create a secondary community and some actually work surprisingly well for what they try to do.
causality0 2y ago
Similar here. I was a huge Dropbox evangelist to almost everyone I knew. Then Dropbox limited free accounts to three devices. Then I started getting the emails, texts, and phone calls asking me why the thing I made them sign up wasn't working the way it always had from people who have no experience in the software industry and couldn't understand a company just taking features away from them.
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  >and couldn't understand a company just taking features away from them Every tech company who offers incredibly generous free stuff eventually does this, even Google. There's no free lunch. All the cloud storage, the dev salaries, the bandwidth needs to be paid somehow. I remember when Google was offering unlimited photo storage in their Google Photos cloud. Well that's been gone for a while now, even for the Pixel users who were supposed to get this indefinitely. Remember Cerberus for Android? They had a "lifetime license" you could buy at one point and after a while they revoked that with a sobbing email saying their business doesn't work without users paying a subscription and they'll have to move everyone, including those who paid the lifetime license to the subscription model, to not go bust. Fuck them. I think enough users have been burned so far by this model: Step 1: Start-up launches cool new app with amazing free feature to gain market share, even though it makes no sense how they're funding it all with nobody paying for it. Step 2: VCs see the amazing user growth and invest. Step 3: Business or lack thereof was unsustainable from the start so VCs start clamping down, shutting down free accounts and squeezing paying users. Step 4: Business slowly dies out since it was never sustainable, and users leave to greener pastures as they see the freebies being taken away from them. Sound familiar? I wish tech companies would be sued for backtracking on their promises they made just to lure users in to fake growth.
  - jtriangle 2y ago
    I wouldn't really call 16.125GB "incredibly generous" to be honest.
    - rakoo 2y ago
ianlevesque 2y ago
> everyone else had access to an SMB share where dropbox actually ran What the...? It honestly does sound like you were holding it wrong.
- fallingsquirrel 2y ago
  Why shouldn't that work? Dropbox and SMB both just need to read/write/watch files like any normal process. I do the same thing at home with Syncthing/SMB and it works fine.
  - ianlevesque 2y ago
    From a theoretical perspective, sure, but the product Dropbox sells is either a website or an app each end user gets that adds local sync and some other useful sharing features. They certainly don’t intend it as a centralized system that people expose over the network in a bespoke way, and I can fully sympathize with why they’d tell this user that’s not something they want to support.

sureIy 2y ago

Could you explain the setup? Who would access the SMB and who’d access Dropbox’ web interface? If it’s running on a server with a network-shared folder, I don’t see how that’s an issue for Dropbox. If you were passing around Dropbox credentials for a single user, that’s definitely a breach of ToS.

jtriangle 2y ago
Had a business account, multiple users in charge of their little zones. Worker bees do work, drop it in a dropbox folder as they go. When they're finished, they tell the person in charge of their zone it's ready, and that person ships it off to the client. Nothing was TOS breaking there, just that it couldn't detect changes to the folders, so, it would never sync. Triggering a manual re-sync would just hang indefinitely and never finish.
- sureIy 2y ago
  > Had a business account, multiple users It’s right there in the ToS: “Don’t share your account credentials or give others access to your account.” You might consider “one company” as a single entity, but it’s extremely clear from the nature of the product that Dropbox is meant to share files between accounts, not “one account for all” If you had multiple accounts as designed, you wouldn’t need SMB. I’m only saying this because it sounds like you’re blaming a company for not bending their ToS to your liking. I stopped using Dropbox myself a long time ago as well.

cynicalsecurity 2y ago

The ownership of data is super important. Dropbox' vague EULA allows them to ban you for whatever reasons they want while keeping your data hostage. Good luck taking it back. Switched to Nextcloud and never look back. Dropbox memory consumption on PC a few years ago was a nightmare, taking roughly 50-70% of RAM. Dropbox mobile apps were slow and clunky while having if not the worst UI for such a simple functionality.

berdon 2y ago

Yep, dropbox was a great company until it wasn't. I made their first "unofficial" android client and they "allowed" it for a year or so up until they wanted to sue the pants off me. (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27036593 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27036593)

jakjak123 2y ago
suing sounds very extreme, but as someone who has worked on a similar service, unofficial clients are actually pretty annoying to deal with. They often end up using ancient APIs, dodgy secrets handling, we don't know what trackers they use, they do not follow our policies for usage that our official clients do. But they create a secondary community and some actually work surprisingly well for what they try to do.

causality0 2y ago

Similar here. I was a huge Dropbox evangelist to almost everyone I knew. Then Dropbox limited free accounts to three devices. Then I started getting the emails, texts, and phone calls asking me why the thing I made them sign up wasn't working the way it always had from people who have no experience in the software industry and couldn't understand a company just taking features away from them.

Rinzler89 2y ago
>and couldn't understand a company just taking features away from them Every tech company who offers incredibly generous free stuff eventually does this, even Google. There's no free lunch. All the cloud storage, the dev salaries, the bandwidth needs to be paid somehow. I remember when Google was offering unlimited photo storage in their Google Photos cloud. Well that's been gone for a while now, even for the Pixel users who were supposed to get this indefinitely. Remember Cerberus for Android? They had a "lifetime license" you could buy at one point and after a while they revoked that with a sobbing email saying their business doesn't work without users paying a subscription and they'll have to move everyone, including those who paid the lifetime license to the subscription model, to not go bust. Fuck them. I think enough users have been burned so far by this model: Step 1: Start-up launches cool new app with amazing free feature to gain market share, even though it makes no sense how they're funding it all with nobody paying for it. Step 2: VCs see the amazing user growth and invest. Step 3: Business or lack thereof was unsustainable from the start so VCs start clamping down, shutting down free accounts and squeezing paying users. Step 4: Business slowly dies out since it was never sustainable, and users leave to greener pastures as they see the freebies being taken away from them. Sound familiar? I wish tech companies would be sued for backtracking on their promises they made just to lure users in to fake growth.
- jtriangle 2y ago
  I wouldn't really call 16.125GB "incredibly generous" to be honest.
  - rakoo 2y ago

ianlevesque 2y ago

> everyone else had access to an SMB share where dropbox actually ran What the...? It honestly does sound like you were holding it wrong.

fallingsquirrel 2y ago
Why shouldn't that work? Dropbox and SMB both just need to read/write/watch files like any normal process. I do the same thing at home with Syncthing/SMB and it works fine.
- ianlevesque 2y ago
  From a theoretical perspective, sure, but the product Dropbox sells is either a website or an app each end user gets that adds local sync and some other useful sharing features. They certainly don’t intend it as a centralized system that people expose over the network in a bespoke way, and I can fully sympathize with why they’d tell this user that’s not something they want to support.