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I had really hoped this would happen in response to competitors like Google Drive. Now it's hear and I can only say: YAAAY!! I'll repeat it, for the billionth

by edanm 14y ago

I had really hoped this would happen in response to competitors like Google Drive. Now it's hear and I can only say: YAAAY!! I'll repeat it, for the billionth time: Dropbox is one of the companies that has drastically changed computing for me over the last few years. I absolutely adore it, and I simply cannot understand the many people who do not use Dropbox to host everything. All of my important, non-computer-specific files are in Dropbox, all of my projects are in Dropbox, all of my photos, all of my documents - in short, everything I care about is in Dropbox.

luser001 14y ago
Serious question: why not use Backblaze to backup your important things? Dropbox is primarily a sharing and synchronization tool: using it for backup is very expensive. IMHO. YMMV. Edit: They now match Spideroak's pricing. If anybody from Spideroak is reading this: you have an awesome service, but here are a couple of things you might want to do. I like your commitment to privacy and hence use it, but sadly, IMHO it's not easy enough for my spouse to use, and I wouldn't recommend it to them. 1. simplify the client. 2. sharing is not intuitive 3. default setting should be that all folders are synchronized: the opposite of the current one.
- mootothemax 14y ago
  Serious question: why not use Backblaze to backup your important things? Because their homepage says: As low as $3.96/month per computer for unlimited data. I consider that to be an unmaintainable low price, and their "unlimited data" claim really puts me off. My files are too important to me; I couldn't even consider going with them. DropBox certainly costs more but: 1) I trust them (knowing that they use Amazon S3 is a BIG bonus) 2) $20/month is an incredibly low price for peace of mind. Note: I'm not the same author as the grandparent comment.
  - hcurtiss 14y ago
    What makes you think that, if their pricing proves low, they won't simply increase prices? And marginally so? They'd have to more than quadruple prices before DropBox is the better backup solution.
  - luser001 14y ago
    In case you didn't know they invented the "Backblaze Pod" to reduce storage costs. I don't think their costs are unreasonably low. 1 TB of double-redundant bare HDD space costs about $250 for five years (they have an interesting blog post where they candidly admit that they buy high-warranty drives and the manuf's eat the loss of drives). Even if you manage to upload 1 TB to their servers, they still don't lose money. Just to be clear, imho 1 TB is an insane amount of data. My pictures and videos from about 3 years still total only about 100 GB. Given the slow upstream bandwidth of most users, most people are unlikely to upload anywhere close to 1 TB.
    - mootothemax 14y ago
      I don't think their costs are unreasonably low. Fair enough. For me, though, there are so many possibilities for things going wrong when it comes to storage, I'd rather not trust it to a company trying to squeeze a profit from taking in a few dollars a month - and that's before processing costs. Also, why would I go for the cheapest option when I get so much greatness for the equivalent of buying a few coffees/beers? It's not mega money by the majority of people's standards.
      - georgemcbay 14y ago
        I used to use Mozy and then switched to Backblaze when Mozy upped the prices. I see your point about pricing and data security, but for me I'm willing to risk it to save some money because it isn't like Backblaze is the only source of my data. I've got the local active copy, a local backup to a home server and then Backblaze for off-site. While Backblaze could theoretically disappear any day as far as I know, the chance of all three of my data sources being lost simultaneously is very small. Small enough that if it ever happened I suspect I'd have bigger problems to worry about than my data backups.
  - Timothee 14y ago
    You can then add suspenders to your belt: sign up for multiple backup services. E.g. I have Backblaze and Crashplan. $3/mo for Crashplan and $5/mo for Backblaze give me two unlimited backups.
    - SquareWheel 14y ago
      If you were to choose one, which would it be? I'm with CrashPlan now, but their upload speed is so impossibly slow that I'll never upload all my data. Uploading only 250GB has taken me 4 months. And the software is not so great. I wouldn't mind paying a little bit more if those problems were fixed.
      - Timothee 14y ago
        Not sure… I had tried Backblaze last year and had the same problem as yours: after a few months I was still not done with the initial backup, so I cancelled. A few months ago I figured I should give online back-ups another try and I signed up for both at the same time. Both took less time the second time around somehow… I was planning on keeping only one but in the end, at that price, it's worth it to keep both. Overall I don't care too much about the software (I agree Crashplan's is pretty bad) since it would be needed only in case of crash. But I like Crashplan a bit better because it can back-up your whole drive and they're cheaper. Their family plan is very cheap too.
        SquareWheel 14y ago
        I agree Crashplan's is pretty bad I'd say so... They just reset my backup for no discernible reason.
      - tallanvor 14y ago
        Backblaze doesn't limit your upload speeds if you have a lot of stuff to backup which is why I stuck with them instead of switching to another provider. That said, backing up from Norway still isn't fast - I only get about 13GB/day, so it's still taking forever to get everything backed up, but I just made sure to exclude the lower priority stuff at first and add another folder or drive at a time in order what is most important to me. So far I have about 2.5TB backed up across 2 computers.
- andreyvit 14y ago
  Because it's convenient and reassuring to be able to access everything from everywhere, including from iOS devices. Also: instantly share any file or folder with a link; zero upload time for content that already exists. (I did give up Dropbox a while ago because keeping projects on it was killing my MacBook's battery life. I'm planning to come back, though.)
- edanm 14y ago
  (Op here) Basically what others have said - I want things Synced, not just backed up. I like being able to access all my things on iPhone, on other computers, etc, and with it always working. Also, I used Dropbox first, Dropbox "opened this market" for me, so to speak, which means I wasn't even thinking that this kind of thing would be convenient before I installed Dropbox and started using it. It's very possible that there are better services which I don't bother looking at because I'm with Dropbox.
  - StacyC 14y ago
    My experience exactly. I started with Dropbox’s free 2 GB account for a short while, and once I saw the benefits of it I went with the 100 GB plan. I pay $20/month and now will get 200 GB for that. I also have two local clones of my MacBook Pro on my desk so I have a fully bootable option if I need it. Dropbox has worked well for me and I am very happy with this setup.
- glesica 14y ago
  Lack of reasonable Linux support made it surprisingly difficult to find a backup provider. I ended up going with CrashPlan. I tried SpiderOak but their client software was terrible and the headless install basically didn't work.
  - msh 14y ago
    Jungledisk is good and got clients for Linux Mac and windows
timofei7 14y ago
My sentiments exactly! A few weeks ago I spilled an iced latte on my air's keyboard and had to let it dry for a week. Shit. But Apple has a 14 day no questions asked return policy. Excellent! I bought a new air -- installed dropbox, app store xcode, homebrew, ran a script to symlink my dot files / documents etc to dropbox, and done. 30 minutes later I'm back up and running as if nothing had happened. A week later I powered on my caffeinated laptop (works fine after its delicious iced latte bath - not a single sticky key even) and returned my free apple rental. Thank you dropbox, and apple.
- patrickg 14y ago
  That would have been much quicker with Time Machine (been there, done that).
wkdown 14y ago
It gets better. Install some PortableApps.com programs like Firefox, Chrome, GIMP, Skype, PuTTY, uTorrent, ClamWin, etc etc
- edanm 14y ago
  Great point. I don't use PortableApps itself, but I hacked together my own portable collection of stuff. Together with a portable Launchy, a portable Total Commander, and a few batch files which automatically set environment variables to point to the current location of my Dropbox folder, meaning Launchy knows how to launch all of my software automatically, and in Total Commander, all my directory favorites (ctrl+d) work automagically.
- keithpeter 14y ago
  I wish someone would do compiles of these programs with static libraries as binary blobs for Linux...
mirkules 14y ago
There are many reasons not to use Dropbox: 1. Sensitive/Confidential info - I would never feel comfortable storing any kind of documentation on a 3rd party server that is sensitive to me like mortgage docs, tax docs or receipts. 2. Many companies have a strict policy disallowing use of Dropbox because it would leak information. On a personal level, any kind of work that I don't want to share with others (this includes Dropbox employees) does not go on Dropbox. 3. Slow, limited or capped internet connection. 50GB over the wire in those circumstances will net you a very, very big bill. Just because you can't understand why someone wouldn't use it, doesn't mean there is no use case for it.
- radicalbyte 14y ago
  If you're a Windows user, then I'd recommend using TrueCrypt (http://www.truecrypt.org/ http://www.truecrypt.org/) to encrypt all of your files. Then put the TrueCrypt file in your Dropbox folder.
  - noarchy 14y ago
    I have to throw in that TrueCrypt runs quite well on Linux and Mac OS, too.
  - huhtenberg 14y ago
    Doesn't TC volume need to be unmounted in order for Dropbox to sync it? Or have Dropbox added Volume Shadow Copying support?
  - danieldk 14y ago
    Yes, and then be left with N copies of your Truecrypt image, because it turns out that its was mounted on two machines a couple of times. Been there, done that.
- aresant 14y ago
  Regarding sensitive / confidential info, why not set up a volume with TrueCrypt that you can just mount when needed for sensitive stuff?
brian_cloutier 14y ago
> in short, everything I care about is in Dropbox. That statement should be one of embarrassment, not of triumph. You're only one disaster short of an angry "everything I cared about was in Drop box and now its all gone" blog post. Please, look into backing your data up. The cloud doesn't make the need for backups disappear, it only makes you feel better about not having any.
- edanm 14y ago
  Well, technically, everything is auto-synced using Dropbox to 2 computers at all times, so I do have a backup. Unfortunately for my peace-of-mind, if Dropbox ever decided to go wonky and delete all my files, it could do so from both my computers at the same time without me being able to stop it in time. Not too worried about this, but it is something I think about once in a while. I do occasionally do a complete backup to a hard-disk, but only very occasionally.
  - alexqgb 14y ago
    3-2-1: Three copies, two local, one remote. That's backup. Anything less is "backup". I use Time Machine for local and Backblaze for remote. Very happy with both. Dropbox is great for stuff I want to sync across machines or share with others. And my local Dropbox is watched by TM and BB, so even if DB implodes, locks me out, and wipes everything from my local drive, I maintain local and remote copies that its system can't reach. The best part is that I never think about any of it. All this just runs in the background, keeping (virtually) up to the minute copies of whatever I'm working on. And I've tested the recovery features well enough to be confident that I can fully restore where ever and when ever needed. I consider backup a solved problem.
euroclydon 14y ago
Please don't trust Dropbox as a journaled backup solution. I powered up a virtual machine that had been down for a while and had dropbox installed. I tried to SSH in. My password kept being rejected. I verified my key through the console, and then it dawned on me that the VM's clock was off, and that's why SSL didn't work. So I set the clock. I think I set it a couple seconds into the future. Fast forward a couple of days and I tried to open a project on another computer, but half the files were missing. What gives? I logged into the Dropbox web interface and saw that three days ago, "2311 files were deleted"!!! That's individual files from all over dropbox. How do I restore them??? Luckily I had a local hard drive backup and got most of my stuff, but it was hell to merge. Did I screw up? Maybe, but I came to realize that that little blue box running in my task bar which has permission to delete my important files whenever it's algorithm thinks it needs to scares the hell out of me.
- brlewis 14y ago
  IIRC you can get deleted files from dropbox.com for 30 days for free accounts. With a paid account you can go back in history indefinitely.
  - bschlinker 14y ago
    Not true -- you must purchase pack-rat unlimited history ($39) to be able to go back beyond 30 days. This is not included in the paid accounts. Both paid and free accounts have 30 days of deleted file history by default.
  - euroclydon 14y ago
    Right, but in my case, it would have been one file at a time.
    - brlewis 14y ago
      OK, I see now that free accounts require a support ticket to revert everything to a specific point in time. One of my users a year or two ago was able to restore a very big folder herself; she must have had a paid Dropbox account with the Pack Rat feature.
nodata 14y ago
> I simply cannot understand the many people who do not use Dropbox to host everything. Easy: Privacy.

by edanm 14y ago

luser001 14y ago

Serious question: why not use Backblaze to backup your important things? Dropbox is primarily a sharing and synchronization tool: using it for backup is very expensive. IMHO. YMMV. Edit: They now match Spideroak's pricing. If anybody from Spideroak is reading this: you have an awesome service, but here are a couple of things you might want to do. I like your commitment to privacy and hence use it, but sadly, IMHO it's not easy enough for my spouse to use, and I wouldn't recommend it to them. 1. simplify the client. 2. sharing is not intuitive 3. default setting should be that all folders are synchronized: the opposite of the current one.

mootothemax 14y ago
Serious question: why not use Backblaze to backup your important things? Because their homepage says: As low as $3.96/month per computer for unlimited data. I consider that to be an unmaintainable low price, and their "unlimited data" claim really puts me off. My files are too important to me; I couldn't even consider going with them. DropBox certainly costs more but: 1) I trust them (knowing that they use Amazon S3 is a BIG bonus) 2) $20/month is an incredibly low price for peace of mind. Note: I'm not the same author as the grandparent comment.
- hcurtiss 14y ago
  What makes you think that, if their pricing proves low, they won't simply increase prices? And marginally so? They'd have to more than quadruple prices before DropBox is the better backup solution.
- luser001 14y ago
  In case you didn't know they invented the "Backblaze Pod" to reduce storage costs. I don't think their costs are unreasonably low. 1 TB of double-redundant bare HDD space costs about $250 for five years (they have an interesting blog post where they candidly admit that they buy high-warranty drives and the manuf's eat the loss of drives). Even if you manage to upload 1 TB to their servers, they still don't lose money. Just to be clear, imho 1 TB is an insane amount of data. My pictures and videos from about 3 years still total only about 100 GB. Given the slow upstream bandwidth of most users, most people are unlikely to upload anywhere close to 1 TB.
  - mootothemax 14y ago
    I don't think their costs are unreasonably low. Fair enough. For me, though, there are so many possibilities for things going wrong when it comes to storage, I'd rather not trust it to a company trying to squeeze a profit from taking in a few dollars a month - and that's before processing costs. Also, why would I go for the cheapest option when I get so much greatness for the equivalent of buying a few coffees/beers? It's not mega money by the majority of people's standards.
    - georgemcbay 14y ago
      I used to use Mozy and then switched to Backblaze when Mozy upped the prices. I see your point about pricing and data security, but for me I'm willing to risk it to save some money because it isn't like Backblaze is the only source of my data. I've got the local active copy, a local backup to a home server and then Backblaze for off-site. While Backblaze could theoretically disappear any day as far as I know, the chance of all three of my data sources being lost simultaneously is very small. Small enough that if it ever happened I suspect I'd have bigger problems to worry about than my data backups.
- Timothee 14y ago
  You can then add suspenders to your belt: sign up for multiple backup services. E.g. I have Backblaze and Crashplan. $3/mo for Crashplan and $5/mo for Backblaze give me two unlimited backups.
  - SquareWheel 14y ago
    If you were to choose one, which would it be? I'm with CrashPlan now, but their upload speed is so impossibly slow that I'll never upload all my data. Uploading only 250GB has taken me 4 months. And the software is not so great. I wouldn't mind paying a little bit more if those problems were fixed.
    - Timothee 14y ago
      Not sure… I had tried Backblaze last year and had the same problem as yours: after a few months I was still not done with the initial backup, so I cancelled. A few months ago I figured I should give online back-ups another try and I signed up for both at the same time. Both took less time the second time around somehow… I was planning on keeping only one but in the end, at that price, it's worth it to keep both. Overall I don't care too much about the software (I agree Crashplan's is pretty bad) since it would be needed only in case of crash. But I like Crashplan a bit better because it can back-up your whole drive and they're cheaper. Their family plan is very cheap too.
      - SquareWheel 14y ago
        I agree Crashplan's is pretty bad I'd say so... They just reset my backup for no discernible reason.
    - tallanvor 14y ago
      Backblaze doesn't limit your upload speeds if you have a lot of stuff to backup which is why I stuck with them instead of switching to another provider. That said, backing up from Norway still isn't fast - I only get about 13GB/day, so it's still taking forever to get everything backed up, but I just made sure to exclude the lower priority stuff at first and add another folder or drive at a time in order what is most important to me. So far I have about 2.5TB backed up across 2 computers.
andreyvit 14y ago
Because it's convenient and reassuring to be able to access everything from everywhere, including from iOS devices. Also: instantly share any file or folder with a link; zero upload time for content that already exists. (I did give up Dropbox a while ago because keeping projects on it was killing my MacBook's battery life. I'm planning to come back, though.)
edanm 14y ago
(Op here) Basically what others have said - I want things Synced, not just backed up. I like being able to access all my things on iPhone, on other computers, etc, and with it always working. Also, I used Dropbox first, Dropbox "opened this market" for me, so to speak, which means I wasn't even thinking that this kind of thing would be convenient before I installed Dropbox and started using it. It's very possible that there are better services which I don't bother looking at because I'm with Dropbox.
- StacyC 14y ago
  My experience exactly. I started with Dropbox’s free 2 GB account for a short while, and once I saw the benefits of it I went with the 100 GB plan. I pay $20/month and now will get 200 GB for that. I also have two local clones of my MacBook Pro on my desk so I have a fully bootable option if I need it. Dropbox has worked well for me and I am very happy with this setup.
glesica 14y ago
Lack of reasonable Linux support made it surprisingly difficult to find a backup provider. I ended up going with CrashPlan. I tried SpiderOak but their client software was terrible and the headless install basically didn't work.
- msh 14y ago
  Jungledisk is good and got clients for Linux Mac and windows

timofei7 14y ago

My sentiments exactly! A few weeks ago I spilled an iced latte on my air's keyboard and had to let it dry for a week. Shit. But Apple has a 14 day no questions asked return policy. Excellent! I bought a new air -- installed dropbox, app store xcode, homebrew, ran a script to symlink my dot files / documents etc to dropbox, and done. 30 minutes later I'm back up and running as if nothing had happened. A week later I powered on my caffeinated laptop (works fine after its delicious iced latte bath - not a single sticky key even) and returned my free apple rental. Thank you dropbox, and apple.

patrickg 14y ago
That would have been much quicker with Time Machine (been there, done that).

wkdown 14y ago

It gets better. Install some PortableApps.com programs like Firefox, Chrome, GIMP, Skype, PuTTY, uTorrent, ClamWin, etc etc

edanm 14y ago
Great point. I don't use PortableApps itself, but I hacked together my own portable collection of stuff. Together with a portable Launchy, a portable Total Commander, and a few batch files which automatically set environment variables to point to the current location of my Dropbox folder, meaning Launchy knows how to launch all of my software automatically, and in Total Commander, all my directory favorites (ctrl+d) work automagically.
keithpeter 14y ago
I wish someone would do compiles of these programs with static libraries as binary blobs for Linux...

mirkules 14y ago

There are many reasons not to use Dropbox: 1. Sensitive/Confidential info - I would never feel comfortable storing any kind of documentation on a 3rd party server that is sensitive to me like mortgage docs, tax docs or receipts. 2. Many companies have a strict policy disallowing use of Dropbox because it would leak information. On a personal level, any kind of work that I don't want to share with others (this includes Dropbox employees) does not go on Dropbox. 3. Slow, limited or capped internet connection. 50GB over the wire in those circumstances will net you a very, very big bill. Just because you can't understand why someone wouldn't use it, doesn't mean there is no use case for it.

radicalbyte 14y ago
If you're a Windows user, then I'd recommend using TrueCrypt (http://www.truecrypt.org/ http://www.truecrypt.org/) to encrypt all of your files. Then put the TrueCrypt file in your Dropbox folder.
- noarchy 14y ago
  I have to throw in that TrueCrypt runs quite well on Linux and Mac OS, too.
- huhtenberg 14y ago
  Doesn't TC volume need to be unmounted in order for Dropbox to sync it? Or have Dropbox added Volume Shadow Copying support?
- danieldk 14y ago
  Yes, and then be left with N copies of your Truecrypt image, because it turns out that its was mounted on two machines a couple of times. Been there, done that.
aresant 14y ago
Regarding sensitive / confidential info, why not set up a volume with TrueCrypt that you can just mount when needed for sensitive stuff?

brian_cloutier 14y ago

> in short, everything I care about is in Dropbox. That statement should be one of embarrassment, not of triumph. You're only one disaster short of an angry "everything I cared about was in Drop box and now its all gone" blog post. Please, look into backing your data up. The cloud doesn't make the need for backups disappear, it only makes you feel better about not having any.

edanm 14y ago
Well, technically, everything is auto-synced using Dropbox to 2 computers at all times, so I do have a backup. Unfortunately for my peace-of-mind, if Dropbox ever decided to go wonky and delete all my files, it could do so from both my computers at the same time without me being able to stop it in time. Not too worried about this, but it is something I think about once in a while. I do occasionally do a complete backup to a hard-disk, but only very occasionally.
- alexqgb 14y ago
  3-2-1: Three copies, two local, one remote. That's backup. Anything less is "backup". I use Time Machine for local and Backblaze for remote. Very happy with both. Dropbox is great for stuff I want to sync across machines or share with others. And my local Dropbox is watched by TM and BB, so even if DB implodes, locks me out, and wipes everything from my local drive, I maintain local and remote copies that its system can't reach. The best part is that I never think about any of it. All this just runs in the background, keeping (virtually) up to the minute copies of whatever I'm working on. And I've tested the recovery features well enough to be confident that I can fully restore where ever and when ever needed. I consider backup a solved problem.

euroclydon 14y ago

Please don't trust Dropbox as a journaled backup solution. I powered up a virtual machine that had been down for a while and had dropbox installed. I tried to SSH in. My password kept being rejected. I verified my key through the console, and then it dawned on me that the VM's clock was off, and that's why SSL didn't work. So I set the clock. I think I set it a couple seconds into the future. Fast forward a couple of days and I tried to open a project on another computer, but half the files were missing. What gives? I logged into the Dropbox web interface and saw that three days ago, "2311 files were deleted"!!! That's individual files from all over dropbox. How do I restore them??? Luckily I had a local hard drive backup and got most of my stuff, but it was hell to merge. Did I screw up? Maybe, but I came to realize that that little blue box running in my task bar which has permission to delete my important files whenever it's algorithm thinks it needs to scares the hell out of me.

brlewis 14y ago
IIRC you can get deleted files from dropbox.com for 30 days for free accounts. With a paid account you can go back in history indefinitely.
- bschlinker 14y ago
  Not true -- you must purchase pack-rat unlimited history ($39) to be able to go back beyond 30 days. This is not included in the paid accounts. Both paid and free accounts have 30 days of deleted file history by default.
- euroclydon 14y ago
  Right, but in my case, it would have been one file at a time.
  - brlewis 14y ago
    OK, I see now that free accounts require a support ticket to revert everything to a specific point in time. One of my users a year or two ago was able to restore a very big folder herself; she must have had a paid Dropbox account with the Pack Rat feature.

nodata 14y ago

> I simply cannot understand the many people who do not use Dropbox to host everything. Easy: Privacy.