14 ms·

Massive increase to Onedrive storage plans

115 points by ghshephard 12y ago

ghshephard 12y ago
The new monthly prices will be $1.99 for 100 GB (previously $7.49) and $3.99 for 200 GB (previously $11.49). You've got to love competition, but I wonder at what point Onedrive's race to the bottom in terms of pricing starts to impact Dropbox's valuation? Other interesting pricing tidbits: OneDrive will come with 15 GB for free (up from 7 GB). Office 365 Personal ($7/month) will come with 1 TB of OneDrive storage. For the first time I'm rethinking my $8.25/month subscription to Dropbox for 100 GB, particularly as I only have about 10 GB of data...
- mchusma 12y ago
  Agreed. My wife had to upgrade her dropbox plan recently to the $41.60/mo 500GB plan. I had to really weigh the pros and cons of switching. In the end, I decided the costs of me having to provide "technical support" to my wife was worth the roughly $30/mo in the short term over Google Drive (and now OneDrive), but figured we would start trying to convert her over the next year or so. Dropbox is in a really tough spot, because if they even cut their prices in half (which would still be significantly more expensive than OneDrive), their revenue would drop tremendously right before an IPO. My guess is that the primary options are to stay the course, go public ASAP, hope you don't get bled too much from Google/Microsoft and try to find more reasons for people to pay a premium for Dropbox, or to sell to Apple, which is the only big player without a meaningful competitor.
  - clarky07 12y ago
    >or to sell to Apple, which is the only big player without a meaningful competitor. iCloud Drive?[1]. The Apple buying Dropbox ship has sailed. Steve Jobs tried to buy them and Dropbox said no. Turns out it was a good choice on their part, but there is pretty much no chance of it happening now. [1]- http://www.apple.com/ios/ios8/icloud-drive/?cid=wwa-us-kwg-features-com http://www.apple.com/ios/ios8/icloud-drive/?cid=wwa-us-kwg-f...
  - ghshephard 12y ago
    Apple is launching iCloud Drive with iOS 8. Pricing is pretty reasonable - $1/Month for 20GB, $4/Month for 200 GB.
- rogerdpack 12y ago
  (don't forget google drive's price decreases, which will also put pressure on Dropbox ...)
  - ghshephard 12y ago
    Yes - Google Drive was probably an impetus for this, and it will be interesting to see what they introduce at IO. I think this price drop is a bigger deal than the Google Drive Drop, as I'm pretty confident that Microsoft is in this for the long haul, and that OneDrive is going to be around in 10 years, and show great enterprise integration.
- lsc 12y ago
  >You've got to love competition, but I wonder at what point Onedrive's race to the bottom in terms of pricing starts to impact Dropbox's valuation? eh, I've looked into getting into this market, and the price I would feel comfortable with (at my scale... which is not large) would be around a penny per gigabyte per replication per month. 2 replications is about the minimum I'm comfortable with, so the $0.02 per gigabyte/month seems pretty reasonable to me, especially because the big players have access to some pretty dramatic economies of scale that I do not. Hard drives are what, $150 per 4tb drive or so, to purchase? Figure that it's another $2000 for every 36 drives for a low-end motherboard and chassis; figure a 36 month life, to be conservative, and that's $5.50/month in capital. figure $200/month per kw usable. a hard drive is going to use 5-10 watts That's $1-$2/month per 4tb. so total cost is going to be around $1.88 per tb per month. Now, multiply by 2.2, as I'm going to have 2x replications and make each replication raid6, (10 disk stripes) so my cost is $4.14/month/tb If I'm charging $0.02 per month per gigabyte, that's $20/month per tb revenue. (Of course, this is all seagate gigabytes. It's more complex if you use GiB.) That's plenty of margin. Now, this doesn't count over-subscription, and if you sell in 100gb blocks, not all of it is gonna get used. Now, especially if you are letting users use this for more than just backups, you have per-account overheads like abuse handling. But yeah, overall? from where I stand? the "race to the bottom" isn't even keeping up with hard drive prices. In a real "race to the bottom" someone at my scale wouldn't be able to make reasonable margins. The biggest problem I see with the market is that most consumers don't need that much storage. I'm going to need a lot of customers to just fill my first 74 disk cluster. Then, if I let customers share the files, I'm going to have to deal with dmca bullshit, and I ain't doin' that for free.
- encoderer 12y ago
  I started re-thinking dropbox when I realized I could get 1TB from GDrive for essentially the same price I'm paying for 100GB from Dropbox. I'm moving at the end of the year when my subscription period ends.
- driverdan 12y ago
  > You've got to love competition, but I wonder at what point Onedrive's race to the bottom in terms of pricing starts to impact Dropbox's valuation? Unless you're a Dropbox equity holder why would you care? As a consumer all I care about is cost and reliability, neither of which are impacted by their valuation.
- ajtaylor 12y ago
  They must be assuming that most people won't actually use all 100 GB since the $1.99 is way below the cost of the physical drive (on a $/GB basis).
DevX101 12y ago
Unfortunately for DropBox, Google and Microsoft can almost give away storage for free as loss leaders for their other products. Hard drive space is a commodity. I was a bit late to the online storage game and at $2 per month for 100GB, signing for Google Drive was a no brainer over DropBox.
- danieldk 12y ago
  Getting 50GB for two years with my phone (Moto X) makes Dropbox look pale in comparison. And they still don't have something akin to Google Docs or Office Online. Space is indeed a commodity. Office, Play, Google Apps, Ads, etc. are the money makers.
pling 12y ago
Nope. I uploaded a legit Office ISO I downloaded from MSDN to SkyDrive (as it was called back then) to test throughput up and down. After 3-4 hours it was gone. My data isn't going near it. Edit: just to clarify... I think they hash incoming files and delete known ones as part of a takedown system. This was an ISO that had been shared on TPB as well as MSDN. Of course their policy allows these measures but I'm not happy putting something up there on the basis that they can arbitrarily delete it.
- mythealias 12y ago
  There was also some discussion about metadata being changed once the files were uploaded to OneDrive. So if you plan to use it just for plain file storage then it might be an issue.
  - sz4kerto 12y ago
    That was something completely different, and a result of Microsoft's naming screwup: Sharepoint adds/changes some metadata of MS Office files (for collaboration, etc.). OneDrive for Business is essentially Sharepoint in the cloud. This OneDrive does not change metadata, it's a 'simple' cloud storage. BTW: interesting, I've submitted this link an hour or so ago, and it was immediately flagged as dead. :)
  - nickbarnwell 12y ago
    That's only OneDrive for Business [1], a product that (fortunately) shares nothing but branding with the consumer product. Not so say the latter doesn't have its own warts...simply that it doesn't have that particularly egregious one. 1: http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/cloud-services/microsoft-secretly-alters-files-in-onedrive-for-business-1244538 http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/cloud-services/micros...
- jscheel 12y ago
  Whoa, that's seriously messed up. Can anyone else confirm that this is still the case?
- brador 12y ago
hemancuso 12y ago
Shameless plug for my product, ExpanDrive. Version 4 came out a week and a half ago and adds support for OneDrive along with a ton of other cloud storage providers. http://www.expandrive.com/expandrive http://www.expandrive.com/expandrive Right now the best Cloud-storage desktop clients: Dropbox/Google Drive/Box/Copy/OneDrive, all do sync of the entire repository (unless you're willing to do the work of selective sync). Apart from that you're not left with many options, other than the web, for moving data to and from your giant 1TB account. ExpanDrive bridges that gap by providing access as a network drive. You connect and interact with the data without needing to bring it all in. We keep a big local cache, and do writes in the background so your saves feel instant, like Dropbox. If you've not checked out the software recently, take another look.
- ghshephard 12y ago
  Very cool - somehow I hadn't seen this before, and you've been around for 10 Years, and I try and follow all things storage. Not sure how I missed your product. I know AWS is fine with this sort of usage (they charge for storage + data access) - any sense as to whether Dropbox/OneDrive/Google Drive are okay with applications being written on top of their cloud storage? I.E. is this a hack, or something I should feel comfortable using as a storage option. And, other than AWS, are there any vendors you feel are most likely to be okay with using their service in this way?
  - hemancuso 12y ago
    If they didn't want this kind of thing they wouldn't/shouldn't make an API, like Amazon Cloud Drive [no API]. It's not a hack :)
- fulafel 12y ago
  Any plans for a Linux version? Edit: to answer my own question, the web page says "Linux version coming mid-2014" :)
  - hemancuso 12y ago
    ping jmancuso@expandrive.com if you want to jump on the beta
boh 12y ago
Too bad Onedrive is known for altering files, scanning your photos for nudity (or partial nudity) and deleting/restricting content it deems "questionable". Otherwise it might seem like a good deal.
- ghshephard 12y ago
  The restriction are on the content you share: http://microsoft-news.com/its-okay-to-put-your-nude-photos-on-skydrive-just-dont-share-them/ http://microsoft-news.com/its-okay-to-put-your-nude-photos-o...
- m0dest 12y ago
  Altering text files is sometimes an issue in OneDrive for Business, which is a totally separate service based on SharePoint. Consumer OneDrive never alters your text or binary data. Photos are only scanned for nudity if they're broadly shared. The definition of "broadly" is changing. It's designed so that content isn't scanned if it's unshared or if it's only shared with a small number of people. The goal is just to make sure that people aren't using the service to host massive public porn collections.
  - 0x0 12y ago
    Why call both products OneDrive then? The only thing I care to remember from the discussion earlier is "OneDrive == data files are modified" aka stay the heck away. By sharing the name, surely you want us to think it is the same product? Would you trust a sync service called "File Destroyer for Consumers"?
- esbonsa 12y ago
  That is not as bad as what you described, but it also corrupted one file in my multi-volume archive that is now not recoverable
josefresco 12y ago
Question, does OneDrive handle large amounts of files/data? Google's Windows software has issues due to it's 32bit/memory limiting nature which makes it almost unusable for me for backing up client files. Can anyone with OneDrive exp chime in?
- nextweek2 12y ago
  Have you tried Insync which is a cross platform gdrive alternative. I believe its using python, so it might not suffer from 32bit issues.
dy 12y ago
I'm currently using Dropbox and sync all my coding folders (mostly Rails/Node.js/Go/C#). I'd be willing to switch if one of the other providers would have smarter folder exclusion (something like .gitignore or I would even take having to make a sentinel file like .nosync in every folder). I'd like to exclude things like node_modules, build folders etc. It's gotten to a point where I have to disable Dropbox during development and let it catch up later otherwise it chokes up CPU at 100% doing it's hashing. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
- nextweek2 12y ago
  Best advice I can give is don't do that. Dropbox is not a good version control system. You'll get burned at some point. Use git with one of the free providers like github or bitbucket. You will find it so much easier.
  - benologist 12y ago
    Dropbox does realtime, automatic backup of your work with file version history in case you accidentally deleted or overwrote something. Git solves other problems.
    - nextweek2 12y ago
      Dropbox does those things, however when you are programming you are generally not working in a single file. You are working across many files with many various temporary files. This complicates the state of a development folder. If Dropbox went down mid upload or you hibernated your computer before it had completely uploaded (it happens), you then work on another computer and that uploads some files, suddenly you are going to get a merge conflict which Dropbox cannot easily help you with. Software development is not one file being edited, its a collection of files in a particular state that give it meaning. Dropbox is good, its gotten better but its still not the right tool for the job. Git (or any DVCS) is good enough that you can commit and push every 5mins if you wanted. The point is that the state a a whole makes sense. Plus what about when you start working with other developers, you cannot all work in Dropbox, you'll get merge conflicts every day. What about bug finding features like bisect? Or just having a log of when thing happened?
mkal_tsr 12y ago
Does it come with improved "sharing" abilities as well? http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/2344633/leaked-nsa-document-shows-microsoft-co-operation-over-prism http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/2344633/leaked-nsa-docum...
baudehlo 12y ago
I wish they would fix their API along with these improvements. Currently there's no way to upload a file to OneDrive without knowing the file size. Google and DropBox support that with their APIs (via slightly different forms of chunked uploads). This is relevant to me for http://emailitin.com/ http://emailitin.com/ because with email attachments there's no content-length. Since I don't want to store attachments on my end (even temporarily) I'd rather just pipe them directly to OneDrive (as I do with GDrive and DropBox). With the current API limitation I have to pipe to a temporary file, stat the file, and then upload. Really annoying.
- hemancuso 12y ago
  It's a multipart upload. You don't need to know the content-length.
  - baudehlo 12y ago
    Maybe they added that feature recently. I'll look into it.
matdrewin 12y ago
If they fix their synching issues, I'm in.
madoublet 12y ago
If the Skydrive team is listening, I love the All Photos feed, but can we get something like that for non-photos? I would like to see everything else that has been synced recently. I am not sure what Recent Docs does, but it is definitely not what I expect.
cabbeer 12y ago
I won't consider skydrive until they fix this issue: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/onedrive/forum/sdfiles/skydrive-windows-81-how-do-i-stop-an-upload/07175d79-4b10-44db-8800-823d808d80c5 http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/onedrive/forum/sdfiles/sk...
tgeorge 12y ago
Just go build one for yourself. >.> https://owncloud.org/ https://owncloud.org/
- Dylan16807 12y ago
  Call me back when it can sync more than one file per second.
  - hnha 12y ago
    Try seafile, it is very perfomant for me.
RexRollman 12y ago
I really like where the online storage space is going but why don't they offer support for standard transfer protocols? Things like ftp, sftp, rsync, etc. I don't want to install a custom client and uploading via a web browser is tedious.
lstamour 12y ago
Accuracy note: SkyDrive launched with 25 GB free, then reduced that to 7 GB unless you knew to click a link to be "grandfathered". So now they're at a fashionable 15 GB free. Good, but not as good as it once was ;-) Either way, paying for the 100GB if you need the storage is a no-brainer. And OneDrive is still one of the few truly cross-platform storage services that's also ships natively with an OS. Now that Apple's offering additional cloud options on iPad, I could see myself picking one cloud provider and sticking with it ....
owenversteeg 12y ago
Aww :( I have two grandfathered 25gb free accounts and I was hoping they'd get more storage.

115 points by ghshephard 12y ago

The new monthly prices will be $1.99 for 100 GB (previously $7.49) and $3.99 for 200 GB (previously $11.49). You've got to love competition, but I wonder at what point Onedrive's race to the bottom in terms of pricing starts to impact Dropbox's valuation? Other interesting pricing tidbits: OneDrive will come with 15 GB for free (up from 7 GB). Office 365 Personal ($7/month) will come with 1 TB of OneDrive storage. For the first time I'm rethinking my $8.25/month subscription to Dropbox for 100 GB, particularly as I only have about 10 GB of data...

mchusma 12y ago
Agreed. My wife had to upgrade her dropbox plan recently to the $41.60/mo 500GB plan. I had to really weigh the pros and cons of switching. In the end, I decided the costs of me having to provide "technical support" to my wife was worth the roughly $30/mo in the short term over Google Drive (and now OneDrive), but figured we would start trying to convert her over the next year or so. Dropbox is in a really tough spot, because if they even cut their prices in half (which would still be significantly more expensive than OneDrive), their revenue would drop tremendously right before an IPO. My guess is that the primary options are to stay the course, go public ASAP, hope you don't get bled too much from Google/Microsoft and try to find more reasons for people to pay a premium for Dropbox, or to sell to Apple, which is the only big player without a meaningful competitor.
- clarky07 12y ago
  >or to sell to Apple, which is the only big player without a meaningful competitor. iCloud Drive?[1]. The Apple buying Dropbox ship has sailed. Steve Jobs tried to buy them and Dropbox said no. Turns out it was a good choice on their part, but there is pretty much no chance of it happening now. [1]- http://www.apple.com/ios/ios8/icloud-drive/?cid=wwa-us-kwg-features-com http://www.apple.com/ios/ios8/icloud-drive/?cid=wwa-us-kwg-f...
- ghshephard 12y ago
  Apple is launching iCloud Drive with iOS 8. Pricing is pretty reasonable - $1/Month for 20GB, $4/Month for 200 GB.
rogerdpack 12y ago
(don't forget google drive's price decreases, which will also put pressure on Dropbox ...)
- ghshephard 12y ago
  Yes - Google Drive was probably an impetus for this, and it will be interesting to see what they introduce at IO. I think this price drop is a bigger deal than the Google Drive Drop, as I'm pretty confident that Microsoft is in this for the long haul, and that OneDrive is going to be around in 10 years, and show great enterprise integration.
lsc 12y ago
>You've got to love competition, but I wonder at what point Onedrive's race to the bottom in terms of pricing starts to impact Dropbox's valuation? eh, I've looked into getting into this market, and the price I would feel comfortable with (at my scale... which is not large) would be around a penny per gigabyte per replication per month. 2 replications is about the minimum I'm comfortable with, so the $0.02 per gigabyte/month seems pretty reasonable to me, especially because the big players have access to some pretty dramatic economies of scale that I do not. Hard drives are what, $150 per 4tb drive or so, to purchase? Figure that it's another $2000 for every 36 drives for a low-end motherboard and chassis; figure a 36 month life, to be conservative, and that's $5.50/month in capital. figure $200/month per kw usable. a hard drive is going to use 5-10 watts That's $1-$2/month per 4tb. so total cost is going to be around $1.88 per tb per month. Now, multiply by 2.2, as I'm going to have 2x replications and make each replication raid6, (10 disk stripes) so my cost is $4.14/month/tb If I'm charging $0.02 per month per gigabyte, that's $20/month per tb revenue. (Of course, this is all seagate gigabytes. It's more complex if you use GiB.) That's plenty of margin. Now, this doesn't count over-subscription, and if you sell in 100gb blocks, not all of it is gonna get used. Now, especially if you are letting users use this for more than just backups, you have per-account overheads like abuse handling. But yeah, overall? from where I stand? the "race to the bottom" isn't even keeping up with hard drive prices. In a real "race to the bottom" someone at my scale wouldn't be able to make reasonable margins. The biggest problem I see with the market is that most consumers don't need that much storage. I'm going to need a lot of customers to just fill my first 74 disk cluster. Then, if I let customers share the files, I'm going to have to deal with dmca bullshit, and I ain't doin' that for free.
encoderer 12y ago
I started re-thinking dropbox when I realized I could get 1TB from GDrive for essentially the same price I'm paying for 100GB from Dropbox. I'm moving at the end of the year when my subscription period ends.
driverdan 12y ago
> You've got to love competition, but I wonder at what point Onedrive's race to the bottom in terms of pricing starts to impact Dropbox's valuation? Unless you're a Dropbox equity holder why would you care? As a consumer all I care about is cost and reliability, neither of which are impacted by their valuation.
ajtaylor 12y ago
They must be assuming that most people won't actually use all 100 GB since the $1.99 is way below the cost of the physical drive (on a $/GB basis).

DevX101 12y ago

Unfortunately for DropBox, Google and Microsoft can almost give away storage for free as loss leaders for their other products. Hard drive space is a commodity. I was a bit late to the online storage game and at $2 per month for 100GB, signing for Google Drive was a no brainer over DropBox.

danieldk 12y ago
Getting 50GB for two years with my phone (Moto X) makes Dropbox look pale in comparison. And they still don't have something akin to Google Docs or Office Online. Space is indeed a commodity. Office, Play, Google Apps, Ads, etc. are the money makers.

pling 12y ago

Nope. I uploaded a legit Office ISO I downloaded from MSDN to SkyDrive (as it was called back then) to test throughput up and down. After 3-4 hours it was gone. My data isn't going near it. Edit: just to clarify... I think they hash incoming files and delete known ones as part of a takedown system. This was an ISO that had been shared on TPB as well as MSDN. Of course their policy allows these measures but I'm not happy putting something up there on the basis that they can arbitrarily delete it.

mythealias 12y ago
There was also some discussion about metadata being changed once the files were uploaded to OneDrive. So if you plan to use it just for plain file storage then it might be an issue.
- sz4kerto 12y ago
  That was something completely different, and a result of Microsoft's naming screwup: Sharepoint adds/changes some metadata of MS Office files (for collaboration, etc.). OneDrive for Business is essentially Sharepoint in the cloud. This OneDrive does not change metadata, it's a 'simple' cloud storage. BTW: interesting, I've submitted this link an hour or so ago, and it was immediately flagged as dead. :)
- nickbarnwell 12y ago
  That's only OneDrive for Business [1], a product that (fortunately) shares nothing but branding with the consumer product. Not so say the latter doesn't have its own warts...simply that it doesn't have that particularly egregious one. 1: http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/cloud-services/microsoft-secretly-alters-files-in-onedrive-for-business-1244538 http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/cloud-services/micros...
jscheel 12y ago
Whoa, that's seriously messed up. Can anyone else confirm that this is still the case?
brador 12y ago

hemancuso 12y ago

Shameless plug for my product, ExpanDrive. Version 4 came out a week and a half ago and adds support for OneDrive along with a ton of other cloud storage providers. http://www.expandrive.com/expandrive http://www.expandrive.com/expandrive Right now the best Cloud-storage desktop clients: Dropbox/Google Drive/Box/Copy/OneDrive, all do sync of the entire repository (unless you're willing to do the work of selective sync). Apart from that you're not left with many options, other than the web, for moving data to and from your giant 1TB account. ExpanDrive bridges that gap by providing access as a network drive. You connect and interact with the data without needing to bring it all in. We keep a big local cache, and do writes in the background so your saves feel instant, like Dropbox. If you've not checked out the software recently, take another look.

ghshephard 12y ago
Very cool - somehow I hadn't seen this before, and you've been around for 10 Years, and I try and follow all things storage. Not sure how I missed your product. I know AWS is fine with this sort of usage (they charge for storage + data access) - any sense as to whether Dropbox/OneDrive/Google Drive are okay with applications being written on top of their cloud storage? I.E. is this a hack, or something I should feel comfortable using as a storage option. And, other than AWS, are there any vendors you feel are most likely to be okay with using their service in this way?
- hemancuso 12y ago
  If they didn't want this kind of thing they wouldn't/shouldn't make an API, like Amazon Cloud Drive [no API]. It's not a hack :)
fulafel 12y ago
Any plans for a Linux version? Edit: to answer my own question, the web page says "Linux version coming mid-2014" :)
- hemancuso 12y ago
  ping jmancuso@expandrive.com if you want to jump on the beta

boh 12y ago

Too bad Onedrive is known for altering files, scanning your photos for nudity (or partial nudity) and deleting/restricting content it deems "questionable". Otherwise it might seem like a good deal.

ghshephard 12y ago
The restriction are on the content you share: http://microsoft-news.com/its-okay-to-put-your-nude-photos-on-skydrive-just-dont-share-them/ http://microsoft-news.com/its-okay-to-put-your-nude-photos-o...
m0dest 12y ago
Altering text files is sometimes an issue in OneDrive for Business, which is a totally separate service based on SharePoint. Consumer OneDrive never alters your text or binary data. Photos are only scanned for nudity if they're broadly shared. The definition of "broadly" is changing. It's designed so that content isn't scanned if it's unshared or if it's only shared with a small number of people. The goal is just to make sure that people aren't using the service to host massive public porn collections.
- 0x0 12y ago
  Why call both products OneDrive then? The only thing I care to remember from the discussion earlier is "OneDrive == data files are modified" aka stay the heck away. By sharing the name, surely you want us to think it is the same product? Would you trust a sync service called "File Destroyer for Consumers"?
esbonsa 12y ago
That is not as bad as what you described, but it also corrupted one file in my multi-volume archive that is now not recoverable

josefresco 12y ago

Question, does OneDrive handle large amounts of files/data? Google's Windows software has issues due to it's 32bit/memory limiting nature which makes it almost unusable for me for backing up client files. Can anyone with OneDrive exp chime in?

nextweek2 12y ago
Have you tried Insync which is a cross platform gdrive alternative. I believe its using python, so it might not suffer from 32bit issues.

dy 12y ago

I'm currently using Dropbox and sync all my coding folders (mostly Rails/Node.js/Go/C#). I'd be willing to switch if one of the other providers would have smarter folder exclusion (something like .gitignore or I would even take having to make a sentinel file like .nosync in every folder). I'd like to exclude things like node_modules, build folders etc. It's gotten to a point where I have to disable Dropbox during development and let it catch up later otherwise it chokes up CPU at 100% doing it's hashing. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

nextweek2 12y ago
Best advice I can give is don't do that. Dropbox is not a good version control system. You'll get burned at some point. Use git with one of the free providers like github or bitbucket. You will find it so much easier.
- benologist 12y ago
  Dropbox does realtime, automatic backup of your work with file version history in case you accidentally deleted or overwrote something. Git solves other problems.
  - nextweek2 12y ago
    Dropbox does those things, however when you are programming you are generally not working in a single file. You are working across many files with many various temporary files. This complicates the state of a development folder. If Dropbox went down mid upload or you hibernated your computer before it had completely uploaded (it happens), you then work on another computer and that uploads some files, suddenly you are going to get a merge conflict which Dropbox cannot easily help you with. Software development is not one file being edited, its a collection of files in a particular state that give it meaning. Dropbox is good, its gotten better but its still not the right tool for the job. Git (or any DVCS) is good enough that you can commit and push every 5mins if you wanted. The point is that the state a a whole makes sense. Plus what about when you start working with other developers, you cannot all work in Dropbox, you'll get merge conflicts every day. What about bug finding features like bisect? Or just having a log of when thing happened?

mkal_tsr 12y ago

Does it come with improved "sharing" abilities as well? http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/2344633/leaked-nsa-document-shows-microsoft-co-operation-over-prism http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/2344633/leaked-nsa-docum...

baudehlo 12y ago

I wish they would fix their API along with these improvements. Currently there's no way to upload a file to OneDrive without knowing the file size. Google and DropBox support that with their APIs (via slightly different forms of chunked uploads). This is relevant to me for http://emailitin.com/ http://emailitin.com/ because with email attachments there's no content-length. Since I don't want to store attachments on my end (even temporarily) I'd rather just pipe them directly to OneDrive (as I do with GDrive and DropBox). With the current API limitation I have to pipe to a temporary file, stat the file, and then upload. Really annoying.

hemancuso 12y ago
It's a multipart upload. You don't need to know the content-length.
- baudehlo 12y ago
  Maybe they added that feature recently. I'll look into it.

matdrewin 12y ago

If they fix their synching issues, I'm in.

madoublet 12y ago

If the Skydrive team is listening, I love the All Photos feed, but can we get something like that for non-photos? I would like to see everything else that has been synced recently. I am not sure what Recent Docs does, but it is definitely not what I expect.

cabbeer 12y ago

I won't consider skydrive until they fix this issue: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/onedrive/forum/sdfiles/skydrive-windows-81-how-do-i-stop-an-upload/07175d79-4b10-44db-8800-823d808d80c5 http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/onedrive/forum/sdfiles/sk...

tgeorge 12y ago

Just go build one for yourself. >.> https://owncloud.org/ https://owncloud.org/

Dylan16807 12y ago
Call me back when it can sync more than one file per second.
- hnha 12y ago
  Try seafile, it is very perfomant for me.

RexRollman 12y ago

I really like where the online storage space is going but why don't they offer support for standard transfer protocols? Things like ftp, sftp, rsync, etc. I don't want to install a custom client and uploading via a web browser is tedious.

lstamour 12y ago

Accuracy note: SkyDrive launched with 25 GB free, then reduced that to 7 GB unless you knew to click a link to be "grandfathered". So now they're at a fashionable 15 GB free. Good, but not as good as it once was ;-) Either way, paying for the 100GB if you need the storage is a no-brainer. And OneDrive is still one of the few truly cross-platform storage services that's also ships natively with an OS. Now that Apple's offering additional cloud options on iPad, I could see myself picking one cloud provider and sticking with it ....

owenversteeg 12y ago

Aww :( I have two grandfathered 25gb free accounts and I was hoping they'd get more storage.