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by azinman2 3789 days ago
I pay for Dropbox, and their sync is the industry's best.

They'll be here in 5. 10 is the bigger question mark when files go away.

2 comments

Files will never go away.
Probably not for 'power' (does that work?) users, but for people like my mom they're pretty much already gone. They started disappearing for her when iTunes was dumping her music into a directory and she had no idea, to her it was indistinguishable from how Spotify works, so now that everything streams like magic she pays zero attention to files or the idea of files. She thinks in terms of galleries, not image files. If I open some sort of file explorer in front of her, I've just gotten 'techy' on her.

A few years ago when I was doing a help desk job, the sentiment was similar. I asked a user to navigate to a directory on Windows and he stopped me. He said, "Hold it now, I'm not a computer person."

So maybe not 'go away,' but perhaps become increasingly invisible and especially so to average users.

But manual file management might. Dropbox is about creating folders and organizing file in there.
> when files go away.

Can you expand on that? What do you see replacing files?

i suppose that once every software comes from the cloud and their data is stored in the cloud as well, you'll barely "see" your files anymore.

but i don't think it will happen anytime soon. even on iOS, i often find the need to make data backups using files.

Data backups of what?

iCloud backs up your entire phone. Most apps store stuff remotely on their servers. And even in the case of photos various services will sync those off your phone as well.

Everything is shifting to mobile and web, and we don't have files on mobile or web.
> we don't have files on mobile or web

Iphone user spotted.

On my Android I have a full file system, with files, and I intend to keep it that way.