[TheAceOfHearts]

I used Dropbox for a few years, but ultimately switched to another big-name company service. Consumers now have great options available from all the big-name companies: Amazon Drive, Apple iCloud, Google Drive, and Microsoft OneDrive. Meanwhile, in the enterprise world it looks like Box is dominating.

Given this, I think it's reasonable to ask: what's their value proposition in 2017? I hadn't been following them for a few years, but looking at their landing and pricing page, it's clear they're transitioning away from being a consumer product and focusing on enterprise customers. For those of you that are paying for their consumer offering, I'd be very interested in reading about why you've chosen to stick with em instead of migrating to another service.

[akg_67]

> what's their value proposition in 2017?

I have been paid user of Dropbox for now 4+ years. The reason I have stuck with it because "It works! plain and simple." I have tried other storage services like Google, iCloud and Box. But none match the simplicity, consistency, invisibility, cross-platform, seamless features of Dropbox. Google is untrustworthy because you never know when they discontinue any service. They have no concept of customer service. They might well be running by robots. I experienced Box at work, forced by the work IT group. IT wasn't very willing to hand out Box accounts unless you can justify business use case , people who used it didn't like it. Box interface was always in your way if you wanted to do anything stored in Box, few extra clicks to do anything. Most people who needed to collaborate used free Dropbox to get around all restrictions. iCloud is okay but only seems to work with Apple ecosystem. I still can't figure out how to access files in iCloud from my Mac and iPhone. Works great for photos and contacts but not so much for files. While Dropbox has released new features, I have never bothered with any.

IMO, Dropbox need to continue focusing their service seamless. There only mistake was to not go after business/enterprise earlier. They could have killed Box easily. While Box was hiring consultants and Enterprise sales people to pitch to IT groups (top down) Dropbox had the mindshare of employees (bottoms up). They were Dropbox champions, just Dropbox failed to leverage that in enterprise.

[krzrak]

> Google is untrustworthy because you never know when they discontinue any service. They have no concept of customer service. They might well be running by robots.

With Dropbox is the same. Some time ago a weird bug occured on my Dropbox account and I reported it. Being paying customer (3 accounts) I expected my issue to be handled professionally, as with most of other services that I use. Unfortunately, I was disappointed. My issue was handled by someone ho had no clue what is the problem and how their service works and looks. During 20+ emails exchange I got mostly advices of reinstalling the applications, etc. They ignored my requests to pass the ticket to someone more knowledgeable. I had to complain on their Facebook page to get the task read by someone else and (finally) get passed to "analysis". But then, weeks passed without word from them. When I finally asked about the progress, I got answer meaning "your issue is not important enough for us, so nobody is working on it right now and don't expect it will change in the near future". Then some time more passed and they finally fixed the bug (it was something on their side, fix was listed in the mobile app changelog). I asked for an account credit for a time when the app wasn't working properly, which influenced my day-to-day work (which is normal with other services), but were repeatedly told to "fk off" in more or less polite way and then ignored completely.

So it seems that Dropbox is introducing the "best" Google customer service policies.

[B1FF_PSUVM]

> is introducing

Nah, they've always been good at not listening to what they don't want to hear.

People were asking about client-side encryption back in 2009, and they've been mishearing for all these years. Top notch.

[msh]

Well I guess they don't want to pay for the extra storage when they can't dedup files.

[mockindignant]

I understand what you are saying, and that is a somewhat plausible story. Another one is that search is more difficult.

But the reality is I think for any company with serious security policy will have to pass on a service that only "sort of" secures their files.

There are a lot of people also who will not ever consider going with dropbox because they have on their board (Rice) someone who has a sordid track record when it comes to warrantless wiretapping, torture, and so forth.

In my opinion dropbox is OK for sharing docs between 2 people as long as the doc is not something you consider private. If you want privacy though (business files/docs/artifacts), best to pick something else.

[paholg]

There are methods of client-side encryption that still allow for deduplication.

For example, use a hash of the file as the encryption key, then encrypt that hash with the client's key.

[nextlevelwizard]

>I still can't figure out how to access files in iCloud from my Mac and iPhone.

On Mac I just open the iCloud folder and the files are there, just like Dropbox

On iPhone I open the iCloud Drive app and the files are there just like on Mac, much like in Dropbox pp expect Dropbox uses list format.

Personally I like iCloud currently more, but as you said it only works in Apple ecosystem (which I'm currently fine with). Recently I also setup OwnCloud on my RPi and it seems to fill my niche usage just fine as well, but I still don't quite trust it.

[TheAceOfHearts]

FYI, there's also iCloud for Windows [0], and some people claim to have gotten it to work with Wine [1] on Ubuntu.

[0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204283

[1] https://askubuntu.com/questions/195603/are-there-any-ways-to...

[nextlevelwizard]

I have the Windows client installed on my "gaming pc", but it doesn't seem to sync well enough. For example I can't find my password manager vault there at all.

[lloeki]

The iCloud Drive folder is indeed "just files" but it’s stored sort of hidden in a wickedly long path†. Firing up a terminal and cd’ing into ~/Dropbox is arguably easier than having to drag and drop a file in there from Finder just to have the correct path.

† "~/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs"

[nextlevelwizard]

How about ~/Desktop? That's mirrored in iCloud for sure. Possibly also other paths, but that's sort of hidden knowledge.

Usually when I use it I just drag files into the shortcut in Finder, but I guess that's a point for Dropbox. Of course you can just make symlink with ~/iCloud (I'm not at my Mac right now, but as I type this I have a feeling that there is some path in your home folder to iCloud or maybe I've already linked to it.)

[askvictor]

While it does 'just work' (i.e. the best product currently in the space) it's more a factor of how much better it is than its competitors, and how much the price premium is.

[mockindignant]

Better is a relative term, some argue that iCloud is VASTLY superior since you can set it up with your own private key that apple does not have access to.

Dropbox can always view your files without you knowing.

I do agree that as far as usability and cross platform support, dropbox is better. For security though I would say it's middle of the pack at best.

[TeMPOraL]

Paying DropBox user here. Reasons I loved them since day one:

- It Just Works™.

- It's bullshit-free. A folder that syncs. No upselling, no storing documents as JSON links only accessible through a web interface (hello Google Office Suite w/ Google Drive).

- Works on Linux.

- Relatively lightweight.

- The "Public" folder, which unfortunately they now retired, was a huge thing that convinced me to use them. With it, sharing anything to people was trivial, and the sharing was bullshit free - no web captive portal or anything, just a direct-to-file link, which I could (and did, a lot) use to e.g. embed images in posts on on-line boards, etc.

Axing the "Public" folder made DropBox lose significantly in my eyes, but I still like the service enough not to switch (and I don't recall anyone else even offering the equivalent of the "Public" folder).

[kogepathic]

>- Works on Linux.

>- Relatively lightweight.

I was once asked to backup all the data in our Dropbox for Business account. 30 users, around 400GB (total).

I installed the Dropbox client on a VM in our data center and waited more than a week while it tried to sync files.

It used a lot of memory, and good lord the download rate was poor. Under 10MBit/sec for a VM which had a Gigabit connection to the internet.

The nail in to coffin for me was that Dropbox for Business administrators don't have access to all the data within the organization. No, every single shared folder must be shared with the account you are using to sync the data.

If a user creates a folder in Dropbox and doesn't share it with the backup user, that data won't be available.

Sadly, in spite of the above, my company is still using Dropbox. We've just given up completely on having a backup of the data in it (IMHO, a decision they will come to regret).

But the experience (also with Dropbox for Business support, who took multiple days to respond to a customer paying them over $5k/year) ruined them for me.

For personal files I use syncthing now.

But your points are valid. The reason others in the company like Dropbox are the client "just works" and their web interface is nicer than OneDrive/Google/NextCloud.

[zulln]

Is it not possible to just create a folder, call it Public and then set share-options to "everyone with the link" or something like that to get the feature back?

[TeMPOraL]

AFAIK you still won't get direct file links this way - only links to a landing page, from which you still have to initiate the download. Being able to get a direct link to file (the kind that works with e.g. wget, or as a src attribute of an <img> tag) was the most useful feature of the Public folder.

[thirdsun]

I think they still have the most polished product, particularly when it comes to the web interface. I don't even have the Dropbox client installed and instead use the service via Arq to backup my music library which is about 500 GB and growing. However I hear the client is flawless and can sync files partially which is significant when it comes to large files.

Occasionally I host and transfer large files and the web interface simply works for that. All in all I need about a TB of storage and saving 3 bucks on Amazon Drive won't convince me to give up the advantage of a carefully designed and very clean, solid product.

Web storage feels like an afterthought on most other platforms - has anyone seen Amazon Drive online? It looks horrible, like a prototype or proof of concept. It's similar with OneDrive, though not as bad. Frankly, I prefer to stay with the company that has been making storage their core product for a decade.

Furthermore Dropbox has a healthy eco system and serves as syncing platform or default storage option for many apps.

[lloeki]

> However I hear the client is flawless and can sync files partially which is significant when it comes to large files.

Yes, Dropbox is one of the rare ones that handle rsync-style rolling checksum syncing.

It’s also the only one to sync FS-specific xattrs properly (like hidden extension on MacOS). Google Drive fails on both points.

[ant6n]

One issue is that it gets slow when there are a lot of files.

[josteink]

> For those of you that are paying for their consumer offering, I'd be very interested in reading about why you've chosen to stick with em instead of migrating to another service.

I'm a freeloader so I guess I don't fully qualify.

That said, what I like about Sropbox is how it works (and works well) everywhere.

Windows, Linux, Android. At home, at work, on my NAS and in "the cloud".

All other services have major shortcomings if you want universal platform-support.

[IshKebab]

I've only used Dropbox and Google Drive, but Dropbox is much less buggy and also supports Linux. Shame it is so much more expensive.

[puranjay]

Although I use Google Docs almost exclusively for most of my work, I still use Dropbox for document storage.

Reason is simple: I've been burned by Google Drive before. Lost some important documents because I thought they'd synced when they hadn't. Drive - at least back then - was simply unreliable with its synchronization.

Never had that problem with Dropbox

[lprd]

Dropbox user since 2010 here. Although I haven't 'thoroughly' compared Dropbox to other cloud based storage providers, the reason I've stuck with Dropbox this long is:

1. Backups all the photos I take with my iPhone automatically.

2. Service integration (E.g. Slack, 1Password, Alfred prefs).

3. Paper is pretty nice, I've been using it lately.

4. User interface is nice and clean.

5. Photo album creation/sharing is nice, but they are removing that feature on the 17th.

6. Screenshot sharing is nice.

7. Enjoyable & clean interface.

Having said that, I have noticed their drift to more enterprise based offerings. Their pricing is a bit steep as well. The only other two providers I've considered are iCloud and Google Drive. I'm not opposed to switching as long as those primary features are matched in another service. I'd also like to compare bandwidth, price per GB, security/privacy in other services. Anyways, just my two cents :)

[pletnes]

8 and 9 would be "faster" and linux support. Not insignificant for me, at least.

[wsc981]

I for one won't be using iCloud for the foreseeable future. It had a lot of issues with syncing and kept asking me for my password on various devices.

I keep using Dropbox for now, but without the app installed on my machine, just using the website. The reason being the sneaky way the Dropbox app tried to get Administrator rights to install some tooling on OS X [0].

---

[0]: http://applehelpwriter.com/2016/07/28/revealing-dropboxs-dir...

[willtim]

Linux support

[rikkus]

Same answer as always: It just works.

While we're here and speaking of consumer offerings: Has anyone found a satisfactory solution to displaying photos from Dropbox on their TV? Everything I try is clunky.

[ValentineC]

> Meanwhile, in the enterprise world it looks like Box is dominating.

Any idea why?

[manigandham]

Box has the admin controls, customizations, APIs and workflow tools that big enterprises actually want and need.

Dropbox didnt even have Groups to manage users until just 18 months ago and had silly things like invites for group folders which are all holdovers from their consumer roots.

[mockindignant]

Customer managed encryption keys are supported by Box, so they also have a much more compelling security story than dropbox.

[chewyland]

Dropbox is bulletproof, period.

[Danihan]

Box has always been better, with less baggage. No dark UI patterns. No creepy Bush-era board members. And overall just a better application.

[robotresearcher]

I just went to the Box website to look for a Linux client. I'd like to report back, but on Safari[1] I can't read anything on the page. It's just black.

[1] Version 10.1.1 (12603.2.4)