[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.