Even then it seems they are removing storage features. My Dad has 2 MacBook Pros - one at work and one at home. Maybe 8 years ago he was complaining about having to email himself documents so he had them available at home. I setup this nifty service - DropBox for him. One thing that got him to stick with it was I symlinked his Documents folder to DropBox. For him he didn't have to change his workflow. He would save at home, and go to work and the file would be there magically. Anytime he was on the road he could use the Dropbox UI and get anything he needed. He used less than the free 2GB of space for a long time, but was a paying customer from day one.
One day, last year, he calls me exasperated that his DropBox no longer worked. I discovered they killed the feature and "controlling his digital life" wasn't all that important to him.
I had moved to iCloud Drive a while back and told him to do the same. No more DropBox.
G Suite is an incredible value. I have an account with a single user, paying $12+tax/month. On that account I have 20TB in Drive. Good luck getting that kind of storage pricing elsewhere, I'm actually nervous about Google ever deciding to kill the heaviest users or charge more because I don't know where else I would go.
In my understanding my 20TB isn't just 20TB sitting in their datacenter, it's de-duped across accounts. But still, amazing value.
Technically, yes. But it has never been enforced AFAIK. That could change tomorrow of course, so I would be cautious of using it for anything that is very important.
I suspect that posting about this on HN is one of the fastest routes towards getting this fixed, in terms of concentration of Google engineers likely to see your post.
Synching with GDrive for me has been painfully slow. I thought it would be a drop-in replacement for Dropbox, but deleting files in particular seemed to take forever. Probably just some growing pains, but I've never experienced that with Dropbox.
EDIT
Also I had an issue with my mac pinwheeling google's 'Backup and Sync' agent. It's fixed now after a couple months, but there was nowhere I could find to report the problem to Google.
I have also had bad experiences with "Backup and Sync", which led me to abandon Google Drive right when I was seriously considering ditching Dropbox.
Given Google's reputation to ditch their own products, I guessed this was some side projects that some Googlers did, and it was never in Google's main strategy to allow people to sync their Google Drive to their local machines. Quite the opposite, actually.
My current gripe with Dropbox is that I'd like to basically be able to pay 4x the "Dropbox Plus" cost in order to get 4x the storage (without having to manage 4 separate accounts). Having 2TB isn't enough, but having "infinite" with Dropbox Business certainly is more than I want.
I used the free tier of Dropbox for 8 years and decided to subscribe recently. $10/user/month [1] for Dropbox Plus. 2TB storage (more than enough for most people who aren't doing video-editing or have a video library -- I barely fill up my 250GB SSD as it is), a client that works well on Linux (and have for years), and not Google. I'd say I'm getting my money's worth.
No way I'd ever depend on Google for more than mail which I can reasonably back up. Not with the only meaningful way to get support from a live human is either knowing employees personally who can raise issues internally, involving the media or raise a shitstorm on Twitter/HN, and at the same time them having "AI" blackbox algorithms close down accounts with no recourse.
I always found it somewhat amusing that people used to point to that quote by Jobs as a knock on him for being wrong. Lately it seems like he may have been right all along.
I take the original comment to be that file syncing will never be a product on it's own. The market for people who need file syncing on its own is small and it only really becomes useful for a large number of paying customers when it is something embedded into a more directly useful product (like GSuite or Office 365). And I think he's been largely right. It's common on HN for people to complain about how Dropbox was great when it did just one thing really well but they weren't a profitable company doing one thing really well. They always needed to create a broader product on top of file syncing in order to survive as a standalone business.
> While many companies struggle through the pandemic, Dropbox seems to be doing well. In its first quarter, it brought in $455 million, an increase of 18 percent compared to the same period last year. According to Bloomberg, last quarter was the first time that Dropbox recorded net income since going public in 2018. In other words, it took a pandemic to make the company profitable.
At this point I think it was an amazing feature that became a mediocre product. I wish dropbox felt like they could make enough money just being the best in the world at syncing files.
No, it turns out that people can just get an FTP account, mount it locally with curlftpfs, and then use SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account can then be accessed through built-in software. Nobody would pay for it.
Plenty of money in that. Look at how many startups and large tech cos are solving this problem under different skins. Everything from Notion to iCloud to Netflix remembering the timestamp you stopped falls under this broad umbrella problem.
Imagine if you were the Stripe of multi-device sync. Sure maybe end users will never know your name but damn you’d be drowning in money.
Like imagine adding multidevice sync to your product with a simple library instead of everyone cobbling it from scratch and hiring huge teams to make it reliable.
> to Netflix remembering the timestamp you stopped falls under this broad umbrella problem.
Funny you give this as an example, that feature is completely unreliable for me. Netflix frequently forgets where I left off, and in the case of TV shows, which episodes I really did see all the way to the end, and which I didn't. Similarly on Prime Video, it's quite unreliable.
I'm pretty sure that every time Netflix thinks I did not see an episode all the way to the end it's because I skipped out just before credits, or just the second credits started, or I accidentally started over and then Netflix thinks I have that whole episode to watch.
Aside from that it does seem that Netflix sometimes 'forgets' if I wait a long time to go back to something, in which case I suppose there can be some sort of cleanup going on. I mean sure I would want to keep these timestamps forever, but probably at a certain scale you want to get rid of old ones as much as it might annoy me.
No, with both Netflix and Prime Video, if you cancel the skip-end-credits-to-next-episode (either intentionally or by configuration) and watch the credits and then close the browser, the next time you tell it to continue that series, it'll start from the start of the episode you've just watched. (At least when watching in Chrome on Windows over the past year.) Given that failure, it would be entirely unsurprising to see other bugs in the progress-tracking.
Unsolvable during a network partition, you mean? It doesn't matter if a streaming service can't update your position perfectly across multiple locations during something that breaks the internet.
I do also wish it didn't lock up my entire computer whenever I make a big change to Selective Sync. I talked to a Dropbox PM after my blog post got some traction and he seemed surprised that this is still an issue.
As someone who's asked for that feature for 5+ years now from everyone I've met there, it doesn't seem like there's much interest internally at Dropbox to implement it. I know it can't be easy to do, but it's such a killer feature IMO that would totally revolutionize workflows.
Agreed. A long time ago, Perforce released a tool that they called Commons, it used OpenOffice under the covers to diff Office documents and display everything in a fairly easy to understand webUI. It wasn't perfect, but treating "documents as code" would scratch that itch that I've had with Dropbox since I've used it.
Just something I've learned to live without, at least for the foreseeable future.
https://github.com/vshih/CloudDiff works for text files. I don't know if it can be used for binary files, but it may be possible if you have an appropriate document diffing tool installed.
> Compare versions of your Dropbox or pCloud text files in-browser or with your configured diff tool.
Even when it was a nice "do one simple thing" company, that thing was a bit of a square peg. The fact is that the hierarchical file system is a silly way of structuring data that doesn't meat people's needs.
I've never understood how Dropbox could be a sustainable business. All the walled gardens have legitimate UX and anti-competative / anti-interopt reasons to get away from files, and the actual core service Dropbox provides is quite commoditized.
To be clear, I'm saying your in trouble either way:
- Just storage: it's commoditization so you have your own hardware and compete at that level
- Other stuff: Now you are alt GSuite. Google needs competition, not know you are fighting and N front war and your old users may not care.
Now VC usually tries to avoid competing head-on with FAANG, and the current situation was definitely inevitable, so quite confused why Dropbox got funded in the first place.
One day, last year, he calls me exasperated that his DropBox no longer worked. I discovered they killed the feature and "controlling his digital life" wasn't all that important to him.
I had moved to iCloud Drive a while back and told him to do the same. No more DropBox.