[1vuio0pswjnm7]

Many times on HN, commenters have mocked those who questioned why someone would use Dropbox instead of a method controlled by the user. I guess becausse someone made lots of money from it or it became popular or something. I always found this perplexing because I look at solutions from the perspective of the user, namely, me, not from the perspective of a third party "tech" startup founder. It's insensitive to the people on HN who want to other tried and true solutions. "Other people are using Dropbox, so you should too." Who cares. Every user is different. If someone wants to use something else besides Dropbox, why harass them. I could care less what "99%" of users are doing. I care about what I'm doing.

I confess I have never used it. I still rely on USB sticks for a variety of tasks, more than simply transferring files. Anyway, for me, this telemetry nonsense would be one reason I would avoid Dropbox.

Maybe there will someday be telemetry in USB sticks. We'll see. Meanwhile...

[latexr]

> I guess becausse someone made lots of money from it or it became popular or something.

No, it’s because it was useful and simple in a way that non-techies could and would set up and use. That’s why Dropbox got popular.

[nottorp]

Even as a techie, why would you put in the work to set up your own thing?

Though, I moved away from Dropbox long ago when they introduced device limits. One phone, one laptop and one triple booting desktop -> over the device limit already.

[JohnFen]

> Even as a techie, why would you put in the work to set up your own thing?

As a techie, I do this so that I can maintain control and trust, and so that when something goes wrong, I can fix it instead of just refreshing the status page of the service and hoping.

I in no way think that anyone else should do like me, but when people are having trouble with a service, I will mention options that involve not needing that service.

[AdamJacobMuller]

Putting in the work to setup your own thing is great. You learn a lot, if your doing it at an advanced level you start to understand some of the designs/tradeoffs that the commercial products made.

Keeping that running and reliable and operating it for years or decades sounds like an absolute nightmare and I'd suggest avoiding that at all costs.

[JohnFen]

> Keeping that running and reliable and operating it for years or decades sounds like an absolute nightmare

But it's not. I run many such services for myself, and keeping them running and reliable hasn't been a large burden.

[ihateyouall123]

I run a lot of my own things on my network. It is a nightmare, but I still do it. If I had more money, I would absolutely outsource this process.

[JohnFen]

Interesting. I wonder why our experiences are so radically different?

[marcosdumay]

To be fair, nowadays setting up syncthing is trivial for a techie and keeping it running isn't harder than keeping dropbox running on your computer.

At the time dropbox launched, there wasn't anything this convenient.

[manigandham]

Dropbox became popular because, from the perspective of 99% of users, it provides an incredibly simple and effective UX for syncing files across devices and locations. And better UX is enough to be a billion-dollar company.

Of course you can use whatever you want.

[abhibeckert]

> I confess I have never used it. I still rely on USB sticks

Phew boy. You really should try dropbox or a competing service.*

Picture this:

1. Double click a file 2. Type some words 3. Save the file

That's it. There is no step 4. Your file is now synced to all your other computers and to any colleagues who also need that file.

Seriously you shouldn't be using USB sticks these days. Also - I'm guessing you haven't started the transition to USB-C yet? USB sticks are going to get really painful when you do.

(* I use a competing service - more than one actually, but I have used dropbox in the past and it worked well. I just didn't like the direction the company was taking it. This story is yet another example of that)

[JohnFen]

> Seriously you shouldn't be using USB sticks these days.

Why not? You say that like there's a problem beyond not caring if there's a more convenient option.

[yamtaddle]

> Also - I'm guessing you haven't started the transition to USB-C yet?

Shit, not more painful than nearly everything else. You're gonna need a USB-A/C hub anyway, unless you only use very new equipment and you've gone out of your way (and, not infrequently, spent more money) to make sure you get C instead of A versions of everything—lots of A devices still being sold.

If not for current-generation console video game controllers, I'd still have almost nothing in my house that natively uses C, aside from Macbooks and one newish iPad.

(However, I am, like you, a tad scandalized at the notion of favoring flash drives over network sync of some sort—I'm a luddite in a lot of ways, but god do I not miss losing flash drives, having them mysteriously fail in 6-24 months of light use [even the good brands! If anything, that part's worse now than it used to be], the "whoops, forgot to copy the file", not being able to have any of the stuff unless you physically have it with you, "let me just print this from my phone—oh, right, I don't have an adapter to plug a USB stick into it", et c. A bunch of extra stress and fiddling, to gain... ???)

[okasaki]

We all know how it works. Some of us don't want the automatic syncing.

[lostlogin]

> I'm guessing you haven't started the transition to USB-C yet? USB sticks are going to get really painful when you do

Those USB sticks that are A on one end, C on the other are excellent. They are also great fidget toys.

https://www.rubbermonkey.co.nz/SanDisk-128GB-Ultra-Dual-Driv...

[bayindirh]

I have a Dropbox account, since eternity, but used it very rarely. Until I decided to remove my desktop computer from my life, and live with my Office PC and a laptop.

Suddenly I have ripped myself out of a lot of stationary storage space, and access to a lot of files in the process. Moreover, this change was also compounded by lifestyle changes, which reduced my computer time at evenings a lot.

Then, I realized that I used these files a lot, and I needed them where I am, regardless of the device I have with me. After that, I understood what Dropbox is about. I have all my files, everywhere I need, anytime I need.

Moreover, many of the bookstores and merchants deliver things I buy directly into my Dropbox. That's great. Even updates to these items arrive automatically.

I backup the whole thing weekly via rclone to a disk, and I'm happy.

[armchairhacker]

I remember when Dropbox was new and it was possibly the only solution I could find to seamlessly sync files on multiple computers (or at least the only one I knew about).

There was this "Dropbox" folder in your home folder, and anything put in there would show up in the home folder on your other computer or operating system or eventually even your phone. I also knew about Apple File Sharing and it was basically that but much more intuitive and worked on separate networks and on Windows (maybe Dropbox was inspired by AFS and the write-only "Drop Box"). Drop Box just worked, and to less tech-savvy younger me that was the only thing that mattered.

Now we have 300+ other programs which can do the same thing, and I use Git/Github for syncing and woof/AirDrop for individual files, so no Dropbox for me. And probably not for most technical users either.

But the average non tech-savvy user still needs a cross-platform service which "just works". And I'm sure their are alternatives which also "just work", but Dropbox is popular, and they don't care about the telemetry.

[mejutoco]

I use git to sync code.

Do you use it for images, too? Maybe using a large file extension. Dropbox syncs around 2TB of random files successfully, and it seems like that is not something git it very good at (judging by game developers using Perforce or others to share files).

I am always open for recommendations to replace Dropbox. Even Gdrive (one of the most obvious alternatives) choked on performing the initial sync (of 2TB) last time I tried.

[ztnktl]

If, a big if, you don't need version control, rsync will do. It can handle any imaginable amount of data and it can work over ssh or for local file syncing. It is much, much faster than other solutions too.

It is my main tool to manage things that aren't code, and I give myself the ability to go back to older files or undelete things in a KISS manner by having multiple rsync destinations that are used in rotation.

[armchairhacker]

Git LFS for large files. Or you may need to use a dedicated service designed for syncing so much data

I’m surprised dropbox handles those well. Unless things changed the free tier still has a <1TB storage limit. But it goes to show much it “just works”

[mejutoco]

Thanks. I am talking about a paid Dropbox and Gdrive plans.

[wanda]

Dropbox's specific popularity on HN may partially stem from its original backing by YC. It will have enjoyed additional exposure here thanks to that, and to be fair to Dropbox, it was a good product.

I say *was because I cannot speak for how it is now, I do not have any data to judge how it is now.

I stopped using it a long time ago – not because I disliked it, I just picked a different solution.

[meling]

I’m still using it, but to me their service has become worse over time as more and more features were tacked on that I don’t want or need… and they are really not listening to their users who want a better experience instead of more junk. I’m also in the market for a better alternative, but haven’t found one so far that is as easy to use as Dropbox. I’d prefer to not have to manage my own servers.

[wanda]

I have heard good things about Syncthing but it depends on your use case.

https://syncthing.net/

[lotsofpulp]

>Maybe there will someday be telemetry in USB sticks. We'll see. Meanwhile...

I have had experiences where putting in a USB stick automatically installs malware on the computer.

[hunter2_]

That's only if your computer is configured to automatically run whatever autorun.ini specifies, which it really should not be.

[adolph]

Do you trust that the USB stick is just storage and not something additional?

Do you trust that the USB "power port" is just power and not a host?

[hunter2_]

Regarding rogue client devices: Suppose it's not just storage and instead is something additional, like a device for which the host will decide (without autorun.ini in this case) to install drivers, or interact in some other capacity along those lines. Can this automatically cause arbitrary code execution? I would not consider code supplied through official OS channels ("let windows search for a driver online" type of stuff) to be arbitrary, because those repositories ought to be trusted as not containing malware. Rather, by arbitrary I mean the USB device supplies the payload or supplies a URL that the OS requests, and then the OS automatically executes that. I've never heard of such a thing, but it's conceivable... source?

Regarding rogue host devices (not just a power port): I agree 100%, these are dangerous. Luckily a typical USB port on a Windows computer can only interact with client devices, not host devices, as far as I'm aware. The inverse of OTG doesn't seem like it would exist.

[rcxdude]

The most obvious rogue client device exploit is to pretend to be a mouse and/or keyboard, which on most devices will allow you to execute arbitrary code trivially, though not completely stealthily. "USB rubber ducky" is one such device available to consumers now. As for exploiting drivers: while the software might be 'trusted', I highly doubt that it is all actually secure. Emulating a USB device with a low-quality driver and then exploiting that driver by violating its assumptions about the hardware its expected to be talking to is a rich field of potential exploits (even on linux, there's vast swaths of low-quality driver code which has nowhere near the hardening of the network stack).

[marcosdumay]

> Can this automatically cause arbitrary code execution?

USB has capability to launch any arbitrary code that the user itself could without inputting any secret.

On anything that isn't the best protected Linux GUI (better protected than the configurations that everybody use), this is enough to install a keylogger on your environment and sniff any secret that it's lacking (but root/administrator rights are overrated anyway).

There has been some work on restricting USB so that it can't initiate anything. But that brings extreme usability problems, so it's very rare for people to do it in practice.

[JohnFen]

> Do you trust that the USB stick is just storage and not something additional?

Yes, because it's my USB stick.

> Do you trust that the USB "power port" is just power and not a host?

Not if it's not my hardware. In that case, I use a data blocking dongle. Always practice safe Software EXchange.

[lotsofpulp]

This was a long time ago, probably windows XP, so don’t know if that is a fixed problem on newer operating systems. I learned to not put USB sticks in back then and eventually just never needed to.

[tinus_hn]

Dropbox is in a rut because Microsoft used their monopoly power to move a lot of people to OneDrive. Which as a Microsoft product of course is all telemetry, no end to end encryption and a poor syncing experience. But the software comes with the OS and the subscription is included with Office 365.

[davidgerard]

Dropbox is popular because it's super-usable and works super-well. Approximately 0% of ordinary end users want to gaffer-tape something together by hand. (Happy Dropbox user here, but I've been tempted to do it by hand at times myself. If only rsync to s3 was easier ...)

[adrr]

USB sticks fail. Also the default file system is fat32 which doesn’t support journaling or file versioning.