[browningstreet]

Having just rsync'd 100s of GBs back down from B2 and not sure where to put it, and having lots and lots of business documents and video files to share with collaborators, I'm surprised how few competitors there are in the Dropbox space.

With their block level syncing, Dropbox is still not really replicated in the market. I'd only take issue with their price given the volumes of data I'm dealing with.

Being able to set local and not-local flags on files/folders is great.

I spent some time trying to use a few of their alternatives, plus their mobile client apps, and it's kinda just Dropbox still.

[ajkjk]

It's a bad market to take on because the competition is 'commodification by Google/Apple/Microsoft'. If you do a great job you compete with Dropbox on price and quality, and if you do anything short of that you compete with the office suite versions of the same product, which are effectively free to their subscribers (because file sync is packaged with other services that they're buying anyway) so getting people to give you money is very hard. Dropbox itself is perpetually at risk of being commodified out of existence; their constant battle is finding ways to make sure their customers can still justify paying for them as a separate service.

(at least this was the ambient understanding internally when I worked there a few years ago)

[layer8]

The value proposition of Dropbox is exactly that it is an independent service, in my view (in addition to having best-in-class desktop integration). Google/Apple/Microsoft can’t compete with that almost by definition.

While not everyone values that, I suspect that enough people do to warrant Dropbox’ existence.

[ajkjk]

For an individual sure, but the vast majority of their business is corporate contracts which don't think that way.

Generally it is impossible to understand Dropbox's strategy if you think about individual purchasers as significant. Iirc they mostly serve as a marketing funnel for team- and business-sized contracts. (although this varies from year to year, sometimes they do focus on e.g. family plans for revenue)

[layer8]

Yeah, I understand that Dropbox isn’t thinking how I think. My argument is that even if they lose these corporate contracts, it should still be a viable (if much smaller) business to serve those users that do care. In other words, it wouldn’t force Dropbox to entirely stop existing.

[computerdork]

Hmm, tend to disagree, but this is just an educated guess of mine. Seems like business have more specific needs that individuals, and would guess that Dropbox has many small features targeted for just companies (richer api's, more stability, more customization). Yeah, at least in my opinion, the larger the business, the more features they need.

[ajkjk]

Well they do. The problem is that if a competitor arises on the individual market they can pretty efficiently copy anything that makes them competitive.

[stackghost]

>With their block level syncing, Dropbox is still not really replicated in the market. I'd only take issue with their price given the volumes of data I'm dealing with.

Business Strategy 101 teaches that broadly speaking, there are 3 categories into which companies fall, which are cost leadership, differentiation, or segment focus.

If, as you say, your only pain point is the cost of dropbox, then any potential alternative would be competing to be the cost leader, and cost leadership strategies are unattractive for startups. Nobody is investing in early-stage companies building "a cheaper clone of XYZ". It's hard to attract startup talent to "a cheaper clone of XYZ". It's rarely fun for founders to build "a cheaper clone of XYZ".

Unfortunately I think there are limited avenues for successful differentiation in the file sync space. Self-hosted vs cloud, standalone vs OS-level integration, cross-platform vs not? Can't think of much else off the top of my head, and I think big players are able to throw shitloads of engineering talent at OS-level integration features (and that gets you iCloud, basically).

Beating dropbox at their own game wouldn't be impossible, but I think that's why there aren't many competitors in that space.

[ajkjk]

The real issue is that if you do manage to build a cheaper clone they can just delete you by lowering their prices. It'll hurt the growth they have to show investors but not as much as letting you live will.

[stackghost]

>The real issue is that if you do manage to build a cheaper clone they can just delete you by lowering their prices.

Yep, this is why cost leadership strategies tend to be unattractive to startups. Finding ways to be meticulously frugal just isn't exciting to most people, I would think.

[ajkjk]

Well my point is that it's not a question of how exciting it is. It is that it is essentially unworkable as a business strategy, unless you have a technique for being more frugal or efficient than it is possible for your competitor to be. And they have scale on their side, so it is doubtful.

(that said I'm just an engineer parroting things I heard while working there, I wasn't involved in any actual strategy)

[packetlost]

it really is too bad. All of the major tech companies' competitors are junk. Google Drive is the least bad of the bunch (out of, say, OneDrive, iCloud, and formerly Amazon Drive), but it's still not great to deal with. DropBox really does do a great job

[jsmith99]

OneDrive used to be rubbish but nowadays it's reliable. We use it at work and I don't feel any pressure to move to Dropbox. It's also much cheaper.

[packetlost]

Considering I have one friend who just lost data due to a OneDrive bug less than a month ago, I'm going to say no. I have zero tolerance for data loss.

[fireflash38]

OneDrive is awful.

Why are my files I created on my local device not on my device

[trollbridge]

Click “keep files on my device”.

I had to uncheck this box since I let my OneDrive (business) account bloat up to 2TB.

[smilespray]

This should be the default behavior.

Microsoft deliberately chose not to because keeping your files in the cloud is a barrier to easy switching.

[pseudosavant]

Probably because the 1TB of storage you get with Microsoft 365 (or whatever it is called now) for <$100/year is more space than most computers come with.

I’ve had OneDrive for a very long time, and there was a couple of years where they didn’t have the files on demand feature as they rewrote the OneDrive client. It was a major regression for me.

If you don’t like that behavior, you can always just check the box to sync everything. I do that on my machine that has 2TB of storage.

[fireflash38]

I download an attachment from a colleague. I edit it and save it. I try to send the updated file back via outlook... And it says the file is not available.

This is one of the most basic operations that people do! Why does it not work?

Why would I need to go back in and tell it to keep it locally for when it was local in the first place!?

It's absolutely inane shit like this that drives me up a wall with Microsoft. Do these people use their own products?

[pjmlp]

To save space, I only have the stuff I am currently working on available locally.

Most laptops aren't having TB sized SSDs.

[ValentineC]

> OneDrive used to be rubbish but nowadays it's reliable. We use it at work and I don't feel any pressure to move to Dropbox.

OneDrive for Business and OneDrive Personal are two different backends. I'm guessing that you're using the "Business" version?

[dpark]

It’s a unified stack now.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/parable-python-goat-story-amb...

[zipy124]

OneDrive still regularly fails when downloading large files... Unusable.

[idatum]

But you can just use any cloud blob storage provider (including the big ones) along with the rclone utility. rclone supports many.

I even use rclone to sync photos to OneDrive I can then share with family/friends.

[amluto]

Google Drive has gotten inexplicably cheap for Workspace users, too.

[svara]

The desktop client used to be just terrible. Has that changed? The Dropbox client does have its issues but it's really amazing at... Syncing files. I use it pretty creatively with large numbers of files and large volumes and it just works reliably.

[bentt]

I find Google Drive desktop to be just fine on Windows. Gave up a long time Dropbox sub for it and I have been happy. Dropbox just got too bloaty and unfocused for me.

[dawnerd]

They've raised prices a lot over the last few years while reducing the storage you get.

[amluto]

The pricing is weird. If you want to buy à la carte storage, it appears to be $40/TB/month for business and $30/TB/month for enterprise:

https://knowledge.workspace.google.com/admin/storage/buy-mor...

This is more than S3 charges, but S3 will nickel and dime you aggressively for using that storage depending on your use case.

But $22/month buys an entire Google Workspace seat, which includes 5TB, for an effective $5.50/TB/month, which is quite a good deal. On the other hand, it’s rather lacking in flexibility.

I find this all somewhat confusing. At least one of these offerings does not reflect the underlying cost of the product.

[sssilver]

What's the issue with iCloud?

[watermelon0]

It doesn't have a great cross platform support (no Linux client, and there are many complaints for the Windows client).

Personally, I dislike that you cannot restore an older version of a file on laptop/phone, and must instead use their web app, for which you need to disable ADP, which defeats its purpose.

[seanhunter]

While there isn't a proper Linux client, if you find yourself on a Linux box and need to sync to or from iCloud, rclone[1] works great. Just putting this out there in the hope that it might help someone.

It's also (ironically given TFA) what I used to sync all my files off dropbox when I cancelled my subscription because of their misuse of root to re-add their thing to special permissions on macOs after I had removed it.[2]

[1] https://rclone.org/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12463338 not trying to reopen a flame war, but for me personally, that was one of those things a company doesn't get to do to me twice. As soon as it happened, I copied my files off and cancelled. In fact I'm there somewhere in the comments on that article saying I was going to be cancelling and I immediately did.

[mmh0000]

That's neat! I had no idea rclone supported iCloud now. Looks like they added support about a year ago[1].

Step-by-step instructions: https://rclone.org/iclouddrive/

I just tested, and it worked... rclone is such an amazing and incredible project.

[1] https://rclone.org/changelog/#v1-69-0-2025-01-12

[msh]

I know it’s not a official client but rclone have great iCloud support (but only if you don’t enable advanced data protection).

[browningstreet]

Mounting Dropbox on Linux machines is really easy. Google Drive has terrible support for binary files and namespaces.

For business purposes I didn't want to use iCloud. But it seems like it's iCloud & Dropbox then.

[prepend]

I find icloud best as long as everything is apple.

[caconym_]

I think they're squeezed between bigcorps offering consumers products in ecosystems they're already bought into, and independent-minded techies more willing to roll their own solutions.

I paid for Dropbox for a long time specifically because it was an independent option, but over time the feature bloat annoyed me more and more, and their dabbling in genai stuff was the last straw. Now I use syncthing over wireguard tunnels.

[rincebrain]

How have you found syncthing's scaling?

I've been trying to use it for a massive tree of ~250k files across ~500k folders, which only needs to live on one device at a time and sync to a backup in case it dies, and even if I tell it send-only/receive-only explicitly, it regularly seems to go cross-eyed at some change made in the folder structure and give up and rescan and hash everything, and if anything in the tree changes while that's happening, it gives up and just marks it a conflict to be manually resolved...or silently hangs until I restart it.

[caconym_]

It's working well for me (as in totally hands off for months or even years at a time) at (I think, roughly) a few hundred thousand files but probably significantly fewer directories. Overall I'm really impressed and happy with it. But this is just personal file sync, nothing too demanding and unlikely to hit edge cases with concurrent edits etc.

[hiq]

On which operating system? That wouldn't surprise me on Android, a bit more on other platforms (and worth filing an issue).

[gonzalohm]

I'm surprised by how many people mention Syncthing as an alternative to Dropbox or Google drive. It's not. Syncthing forces you to have a copy of your data on all your devices. With Dropbox or Google drive you can "stream" only the files you need. This is important when you want to share GB of data with devices that can't sync everything into local storage (like a phone)

[caconym_]

I actively don't want this feature and its appearance in Dropbox is one of the major factors that drove me to look for an alternative. Needing to constantly stay abreast of feature churn to make sure I understand how and where my files are stored is not for me, nor is reliance on the weird hacks they use to implement it "transparently" across different platforms.

I separate my files in Syncthing into different shared folders that sync to different sets of machines, and put stuff that doesn't need syncing at all on my NAS. On paper this might sound more complicated but in practice for me it's a much lower mental burden.

[gonzalohm]

That makes sense. But Dropbox was never designed like that. It has always been a client-server service. Syncthing is P2P so it's not a replacement.

[caconym_]

I run Syncthing in a hub-and-spoke topology where the hub is a headless VM with a volume hosted on my NAS. This is half for my sanity wrt remembering what's peered with what, and half because it works much more consistently across network boundaries.

The way I use it, it's a 1:1 replacement for the way I used Dropbox: a directory of files that are continuously synced across different machines, with a durable central copy that gets regular snapshotted backups. I understand that Dropbox has more features now, but that's pretty much all it was when I started using it; and the fact that Syncthing supports other use cases than mine doesn't mean it isn't a perfect fit for mine. Out of all my experience self-hosting ~replacements for consumer cloud services, it's probably been the most successful by far.

[pianoben]

> I'm surprised how few competitors there are in the Dropbox space.

There used to be many more - Sugarsync, AeroFS, Syncplicity, just to name a few - all bit the dust. Box.com found a niche serving business document flows; Gdrive, iCloud, OneDrive, all survived thanks to being features in a broader Big Tech suite. Everybody else? Outcompeted, plain and simple. Dropbox was just a cut above.

(I used to work at one of the companies named above, so although it's just one person's opinion, it's at least as informed as anyone else's here :) )

[eikenberry]

> Having just rsync'd 100s of GBs back down from B2 and not sure where to put it [..]

Why not keep using B2? You didn't mention why you were leaving that platform when it seems like a decent solution to your problem.

[browningstreet]

B2 isn't really great as an active file store, it's better as cold storage.

[debo_]

> With their block level syncing, Dropbox is still not really replicated

Good pun!

[browningstreet]

:-)

[genxy]

How much are you willing to pay for this service? Ballpark. And what is your ratio of data at rest vs data you want shared? Are you ok with your permanent copy being local?

[jamwt]

It's a surprisingly tricky problem. I know all too well.

If you want to minimize drama, it's worth still paying for Dropbox.

[DANmode]

Spideroak,

pCloud,

Resilio Sync.

May be worth reviewing.

[1970-01-01]

You could just put it on a local disk? 512GB sdcard is like $15 at Walmart.

[dghlsakjg]

Check the price of flash memory again. That $15 card is almost certainly a scam.

[matsemann]

At least if bought from Amazon. It will happily accept writing 512 GB to it, but it's not stored anywhere.

[irishcoffee]

Yep that burned me once. Lesson learned.

[dawnerd]

Yeah their memory of how much memory costs is outdated. I was just at a walmart this weekend and a 128 card was 30 bucks.

[browningstreet]

I wanted a forever backup. I'm going to trust Apple and a hard drive.

[lostlogin]

Ah yes, the famously reliable Time Machine.

[tibbydudeza]

TM was a hack - iCloud is pretty good I reckon - for the millions of devices they have in the market there has been the only odd complaint from somebody on twitter making headlines with a Technorati type of following about user accounts mysterious being deleted or blocked (poor customer support) or some weird syncing issues when moving to a new device and the old device is still in use.

[ThePowerOfFuet]

Tell me you have no interest in your own data without telling me you have no interest in your own data.

[1970-01-01]

How is a local copy not the best way to store data?

[Twirrim]

A local copy is inherently fragile. It's easily destroyed by accident, flood, fire etc. This is especially true when using a single storage device like an SD Card, vs the way that these storage services operate, leveraging things like erasure encoding.

Local backups are important, they're cheap, and often fast. They just shouldn't be the only kind of backup you do for data that is important to you.

[asdff]

Make two local backups and store the other one at work or a friends house.

[beoberha]

Hope you never want to take diff backups