Poll: Did you “drop Dropbox”?

[ajani]

A few months ago there was an intense discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7566069 regarding the appointment of Condoleezza Rice on the Board of Dropbox.

The linked page was http://www.drop-dropbox.com/.

Looking at Crunchbase profile of Dropbox indicates that Rice continues as a Board member.

I am curious to know how many users decided to drop Dropbox as a consequence of the above.

Don't forget to upvote the post itself to get more people to vote on this.

[lhnz]

I continue to use Dropbox and I'm pro the appointment of Condoleezza Rice as for the sake of our industry it is wise for us to have better political links to the US government.

(Politics is irrelevant to me, but power is not. The government can already twist your arm; being on first name's basis with somebody important will be invaluable.)

Edit: I thought we could openly state our opinions, but it seems I am getting punished with downvotes. Editing again because it's now going the other direction, but my point still stands: don't downvote or upvote just to normalise your own political beliefs.

[nikolak]

I did, and then I reinstalled it when I saw that it's the only thing that works.

Alternatives aren't as good as dropbox. Google drive is a close second, but without official linux client it's borderline useless to me - also their photo backup system is too complicated with g+, private/public albums, sharing, galleries etc and I don't want to spend time figuring it out when I just want simple photo backup service that I enable with one click.

I don't want spend time setting up my own servers, I don't want to use beta software, I don't want buggy 3rd party software, I don't want to compile stuff from sources.

I want to install something that works out of the box and is cross platform, and right now dropbox is literally the only option there is.

[rsync]

"I don't want spend time setting up my own servers, I don't want to use beta software, I don't want buggy 3rd party software, I don't want to compile stuff from sources."

May we invite you, provided you just need cloud storage and not happy-clicky-gui-sharing, to try rsync.net[1] ?

Just works on any unix, including mac, with nothing to install. HN discount, as always.[2]

[1] http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt [2] https://www.rsync.net/signup/signup_offer.html?code=710b50

[Florin_Andrei]

> Google drive is a close second, but without official linux client it's borderline useless to me - also their photo backup system is too complicated with g+, private/public albums, sharing, galleries etc and I don't want to spend time figuring it out when I just want simple photo backup service that I enable with one click.

My thoughts exactly.

[wcunning]

I use Wuala, which not only has a Linux client, but a FUSE module for true ease of use. It also does client-side encryption, and if you forget your password, you've lost your data, which is how it should work. I'm also reasonably pleased with the Windows and Android clients, though I don't use them nearly as much.

[lingben]

did you try duplicati? the fact that dropbox doesn't have client side encryption is a MAJOR issue

also duplicati is open sourced

[john2x]

There should have been 2 options for "I continue to use Dropbox despite being against the appointment of Rice" and "I continue to use Dropbox, with no opinion about the Board".

[ultramancool]

How about one for "I dropped DropBox in favour of an option with client side encryption"?

Wuala, SpiderOak, even GDrive/DropBox + EncFS/Ecryptfs/BoxCryptor. So many better options than DropBox for those of us with privacy concerns.

And for the more DIY people, there's OwnCloud, git-annex assistant (which supports encrypted remotes!), SyncThing and TahoeLAFS. Anyone know of a good sync client for TahoeLAFS though?

[arh68]

I loved dropbox, it was very useful. The Rice appointment was totally surprising, and the drop-dropbox page was fairly well-written, so I dropped Dropbox. It became immediately clear the company I thought they were and the company they are diverged some time ago. It doesn't really matter when, now.

My .bash_profile is much more of a mess now, but I'm more aware of where all my hard copies are. Before, I relied on Dropbox way too much to keep important stuff around.

Besides, tarsnap has a better CLI, am I right? ;)

[tombrossman]

Same here, though it helped that they appointed her about 10 days before my paid renewal was due.

I miss the ease of use and I've had to put much more work in to (mostly) match the features I gave up. Owncloud, cron, rsync, and a few other tools are all tested and working now, but it isn't as slick and requires occasional maintenance.

I miss using Dropbox but there are some things that are unacceptable to me, and require a permanent change even if burdensome. It isn't that I trusted Dropbox before - I used client-side encryption for most files. It's appointing her and the huge 'fuck you' message it sends to those of us who care about privacy. There's just no overlooking it.

[bpodgursky]

This poll is a spectacular example of selection bias, and the uselessness of polls. There's not a chance in hell that 20% of active Dropbox users have stopped using it, even among tech circles.

I would be amazed if even 20% knew about this in the first place, and amazed if as much as 1/10 of those people truly stopped using Dropbox.

[err4nt]

I'm dropping Dropbox but haven't had a chance to rescue my data yet.

It's not specifically about the appointment of Rice, but in general the whole collision between my data and foreign (US) politics, given the privacy disclosures in the past few years.

I already have Owncloud set up on my own private server for less money than I pay Dropbox each month and that kind of setup allows me to share files publicly online (and use owncloud to host sites) as well as even an in-browser text editor to alter the files. I can host and edit a website using nothing but Owncloud!

[atemerev]

I support Condoleeza Rice and GOP, but that wasn't enough for me to start using Dropbox — Google Drive is fine for me.

Not everybody is left-leaning here.

[nodata]

I switched to Syncthing for everything apart from photo syncing. Haven't looked back. http://syncthing.net/

[vu3rdd]

I dropped Dropbox post-Snowden revelations. I am now a proud user of Tahoe-LAFS[0].

[0] https://leastauthority.com/

[DanielBMarkham]

I stayed on as a customer.

I really don't keep magic lists of people that are cool or not-cool.

As far as privacy, it remains a concern, but Rice has absolutely zero impact on that, so the whole thing was not germane to my internet activity.

What concerns me more about Dropbox is this practice of giving away space -- but only for a limited amount of time. I bought some products and got a huge amount of space, but only for a year or two.

Now what the hell am I going to do two years later? Download 100GB over my satellite connection? They've effectively trapped me into doing business with them. That's the kind of thing I find much more objectionable than keeping a roster of who plays on which team in SV.

[morganvachon]

What concerns me more about Dropbox is this practice of giving away space -- but only for a limited amount of time. I bought some products and got a huge amount of space, but only for a year or two. Now what the hell am I going to do two years later? Download 100GB over my satellite connection? They've effectively trapped me into doing business with them. That's the kind of thing I find much more objectionable than keeping a roster of who plays on which team in SV.

This is my biggest issue with them, once you get past the privacy issues. I have a 500GB colocated file server that I can use OwnCloud, rsync, btsync, etc. on once my 30GB of "free" Dropbox space runs out. I've already got it all backed up to that server anyway using rsync. Now I just have to figure out which sync method works across all of my devices (GNU/Linux, Windows, Windows Phone, Android, OS X).

[icebraining]

Didn't you know it was time limited? How did they "trap" you?

Besides, who says you need to transfer to your home? There are ways of doing cloud-to-cloud transfer. The most basic of which is simply getting a cheap VPS with a couple of TBs of storage (mine costs 20€/month) and pull from there.

[forrestthewoods]

I kept Dropbox because they appointed Rice. Dropbox is forced to navigate complicated political, regulatory waters. To do that successfully you need someone who knows how they works. People move from the public to private sector all the time to do exactly that.

(edit: why would you downvote this? that's crazyballs!)

[rantanplan]

Um sorry I am confused. Are you saying that C. Rice is going to help dropbox "navigate political regulatory waters"... in favor of their users?

Am I understanding this correctly? C. Rice watches out for me?

[bojo]

I dropped Dropbox immediately after their first "anyone can enter your email without a password and access your data" security flaw.

[Trufa]

We've switched to owncloud not for Condoleezza Rice in particular but for general privacy concerns, the possibility to self host and pricing issues.

We really recommend the product, it may have some disadvantages to dropbox but it's very very usable, evolving and we're very happy about it.

[lucisferre]

Would you mind elaborating on the disadvantages? Also what are the advantages in terms of pricing, how much less is it costing you?

I'd also be curious how much maintenance, setup, etc., work you estimate is involved.

[road42]

Me too, it feels better :-)

[maggit]

I would have loved to switch away from Dropbox (for example because of Rice, but also because of NSA), but I haven't been able to find anything that works for me with as little hassle as Dropbox. Lock-in by delivering a superior product. Those bastards.

[StevePerkins]

I switched to Copy.com, because it was the only option I could find which met all of my criteria:

[1] Actually works, reliably

[2] Works on Linux

[3] Generous free quota

Of course, I'm probably not the best customer profile to target. I'm a shameless freeloader, and would never even consider paying money to go beyond a free quota. Until my home Internet service is an order of magnitude faster, these services are only useful to me for simple file sharing and photo backup.

Truth be told, I would drop Copy.com and consolidate around Google Drive if they had a simple "automatically backup my cell phone pictures" feature. I can get Drive to work on Linux, and that's already where most of my word processing documents reside. Unfortunately, Google's photo backup feature is tied to G+ rather than Drive, which makes it useless at best.

[sroerick]

I "dropped dropbox" for privacy reasons a couple years before Rice joined the board.

No option for this.

[motoboi]

I dropped Dropbox for Google Drive long time ago.

[ad_hominem]

If Google Drive would release a native Linux client, I would as well. They've been promising one is coming soon for years now, though. I should probably just give up.

[nej]

My only concern with using Google Drive is worrying about it's future. Who knows if it will get axed like Google Reader did. At least with using DropBox or other alternatives you know what the companies MVP is.

[eli]

I like Google's pricing a lot better, but it really does not deal with locking/conflicts as well as Dropbox.

[gress]

Does Google Drive have a different privacy policy to GMail?

[jfb]

I dropped Dropbox because I no longer found it useful. The composition of a company's pro-forma board of directors is quite possibly the last on my list of decision procedures when making choices about what technologies I use.

[josefresco]

Board appointees aside, I "dropped" Dropbox as my cloud backup solution because the Windows client suffered from frequent memory crashes when syncing large numbers of files.

Google Drive suffered the same crashes (it's a 32-bit memory limit thing), so I'm currently using Backblaze for entire PC backup and it's been working great.

I still maintain my free DB account, as it's the most commonly known/used "file sharing" service known to my clients.

I originally jumped from DB to GDrive because of pricing, but this was before Dropbox answered Google's price cuts with their own new tiers.

[tunap]

A client dropped Dropbox when it took 2 days to download their 10GB backup on a >5Mb/s connection. The new solution is an external hard drive for nightly batch backups + Cubby's DirectSync feature for multi-systems, multi-locations & real-time propagation without actually using the Cubby 'cloud' service they pay for. 3-2-1, FTW!

PS: They were weary of BitSync b/c of BitTorrent pirate news but the news about the celeb nudie pictures helped them finally come around to what I've been saying all along: RETAIN CONTROL OF YOUR DATA!!!!!

[tunap]

Haha, I'm back after I read the question below the title. I just ASSUMED this being a tech site that this was a technical poll. Doesn't political BS polls/posts send a mixed signal while YC & HNers continually talk about meaningful input, relevant discussions & not devolving to the lowest common denominator like some other news aggregator sites? Here I have been making a meaningful effort to keep my opinions to myself, stay my hand when I feel that wise-ass niggle coming on(exactly like right now) and only include pertinent knowledge & experience to the discussions rather than go /b-tard and you went ahead and created an entire thread dedicated to the problematic behavior. Is this a honeypot...?

Edit: -derision