I use Dropbox because they don't try to innovate on the UI side. I use it mainly to sync certain directories (like fonts, desktop backgrounds, themes, dotfiles, certain /etc files, code workspaces, and other configuration files) across my Linux machines.
It's also a billion times more easy to use Dropbox with people from China than Google Drive because you can set up an EC2 server in Japan, install the command line version of Dropbox, and have it serve a synced directory over HTTPS from a non-blocked IP address. Can't do that easily with Google Drive or anything that tries to be too much.
The reason I am not committing to Dropbox Pro is because I need to use such a service when I'm in China (and with people in China). Setting up an EC2 server, configuring apache or nginx, setting up some access control, etc., goes completely against the whole idea of Dropbox being simple. Also, it's one way, unless you go to extra lengths to setup some upload system. Of course if this is something you use several times each day then it's worth setting up, but for occasional use it's really an overkill. By the way, no, I haven't found any good substitute for Dropbox that works in China.
I've moved away from Dropbox purely because the desktop (OS X) app has gotten so terrible. Besides the lack of responsiveness mentioned in the article, Dropbox routinely takes up > 90% of my CPU resources while running. If I'm working at a coffee shop without power, having Dropbox running literally halves my battery life. This is new as of the last six months, and happens consistently across multiple Macs. I've asked Dropbox employees about this, and they've just shrugged.
I don't care if they innovate or not. I care that the experience of using Dropbox is measurably worse than it was a year ago.
In my experience, Dropbox responds to all file system I/O, even those outside of the Dropbox folders, strangely.
If I'm running, say, npm install or bundle install or installing Xcode (or doing anything else I/O heavy), Dropbox starts using a bunch of CPU, proportional to the amount of I/O going on at the time. Note that none of these operations are inside my Dropbox folder.
I do believe the FSEvents infrastructure allows you to just watch an individual folder [1], so it shouldn't have to be this way...
That happens to me too, it's also getting a bit silly that you still can't exclude directories easily, and the "share" menu only seems to work in the root dropbox folder these days.
One problem we have witnessed with Dropbox is that low-tech users tends to delete files they don't personally need. Often times this causes deletion of the files for the entire company. Resultingly admins are afraid to share file access with users, and users are afraid to cause problems, so they ask admins to email the files instead, which sort of puts you back at the square one.
We might be approaching a point where different different kinds of users and maybe different verticals will be able to justify separate file sharing apps. Or even all other apps, for that matter.
Dropbox need to do a lot better job on space usage. It is trivial for Dropbox accounts to end up with more usage than many common devices have (cough MacBook Air cough). We had managers deleting content to free up space, not realising that deleted it for everyone. I guess their mental model is seeing the Dropbox folders as more of a cache than synced files affecting everyone.
Yes, there is selective sync. Now use it to reduce consumption by 10GB. It requires lots of non-Dropbox tools to try to achieve that. They do need an alternate way similar to hierarchical storage that brings in files as you need/reference them, rather than everything.
It used to be a big pile of something-or-other, but the newest iteration of SharePoint is really quite a solid product, particularly for some of the trickier tasks around document management and distribution. And with the Office 365 versions, smaller businesses don't need to worry about building out the physical resources (or hiring the admin personnel) to run an instance.
It might be something to ask your IT folks if they've considered recently.
This is a confusing case even for non "low-tech" users. I had a shared dropbox folder with a friend. I was done with my copy of the files, so I deleted them because I was close to my dropbox space limit. He freaked out because dropbox then deleted them from his drive too. In retrospect, I guess it makes sense, but the idea that a delete would propagate was certainly not the expected behavior.
7. Deceptive advertising. Telling their customers that they encrypt data enroute and at rest without telling them that they use a single common password for every customer.
9. Mailbox app has server-side access to your email (Gmail or iCloud). This is totally unnecessary for a mail client. They claim they need it to support Snooze functionality, but that is not true. It can be implemented entirely in the client, storing snooze meta-data (with a reference to, not a copy of, the email) only on their servers for cross-device sync purposes.
> If you have to execute bulk operations, your only option is to first sync everything to a local machine, then move stuff around there (or delete it) and wait for the low performance desktop client to shovel everything back up upstream.
> It’s such a flawed design.
> One major advantage of cloud storage and selective sync is that I conveniently want to be able to re-organise files and folders through my Browser, without actually being forced to download everything first.
Hmm. The way I see it the Web UI is a bonus and a fall back when you are not near the computer where it's much easier to move files and folders around. Dropbox was sold and still sell as `files on your devices synced everywhere´ not `central mainline repo that downloads to your devices´.
I am old school, I still think that file management in the browser doesn't work well.
But I agree the desktop client (win and mac) got slower and slower (UI wise). My debian installation runs a previous version that is much faster.
I am glad they aren't packing it with new features that would disturb the dropbox mental model every layman has.
What I've really always wanted, and still never seen, is "Hierarchical Storage Management with the canonical copies of everything in the cloud, and a bounded-size MRU cache on all my local devices, but where updates to the cached files are taken as updates to the canonical version."
This way, you'd be able to have petabytes of stuff seemingly "synced" to your local disk; stuff would just be (much) slower to access the first time, or if you hadn't used it in a while. (Sort of like Apple's "fusion drives", but with the spinning disk very, very far away.)
It's almost like a FUSE-mounted WebDAV share or somesuch, but where you interact with it through its local cache on your real filesystem, rather than by your OS making its read/write requests to the server itself.
I've been using copy.com for a while and I'm quite happy with it. The main reason I chose it (at the time) was 20GB for free accounts, fair storage in shared folders and pricing (I have the 250GB account).
Let's not forget they have a working Linux client. Maybe things have changed since I last looked, but they were one of the few supporting Linux (both cli and gui).
I use both and one thing that really bothers me about both services is that they don't work well with proxies and laptops.
My company forces me to use a proxy so I must manually configure Dropbox and Copy with that proxy info even though I've already configured OS X to use the proxy. Why can't they obtain the system-wide OS X proxy info that all other (non command line) apps use?
When I'm not at work the proxy isn't available and neither Dropbox nor Copy will recognize that fact and bypass it. Instead they just hang, even though all other GUI apps are fine. I have to manually turn proxying off in each app in order to get syncing to work. It's not only a pain to do this but it's also easy to forget, and then you wind up with files you need that haven't been synced.
Note that Copy.com is owned by Barracuda. If you're considering leaving Dropbox for privacy or political reasons, be aware there may be similar concerns with Barracuda.
There is no visual indication of progress. No clue about any ETA. No system logs. No detailed activity window.
Not returning any meaningful information when problems arise is the most annoying aspect of modern apps, especially on phones. Even Windows cryptic error numbers were better than this.
Three of these issues are minor UI/UX gripes. What's the better alternative? What more "innovation" do you expect from a file syncing app that already works really well? Have you even reported the file list bug you are experiencing to Dropbox so they can fix it?
It may be time to explain the "So What?" test of writing again.
You should ask yourself that question any time you write an article. (Or give a talk, teach a lesson...) If you gave enough information, that should sound like a stupid question. But if it sounds like something that might reasonably be asked, you forgot to communicate something important. In this case, the big missing piece of data is what they will be using instead of dropbox.
Because without that critical piece of data, this entire article can be summed up as "Dropbox sucks."
The title of the article was "4 reasons why we are leaving Dropbox" and not "10 alternatives to Dropbox", which would be an interesting, but totally different article on it's own. It is good to read about these issues, as these days many people think about moving from A to B in cloud storage.
Personally i moved all my storage, contacts and calendars over to a self-hosted owncloud instance, which i did not regret so far. But i'm not going to write an article about it ...
I don't know for them, but for me I have moved to self hosting with good sync by BitTorrent sync. Then at least I do not send my data to somewhere else. It's time people start to understand they are responsible for their own stuff, and third parties will never be.
I'm using dropbox + google drive (due to google docs) both home and for work and I get all of your claims. But what's the alternative? Besides google drive that has it's own issues all other solutions are less than dropbox or same with something missing (proper mobile app etc)...
I changed to Hubic and I am happy, Created account, run referral links and I’m at 55GB as I speak. You can sign up to get extra space beyond the space offered on their website https://hubic.com/nl/offers?referral=CYHNPO
OK, 55GB that’s way more than most of storage services offer. Plus - here is the deal - Hubic offers true folder syncing (not like Dropbox or Onedrive, just one folder), plus they offer backup option only. The mobile device apps are pretty good. One thing I like about Hubic is it give expiry dates on shared links.
SugarSync doesn’t provide free space. Cubby has limited storage and you have to do a lot of work to get some space. Copy is not interesting anymore since they cut the referral program. Dropbox sucks because you have to do 30 referrals to get just a few Gig space. I find HubiC is pretty good and it now pretty fast, I am averaging 2-3 GB upload per hour which is pretty decent. Here is a sign up link to get you extra 5GB in addition to 25GB plus you can get 25 GB additional space for a total of 55GB of space easily on HubiC: https://hubic.com/nl/offers?referral=CYHNPO .....
Just sign up with this link and you get the bonus space instead of the regular 25GB if you go directly through Hubic website. And you can have peace of mind HubiC is owned by OVH, they are pretty big internet hosting company, hosting is in Europe.
Right now they have 500,000 accounts, which is pretty impressive for a service that just started a couple of months ago.
If you decide to subscribe to their service, it’s starts at 80 cents per month, pretty good price, so no need to prepay chunk of money and you can cancel anytime.
The Google Drive sync client had a major problem in that it used all your bandwidth when doing large syncs, they finally fixed that problem by introducing bandwidth settings. It is much more reliable now. https://www.synergyse.com/blog/prevent-google-drive-for-mac-...
Maybe its because I'm not a Dropbox user (or a cloud storage user for that matter) that what I found most interesting was that Google tried calling someone up for a support ticket on Google Drive.
Google doing actual customer support? I thought the internet said that never happened.
I use bittorrent sync (stay with 1.3.109 until they stop messing it up or syncthing gets a bit more mature). I've never paid for it, it Just Works (no install, just binary, takes literally 30 seconds to get two machines syncing, I've used it to send files to my mum because it's easier than teaching her to use mediafire), it's not storage limited, it end-to-end encrypts and because it's peer to peer, it is way faster because it doesn't upload to a server first.
Remind me again why you lot insist on using third party providers for this stuff?
[+] [-] dheera|11 years ago|reply
It's also a billion times more easy to use Dropbox with people from China than Google Drive because you can set up an EC2 server in Japan, install the command line version of Dropbox, and have it serve a synced directory over HTTPS from a non-blocked IP address. Can't do that easily with Google Drive or anything that tries to be too much.
[+] [-] jayvanguard|11 years ago|reply
The one point I agree with him on though is that the web interface could use some work.
[+] [-] cefstat|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lazerwalker|11 years ago|reply
I don't care if they innovate or not. I care that the experience of using Dropbox is measurably worse than it was a year ago.
[+] [-] ejdyksen|11 years ago|reply
If I'm running, say, npm install or bundle install or installing Xcode (or doing anything else I/O heavy), Dropbox starts using a bunch of CPU, proportional to the amount of I/O going on at the time. Note that none of these operations are inside my Dropbox folder.
I do believe the FSEvents infrastructure allows you to just watch an individual folder [1], so it shouldn't have to be this way...
[1]: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin...
[+] [-] 0898|11 years ago|reply
As far as I can tell, there's no way to tell which of my 18,394 files are stuck.
[+] [-] wordbank|11 years ago|reply
I'm using Mac Mini with HDD and Dropbox takes 90% of disk I/O when there are more than 20-30 files updating.
I used to keep my projects in Dropbox folder before but now it literally slows my work.
[+] [-] benologist|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DenisM|11 years ago|reply
We might be approaching a point where different different kinds of users and maybe different verticals will be able to justify separate file sharing apps. Or even all other apps, for that matter.
[+] [-] rogerbinns|11 years ago|reply
Yes, there is selective sync. Now use it to reduce consumption by 10GB. It requires lots of non-Dropbox tools to try to achieve that. They do need an alternate way similar to hierarchical storage that brings in files as you need/reference them, rather than everything.
[+] [-] mattlutze|11 years ago|reply
It might be something to ask your IT folks if they've considered recently.
[+] [-] steven777400|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pppp|11 years ago|reply
7. Deceptive advertising. Telling their customers that they encrypt data enroute and at rest without telling them that they use a single common password for every customer.
[+] [-] eevilspock|11 years ago|reply
9. Mailbox app has server-side access to your email (Gmail or iCloud). This is totally unnecessary for a mail client. They claim they need it to support Snooze functionality, but that is not true. It can be implemented entirely in the client, storing snooze meta-data (with a reference to, not a copy of, the email) only on their servers for cross-device sync purposes.
[+] [-] johnchristopher|11 years ago|reply
> It’s such a flawed design.
> One major advantage of cloud storage and selective sync is that I conveniently want to be able to re-organise files and folders through my Browser, without actually being forced to download everything first.
Hmm. The way I see it the Web UI is a bonus and a fall back when you are not near the computer where it's much easier to move files and folders around. Dropbox was sold and still sell as `files on your devices synced everywhere´ not `central mainline repo that downloads to your devices´.
I am old school, I still think that file management in the browser doesn't work well.
But I agree the desktop client (win and mac) got slower and slower (UI wise). My debian installation runs a previous version that is much faster.
I am glad they aren't packing it with new features that would disturb the dropbox mental model every layman has.
[+] [-] derefr|11 years ago|reply
This way, you'd be able to have petabytes of stuff seemingly "synced" to your local disk; stuff would just be (much) slower to access the first time, or if you hadn't used it in a while. (Sort of like Apple's "fusion drives", but with the spinning disk very, very far away.)
It's almost like a FUSE-mounted WebDAV share or somesuch, but where you interact with it through its local cache on your real filesystem, rather than by your OS making its read/write requests to the server itself.
[+] [-] xomateix|11 years ago|reply
(Disclaimer: this is a referral link that will give us 5gb https://copy.com?r=b2yUAQ ;-))
[+] [-] mdk754|11 years ago|reply
Let's not forget they have a working Linux client. Maybe things have changed since I last looked, but they were one of the few supporting Linux (both cli and gui).
[+] [-] pivo|11 years ago|reply
My company forces me to use a proxy so I must manually configure Dropbox and Copy with that proxy info even though I've already configured OS X to use the proxy. Why can't they obtain the system-wide OS X proxy info that all other (non command line) apps use?
When I'm not at work the proxy isn't available and neither Dropbox nor Copy will recognize that fact and bypass it. Instead they just hang, even though all other GUI apps are fine. I have to manually turn proxying off in each app in order to get syncing to work. It's not only a pain to do this but it's also easy to forget, and then you wind up with files you need that haven't been synced.
[+] [-] runjake|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eevilspock|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blfr|11 years ago|reply
Not returning any meaningful information when problems arise is the most annoying aspect of modern apps, especially on phones. Even Windows cryptic error numbers were better than this.
[+] [-] vlucas|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codingdave|11 years ago|reply
You should ask yourself that question any time you write an article. (Or give a talk, teach a lesson...) If you gave enough information, that should sound like a stupid question. But if it sounds like something that might reasonably be asked, you forgot to communicate something important. In this case, the big missing piece of data is what they will be using instead of dropbox.
Because without that critical piece of data, this entire article can be summed up as "Dropbox sucks."
[+] [-] csbrooks|11 years ago|reply
Not sure "so what?" is a reasonable test anyway. If you're snarky enough, couldn't you ask that about any article at all?
[+] [-] jachwe|11 years ago|reply
Personally i moved all my storage, contacts and calendars over to a self-hosted owncloud instance, which i did not regret so far. But i'm not going to write an article about it ...
[+] [-] gbog|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] linker3000|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yarrel|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] orenbarzilai|11 years ago|reply
So what are you switching to?
[+] [-] baldfat|11 years ago|reply
I really like BTSync for th following:
1) Like git the copies are on local machines
2) I control the servers and I control the folders that are shared
3) Super fast in a local network
4) You can use whatever encryption you want and it works perfectly
5) You can selectively sync individual folders and files
6) Easy to share things that are Read Only or Read/Write
[+] [-] pjc50|11 years ago|reply
https://github.com/pjc50/pjc50.github.io/blob/master/secure-... : my own notes on sync/cloud storage services. I have my own prejudices as to what I want, but that may align well with the prejudices of HN.
[+] [-] tshannon|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thegreatpeter|11 years ago|reply
Sounds like an opportunity.
[+] [-] azurelogic|11 years ago|reply
Spideroak FTW! If you keep an eye open for promos and stuff, it's not hard to rival a free Dropbox account.
(For things I don't care about or need to use in collaborative settings, I still use Google Drive and OneDrive)
[+] [-] willyyr|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brianwawok|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mw67|11 years ago|reply
1/ Google Drive
2/ Box
3/ USB keys
[+] [-] achyfxgi|11 years ago|reply
OK, 55GB that’s way more than most of storage services offer. Plus - here is the deal - Hubic offers true folder syncing (not like Dropbox or Onedrive, just one folder), plus they offer backup option only. The mobile device apps are pretty good. One thing I like about Hubic is it give expiry dates on shared links.
SugarSync doesn’t provide free space. Cubby has limited storage and you have to do a lot of work to get some space. Copy is not interesting anymore since they cut the referral program. Dropbox sucks because you have to do 30 referrals to get just a few Gig space. I find HubiC is pretty good and it now pretty fast, I am averaging 2-3 GB upload per hour which is pretty decent. Here is a sign up link to get you extra 5GB in addition to 25GB plus you can get 25 GB additional space for a total of 55GB of space easily on HubiC: https://hubic.com/nl/offers?referral=CYHNPO .....
Just sign up with this link and you get the bonus space instead of the regular 25GB if you go directly through Hubic website. And you can have peace of mind HubiC is owned by OVH, they are pretty big internet hosting company, hosting is in Europe.
Right now they have 500,000 accounts, which is pretty impressive for a service that just started a couple of months ago.
If you decide to subscribe to their service, it’s starts at 80 cents per month, pretty good price, so no need to prepay chunk of money and you can cancel anytime.
Here is the link again: https://hubic.com/nl/offers?referral=CYHNPO
Cheers.
[+] [-] achyfxgi|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dandare|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Synergyse|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cephaslr|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xtrumanx|11 years ago|reply
Google doing actual customer support? I thought the internet said that never happened.
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] pXMzR2A|11 years ago|reply
Unsure why "they" would not come out and say that.
[+] [-] csbrooks|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Sir_Substance|11 years ago|reply
I use bittorrent sync (stay with 1.3.109 until they stop messing it up or syncthing gets a bit more mature). I've never paid for it, it Just Works (no install, just binary, takes literally 30 seconds to get two machines syncing, I've used it to send files to my mum because it's easier than teaching her to use mediafire), it's not storage limited, it end-to-end encrypts and because it's peer to peer, it is way faster because it doesn't upload to a server first.
Remind me again why you lot insist on using third party providers for this stuff?