Dropbox ignores user's complaints of poor performance for almost a year

Storing a lot of files inside your Dropbox will also cause performance problems. Which means that paying for extra space (I do) isn't that useful if you intend to keep your git repos with source code there.

It has been like that for years, the company has made little progress performance-wise (instead we got useless things like photo-something-or-other-that-tries-to-access-my-photos).

I learned to live with it, because the advantages of Dropbox outweigh the disadvantages of a poor implementation. Dropbox is still a very good product, even if you have to pay a hefty price in CPU and battery life for it. I dream that one day someone will decide that performance is a goal worth pursuing and finally optimize the thing.

The only thing Dropbox has going for it is that somehow, everyone else is worse. Core syncing and client reliability is just trash across the board for all the other providers. But Dropbox is still infuriating.

Interesting thread.

Support response:

The event you've provided shows and deletion of 12 files as well as an addition of 12 files. When this happens in the exact same event, it is due to a move or to renaming a folder 99% of the time.

To recover your correct previous versions of these files, you may be able to rename the folder back to exactly what is what named prior.

I've been bugging them about a solution to the file limit for at least a year with no response. I finally got a (public) response by tweeting at them. They said they would follow up with me and they never did. Even a "we can't fix this" would be better than the dead air I've received.

I really don't know how they intend to compete with the software giant's similar offerings if it's not via superior customer service.

For anyone not aware of the file count issue you cannot have more than ~300,000 files on dropbox before it totally falls apart. I was paying for 1TB of storage and using about 3% of it when it totally stopped syncing.

CONFLICTED copies in Dropbox drives me absolutely nuts, and should not happen since I never edit the files concurrently.

[0]: https://blogs.dropbox.com/mailbox/

[1]: https://www.dropboxforum.com/hc/en-us/community/topics/20021...

I had to give up syncing some parts, because the problems would create a bevy of file conflicts.

Not saying that shouldn't be allowed, but you'd think the community manager would make it a point to take that feature right to the dev team. I know its not an easy fix, but definitely something that would immediately satisfy a large group of users.

Not to mention from a 'green' perspective the amount of CPU cycles, Wi-Fi packets, etc that could be saved from fixing this.

I still use it, but Dropbox's refusal to do anything about this problem (or even acknowledge that it exists!) is mostly what's prevented me from taking the leap to a paid account.

It's too bad, because Dropbox's speed, simplicity and (at the time) minimal performance hit was what I originally liked about it compared to other sync solutions. Now it's missing all three.

(I will admit that we have performance issues when users sync more than 100,000 files; but that's more due to fundamental limits of what you can do in a user-mode application.)

Perhaps Dropbox is just trying to trap deleting / moving / renaming the Dropbox folder? That's something that's tricky to do; and we had to disable our technique to do it because it had too many side effects.

http://imageshack.com/a/img908/1838/YHDwZ6.png

I only keep Dropbox because they automatically stick my screenshots in a folder and sync it.

Though, I've never, ever had a perf problem with it.

I submitted my resume years ago and never heard back. I wonder who they hired instead..

Other than Guido, of course :)