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Comment by brchr | Hacker News Reader

According to the new plans page [1], "shared link controls" for things like passwords and expiration dates will now no longer be available on the Plus plans like they have been for the last 5+ years? Am I reading this correctly? If so, that is a deeply unsatisfying regression buried in this announcement.

[1]: https://www.dropbox.com/plans

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Existing Pro/Plus users (from before today) will keep the "shared link controls" feature.

I noticed that too and that would definitely be a shame to have such a downgrade.

I see how Dropbox is trying to diversify their prices based on features. But honestly, they should try to compete harder with providers like Apple and Google by providing different storage tiers. Apple has 2TB for the same $9.99/mo Dropbox provides 1TB. At this point Dropbox has me mostly because of inertia and their reliability.

not only Apple and Google, compared to Office365 for $99 per year which includes 1TB Onedrive + full Office for up to 5 users, i don't see how dropbox is worth it nowadays

Well they have me because Google Sync doesn't seem to work half of the time and/or takes forever to sync on all of my devices, and OneDrive and iCloud don't have clients on Linux (really?)

What sync do you use on Linux then? I am moving over from the Goog to mega. Full Linux support, 50GB, TNO.

Insync is one option (you do have to pay though) that works much like Google's client; there are other command line options too.

I use Dropbox, but I might switch to Mega in the near future. The better storage capacity and leaner UI speaks to me. I haven't had any issues with the sync client so far either, though I've only tried it on Windows.

It’s so bad. My work just switched to Google from Dropbox and it performs much worse. Also everything about the client and the product just screams that Google doesn’t give a crap about it.

Yes, Google Drive is the butt of many jokes in our company too. The main reason we're using it is because Dropbox is prohibitively expensive.

I'm sure not having clients on < 5% of the desktop market will cause Microsoft to become non-viable any day now.

I think it is this kind of attitude that made them miss the boat on mobile

You mean the boat where I can get Office etc on Android and iOS?

In a way yes. If you told people 20 or 10 years ago that in 2017 Apple would be #1 company in the world and have the browser with the second most users (with the first NOT being IE) people would laugh at you.

To be pedantic you mean the POSIX userland. Office (including its OneDrive integration) does ship on Linux, albeit under the Android userland which doesn't help you if you want to run Ubuntu.

At least for the OneDrive for Business offering, it’s easy for them to offer 1tb of storage since you’re never going to be able to be use it anyway, the sync client will crash and burn long before you get near that.

It is not in the same league as Dropbox.

The 1 TB storage that you get with regular Office 365 memberships is the regular OneDrive service, not OneDrive for Business. It works pretty well with large accounts.

Also, it's likely that your past experience is with the old OneDrive for Business client. Last year the normal OneDrive client learned to sync OneDrive for Business data, and reliability and performance improved quite a bit.

(I worked on OneDrive until last summer, but I don't currently work at Microsoft.)

Did they remove the hard limit of 20,000 files per OneDrive? Because if not, one would need to average 50MB per file to fill the 1TB up.

No, my experience is with the ‘modern’ client. It is less terrible than the old one but still unreliable.

OneDrive is no Dropbox (which i use aswell in its free form for sharing) but it works fine for me for general sync and storage.

Unless it's still coming, I still have expiring and password links on my plus plan.

Existing customers who have access to shared link controls will keep this access. They’re “grandfathered” in.

I'd be more satisfied with a company I could actually trust my data not to be handed over directly to state departments without a warrant myself

It's difficult to compare Dropbox to Apple, Google and Microsoft in terms of what they offer and for how much. All three of those giants are able to subsidize their storage offerings. Apple has their hardware business, Google has their ad business, and Microsoft has their software business. The storage offerings from all three are used to entice you into using their other services. It doesn't matter if they're profitable (and I'm willing to bet that they aren't). What does Dropbox have? Nothing but its storage offering.

If you're a consumer, it's easy to compare, though. Consumers don't care about the vendor's costs, just the price and some perception of stability (of which, if I had to bet, Dropbox and Apple are the most likely to not surprise-discontinue on us in the future).

That said I'm pretty happy with Dropbox and not going to switch. I'd love Smart Sync, though, but not at 2x the price I'm paying for Plus right now. $99 a year is great, $199 not so much.

OneDrive has been around for 10 years and we're one of the best known companies for backwards compatibility and keeping things far past their prime (Hotmail/Outlook.com, for instance, which has been out for 21 years, albeit only 20 under the company.)

What makes you think it's going to be surprise-discontinued?

Perhaps you'll decide to buy a competitor like Dropbox, choose their product as the one true product and close down OneDrive. Like you bought Skype and shut down MSN Messenger.

That said, it probably won't happen overnight and it's not that difficult to migrate from OneDrive to Google Drive or such. Lock-in is low.

I mean, yeah, no product will last forever. MSN Messenger was alive for 14 years and was slowly dying as users were moving on to other services. At a certain point, it becomes unprofitable to keep sustaining a service. But even when it did get discontinued, all Messenger accounts and their contacts got transferred to the Skype service. If you still wanted to talk to the same people, you could just through a different client. You could sign in to Skype with your same credentials and talk to the same people for over a year before that happened, too, to give people time to adjust.

Groove Music is an even more recent example. Yes, the service is going away, and certain parts of the deprecation might be annoying (you have to download all purchased music before the end of the year, for instance) but all accounts can be migrated to Spotify, a previous competitor of the service. It's not like we left people completely stranded without any options.

Probably more detail than I can really articulate, but I've lately perceived a shift in how Microsoft wants to support legacy and maybe getting more aggressive in taking a stance in eliminating some.

Right now Microsoft seems really high on cloud, particularly as a means to make Office a subscription product (which helps with legacy support, as in the long run, there are no legacy versions to support in this model). From that respect, I don't think OneDrive is at any risk of ceasing to be a product, but I do think they might yo-yo the storage quotas and things like that. Didn't they do that with SkyDrive a while back?

I'd certainly rate their risk lower than Google, which does have a history of abandoning things that people really like.

Dropbox and Apple are lowest risk for me, but for two different reasons. For Dropbox, it is their product, and they seem to make money. For Apple, it's baked into their user experience, and they tend to focus on that - rather than cut costs and compete on price, they'll make it more expensive if they need to, but it'll probably continue to work well.

You are right, your quota will depend on when you got the account and what you did. At various times, we had 5, 7, 15, and 25GB for free. When the big nerf happened from 25 to 7 (I think that's the one you're talking about), existing accounts could opt in to 25GB (personally, was not a fan that it was opt-in) for life. Same thing happened to the O365 offering, nerfed from unlimited to 1TB which is more reasonable, I don't know why anyone would offer unlimited storage honestly, that's just an open call for abuse.

Edit: For me, after Apple actually decided to integrate iCloud into macOS, I felt more secure about it staying, but before that it definitely felt like a pet project that might be abandoned. I still don't fully trust it with my documents, but since I have an iPhone, I have well over 15GB of photos and videos uploaded that I'd like to see stay for a while. :)

Selective sync can be used the same way as smart sync as long as you remember to untick your special folder on new computers as soon as you install the Dropbox client (arggh!!!!)

This gives them a great chance to focus and improve product.

If iCloud's storage offering matures to be on par with Dropbox Plus, I'd drop by Plus account in a heartbeat.

Dropbox isn't competing on storage alone anymore. It wants to release productivity tools and start getting more into the Business space (which I can't fault, biz is where the volume and margins are at). But for storage alone? Sync fast, don't lose my files, and you can have my money.

I won't dare say iCloud/OneDrive/Dropbox are a commodity...yet. Storage is a commodity (S3, Backblaze, Azure, GCP, etc), and the consumer-friendly layer on top will eventually commoditize (and you'll be able to migrate your entire "drive" between providers super quick). The treadmill only speeds up.

If they drop expiring links, I don't see any reason I'd stay with them. I also have OneDrive, and I like DropBox better, but not that much better...

I hope people on existing paid plans aren’t having features taken away.

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