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Comment by anoncoward111 | Hacker News Reader

Out of curiousity, what does Dropbox do for you that they don't? Have you stayed because of price, service, features, laziness to switch? :)

I personally don't have many storage needs so I just email myself important files, back up some things to USB, and sometimes will add things to Google Drive

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Google Drive is like "I guess you can use the desktop client instead of the web one". One Drive is like "I guess you can use a Mac". iCloud is like "I guess you can have non-Apple devices". Dropbox just syncs your files from and to anything you have, equally well. I'm pretty sure none of the others even have a Linux client at all, but Dropbox does.

Along with that, there seem to be more useful integrations with dropbox, than with other services.

Well said.

Yeah, this is really it. Dropbox just let's you use it they way you want, because they have no larger agenda than letting you share your files with yourself.

For Google Drive, even if not an official client I find that Gnome's Nautilus integration works extremely well and without friction (it's treated like an external storage) for the random file I could need to share with another device...

Except smart sync only works on mac and windows. Linux is a second class citizen.

I’d sign up for Dropbox if they had feature parity on Linux.

Also a plan in the $5 range would be greatly preferred. My threshold for moderately helpful services is usually $5/Mo.

I believe Linux also has a headless/command-line-only client, which is pretty freakin sweet

I'm not sure what you mean by "smart sync", but selective sync does work on Linux last I checked (a few months ago)

https://www.dropbox.com/smartsync

No, it’s not the same thing and no, it does not work on Linux.

> Also a plan in the $5 range would be greatly preferred. My threshold for moderately helpful services is usually $5/Mo.

Very much this. I was using Dropbox, and the 2 gig free plan wasn't enough, but I sure as hell didn't need a whopping 1 TB, so I switched to Google Drive. The 15 gig free plan is enough for me, and I can rest easy knowing that if I end up needing only a little more, I can get 100 gig for $2.

That said, I definitely preferred Dropbox's client more. Google Drive for some reason is frequently showing an X on it's sync folder indicating it isn't syncing even though it's working fine. Google Drive's client also seems to be really slow to start.

I've mainly stayed because I don't want to support the mega-corporations when there's a smaller ($12bn counts as "smaller" these days...) company doing a fine job. That aside, I appreciate that they've mostly stayed focused on the core task of syncing files between computers, that there's no bias in terms of devices or OSes, and that their client software tends to work just a little bit better than the competition.

Thank you for your quick and honest reply!

I fancy myself as someone who supports "the little guy", and the Dropbox team's story is an example of how "the big guys" totally and completely fell asleep in a pool of their own money while Dropbox built something that people wanted before other bigger players.

I therefore find it ironic that I don't support them with even just a little bit of money per month, when a big portion of the pitch for the job I currently work and the small project is "but we're different because we're smaller and therefore client focused!"

I hope everyone can reflect on who their money supports. But I'll tell you two large corporations I'm very happy to support: Bozzuto, my apartment company, and Bank of America, my bank.

I would never trust a small landlord to take care of me for the right price (I've been burned so many times by private owners). And well, I store my money in a place that is FDIC and regulated... Ok I have a credit union too :)

Why do you like B of A?

Before they introduced Zelle, it was a free and relatively trustworthy way for me to exchange money with no fee between most of my friends. It just so happened we all had B of A.

In addition to that, their fraud resolution department has always been nice to me and their branches are nearby my house if I'm ever required to go in there. Still, right now, I trust my credit union more. But, my credit union wasn't founded by "two dudes" like Dropbox was, is the analogy I'm trying to make here.

Corporations I trust with my business - BOA, Google, LG, Walmart

Corporations I don't trust with my business - Comcast, Chipotle, McDonalds

"Two Guys" I trust with my business- My local mechanic, my local electrician (it took years of searching and relationship building).

I can’t see myself paying $10/month for Dropbox when I can get Office365 for the same price with 1tb apiece for up to five users, plus office for 5 computers, and 5 iPads.

The equivalent Dropbox plan is also 1TB. I personally don't ever use Office so for me that element of it is not a benefit.

How many large businesses do either use MS Office or Google’s enterprise offerings?

Dropbox will gladly take money from consumers but the money is in the Enterprise and that’s what they are chasing.

Right, and that's where they have a competitive disadvantage. They did launch Paper which is pretty neat, and they've done some partnering, but I could understand a business not using them for that reason.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/01/dropbox-to-add-native-g-su...

There are lots of things wrong with OneDrive which is what you will be using. Off the top of my head: no delta sync; no LAN sync. End result was that every single file change will result in your the entire file being uploaded to the web and your ENTIRE team downloading it again ... Can't remember the others, but it was enough for me to continue with DropBox despite the rising cost when recently compared to OneDrive.

We use OneDrive at work and I think it's awful.

My biggest complaint is how slow syncing is some times. I have a desktop and laptop at work and I can save something in my OneDrive folder on my desktop and it'll take over an hour for it to appear on my laptop unless I manually pause syncing and then unpause it to force a refresh from the OneDrive server.

I've never had that with Dropbox. It's been damn near instant every time.

I can't use onedrive due it's lack of a Linux client. There are thirdparty ones available, but upstream API changes have caused data corruptions so I don't trust it as my main driver anymore.

Can I ask why syncing files between computers if a useful thing for you? I'm on the verge of cancelling my Dropbox account since I realized the Dropbox account is not useful as an external drive, but only as a syncing tool. To me that's not worth anything bit I'm curious what use the happy customers have for it.

Storage is cheap enough these days that each of my computers has more HDD space than I need for my whole Dropbox, so I don't have a need for a "true" external drive. I primarily use it as a backup and secondarily use it to sync across machines. Every file of importance lives in my Dropbox directory, so when I'm working on a project or something I don't even have to think about backups. If my apartment building burned down or all my drives simultaneously died, I wouldn't lose any data. And if I ever need to glance at some file away from home I can always do so.

For backups I understand. What I'm curious about is what is your setup that involves multiple computers. Is it one personal computer and one at work? Do you have multiple personal computers for some reason? Just curious about usage patterns that differ from my own.

I have a Windows/Linux desktop and a Macbook, both personal. Also and Android phone. If you truly have ample storage you can also use Dropbox as a way of syncing between OSes on the same machine, in a VM or on separate partitions. Duplicates a bunch of data, but you don't have to mess with mounting and differing file systems and everything.

Thanks, I hadn't thought of using Dropbox as a file sync between different OSes on the same machine.

Saving everything into Dropbox is just so incredibly easier than trying to manage and keep track of and not damage an external drive.

Good comment. Dropbox is like how companies used to be: offer an amazing service and stay in your lane.

These days, I wouldn't be surprised if Google sent me an email that said: Hey Widgetco, become a Certified Ad Partner to join our Managed Preferred Storage Solution or else your files on our legacy system will be deleted when it is deprecated in 24 hours. Also please fill out this Google Form (Google.com Account required; get one, it's easy!) and in this Google Form please tell us more about your company, including: how many employees do you have, what is in your product pipeline. Also would you like an investment from GV? No? You have violated our Terms of Service!

(Two weeks later)

We're proud to announce Widgety by Google, launching today!

(Nine weeks later)

Widgetco's website doesn't adhere to Chrome's latest Super Safeweb standards.

Haha, this is extremely true. I endeavor to keep my needs so small that I'm never in the crosshairs of BigCo's "PLATINUM PARTNER NETWORK (TM)". That's a Kafka-esque place to be!

I used Dropbox in the early days because of the ability to place a file in your public folder and allow others to download a copy of that file using a standard URL.

You could share a file with your colleagues by simply emailing a URL to the file. No other service was as straightforward at the time.

When that feature was later removed, I stopped using Dropbox.

(Used to work there; haven't in several years.)

Such a feature was a pretty bad phishing and social engineering vector, particularly when you could render html out of that folder, but even when html was dropped that there were social engineering attacks a bad actor could pull relying on the user's trust of a dropbox url. You could also guess other files in the public folder based on the url, which was a privacy concern.

Multiple years before support was dropped, shared links were added, which fix these concerns. You can set ?dl=1 to get a raw link. `curl/wget` (set to follow redirects) still get you the raw contents even if you don't set ?dl=1.

They removed the public folder but you can still share a file(s) via url via their website.

The Dropbox client still syncs files much faster than the competitors.

Tell me about it. Google Backup and Sync is a horrendous mess, taking several hours just to start syncing every time the sync engine is relaunched.

Really? And I thought Dropbox was slow. I find myself asking what's the point of gigabit internet when I haven't found a service that users more than 50Mb.

Sounds like you're asking the right questions

Gigabit Internet is largely pointless for home use. Unless you have a Mormon family all watching different 4K shows at the same time or something.

Seriously.

I have a 30 mbit fiber connection. The only time I ever notice is when I'm downloading a new game. Otherwise, my wife can be watching Netflix while I'm gaming and there's no difference in my latency.

I had the same Dropbox slowness. On Google drive I see speeds around 400 megabits over my gigabit fiber.

I use both Dropbox and Google Drive, and the in-OS integration is a killer feature for me. The ability to just drag and drop into a normal folder (or work from a folder) and have those changes sync is great. I use Google Drive mainly for Docs and collaboration on those documents, not really for other files (due to the "manual" upload process, just a little bit more work to do).

Having used Dropbox and then switched to Google Drive, what had me coming back to Dropbox was how much Dropbox is used for sharing than Google drive.

Because of the rapid growth of Dropbox specifically in regards to sharing it's still used for that so it continues to increase the funnel and reactivate customers, while Google Drive feels more like a personal storage system.

That could be one large factor.

Google Drive lost some of my files due to syncing errors early on. Dropbox didn't.

Google Drive might have improved since (and I do use Google Apps for email and documents), but I haven't been able to forget that experience and trust Dropbox.

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