The new Dropbox

- https://www.seafile.com/en/home/

Open-source and all. :)

In general, it is a CPU catastrophe, a penalty I have to pay in order to use file synchronization. I really hope that a better competitor appears.

Additionally, the software pesters me with annoying popups pushing me to upgrade.

I've been pretty happy with iCloud Drive since I switched to it. Works seamlessly and effortlessly on my Mac and iPhone, affordable pricing fo storage which can be shared with family, and also solves my photo storage needs with Apple Photos. The only drawback is the lack of shared folders, but they just announced that is coming soon.

1. I never asked for anything more 2. you still charge me for more at a higher price

I just bought 2TB data on iCloud, moving everything there. Now I will have good photo application with face recognition which is awesome. Do not expect any move from Dropbox to make your personal life better, they won't. They are going towards enterprise customers.

Use iCloud that's it if you're in the apple word.

I haven't actually moved over to this myself yet, but it does look much better than Dropbox or Sync.com (which I stupidly am still subscribed for despite their client being even worse than Dropbox - but at least it's encrypted...)

Nextcloud mentioned previously is the obvious choice for the privacy-conscious, but does take some further responsibility to ensure integrity and availability.

Dropbox was the only one that managed to sync 10s of gigs in a timely manner, without spending hours "analyzing files" before starting to upload.

A symlink is just a file, like any other. It is a user's responsibility to insure that a symlink will work elsewhere; cloud services should just copy the file, just like any other. The users who expect a symlink to trick a cloud service into special behaviour (like syncing folders elsewhere) are also wrong. You no more want a cloud service going off and "thinking" about a symlink, than you wanting it going off and "thinking" about porn it finds on your computer. These are just files; their contents or meaning are absolutely not any cloud service's concern.

For example, a MacOS application bundle typically includes internal symlinks that most users are unaware even exist. Yes, DropBox breaks these, too. They tell you that their service is not intended for synchronizing entire file systems, as if properly handling an arbitrary file is somehow rocket science. I'll grant them that this is over their heads, but it's not hard.

There's exactly one sync program that gets it all right: Unison, written by Benjamin Pierce, a world-famous computer scientist. Yes, he actually thinks about this more clearly than any of the programmers of commercial services, and the best community ideas are adopted.

Unison handles symlinks properly.

Atomic directories are a relatively new feature in unison: One can declare a directory atomic, forcing the user to choose at the directory level when there’s a conflict.

I declare .git directories atomic. A better example: A MacOS .sparsebundle disk image file appears as many files (bands) inside a directory, but is intended to be seen by the user as an atomic file, not a directory. This has the advantage of more efficient backups: If one makes a minor change to a large mounted disk image (say, a few MB to a multiple GB disk image) then backup software isn’t forced to make a new copy of the entire multiple GB disk image.

If one makes minor changes to the same mounted disk image on two machines, and then does a two-way sync, one could buy the farm. Most likely, there will be a conflicting root file alerting one to the problem. Far cleaner to simply be forced to choose one disk image directory over the other. Functionally, the entire disk images are in conflict, not specific files within.

The ability to declare atomic directories is not a feature of any other two-way sync software, and it should be. A good heuristic: If a naive user can’t easily open a folder to reveal its contents (say, a Mac application bundle, or a sparse disk image) then the supporting directory should be treated as atomic by default.

I run a company with sync software, we treat them same as any other file so if you have one in a folder set to sync, we sync it, we don't follow the link and sync the linked file (as the link could go outside of the configured sync folder).

Solution of course is to just use rclone and mount Google drive directly.

For the price Google beats everyone.

I switched a few years ago. It works really well. Unless you are using Dropbox with a team or a corporate environment, iCloud is better. I use a combo of iCloud (love the desktop syncing between my machines btw), and Google File Stream for team documents.

(Also in third party Finder alternatives, like Commander One, you will typically get thumbnails for symlinks.)

Google Drive has no differential sync. Any changes you make re-upload the whole file. This is a hard no for me. Also Google.

I moved to Sync[0]. The pricing tier was more what I wanted (500GB). They support symlinks, differential syncing, selective sync as well as a 'Vault' for storing files in the cloud but not on your machine. I think it's end-to-end encrypted as well, not going to commit to saying anything specific in that regard. The Mac app is also a lot better, I find it spinning up a lot less for me and its a lot lighter in general. To be fair though, even with iCloud I get my fans whirring up when I start uploading lots of changes.

I've also heard good things about pCloud[1] but I don't see any reason to change my workflow now after have to already change it.

[0] - https://www.sync.com/ [1] - https://www.pcloud.com/

I can't remember a time when I've had Dropbox open and not found it at the top of the CPU tab of Activity Monitor. This may be because I have a couple symlinks (not many, just some dotfiles) or because I have a large number of files (nothing ridiculous, ~100k photos backed up) but the fact is, it's been long enough for Dropbox to have figured this out and fixed it.

It's bad enough to where I now leave Dropbox off all the time, then only turn it on when I need to sync something. With iCloud sync I don't even think about it, which is the way it should be.

I opened Dropbox before starting this comment to see the new UI and even after giving it enough time to catch up, it' still using between 48 and 127% CPU. It makes even Outlook feel breezy.

Why? To detect changes, they were storing a snapshot and comparing everything on disk to the snapshot. Which is madness when Windows has methods that don't require reading every damn byte on the disk - at the least, they could use a filesystem minifilter driver, or the NTFS USN change journal.

As if that wasn't enough, after the startup scan they were using an unreliable method to detect further changes (same one as dotnet's FileSystemWatcher, I forget the name of the underlying Windows API).

And to top it all off, even with only 2 systems sharing the data, there were conflicts all the time that required manual resolution (and I seem to recall Dropbox wasn't very good about surfacing these when they happened). Then there was a data loss incident, I presume due to some kind of conflict snafu - Dropbox only support at the time was a forum, and they were completely uninterested in even acknowledging that there was an issue.

I switched to Seafile after that, and haven't looked back. I honestly don't understand why people would put up with that crap, but given the size of Dropbox they obviously do...

https://tresorit.com/

I agree with the issues with the Mac OS client burning too much CPU/battery, I've learned to live with that as an inconvenience, since otherwise, it works great by fulfilling the top priority you want in a service like this: it is reliable.

  > Does anybody know how the CPU/power impact of Microsoft's and Google's offerings are on the Mac?

Neither competitor qualifies as "a folder that syncs" and they both install all kinds of junk to your system.

big with https://www.freenas.org/

small with https://freedombox.org/

scaling with https://nextcloud.com/

If you cant do any self hosting https://nextcloud.com/ can be paid for. THere is a demo here https://demo.nextcloud.com/

as long as the client is running, my GPU is tacted at 1.6 GHz, if i kill the client GPU settles at around 0.14 GHz. this makes quite the difference in power consumption of my machine when left idle for multiple hours the day.

nowadays i only start the client when i want to sync files or expect to receive some uploaded by my peers. after thats is done the client gets killed immediately.

but why does it have an 3d context running you ask? for the small notification window where i can track the sync progress. i still remember the "native" solution they used few years back, did not have drop shadows, but the entire functionality was present via an WinAPI menus. Considering one can, with some OwnerDraw work, put progress bars and scrollable lists in Menus, i don't get the point of using an whole web browser to display a 600x200 popup.

They really should take a look at bvckup2, how fast and efficient a backup/sync tool could be done in native way

Also, Dropbox Paper shows the same lack of attention to detail. The iOS client has all sorts of really stupid basic bugs like undo and copy & paste not working properly. It’s nuts.

It feels like Dropbox’s culture is to ship a product and not do the hard work that it takes to make the core basics rock solid on all devices and platforms. It’s really hard work, but it’s essential for a user base as large as theirs.

The even harder part is for their leadership and PMs to say “No” to new features until they hey the basics right; otherwise they are going to find themselves in the position of doing a lot of things not very well.

Similarly. That was the biggest appeal to me back when I first discovered them and they were giving out bonus space for their free plan depending on the number of people that any one user referred. On top of this shift, didn't Dropbox just limit the number of computers one could have their data synchronized between? These moves seem bad overall.

I agree with you completely, Google should have squashed Dropbox like a tiny, helpless bug that it is in comparison. Yet reality disagrees and they haven't.

Google can't even deliver a proper client for Google Drive on Linux which is a system many Googlers use. It all remains a mystery to me.

As far as I can tell, Dropbox’s vision is of having the same sort of thin-client experience of having an app that represents “your files” and lets you do things do those files like an Explorer or Finder would—but with this app providing these integrations regardless of your platform (Windows/macOS/Android/iOS/ChromeOS/Linux) or cloud provider.

This is already the play that Slack used: despite Google Hangouts being integrated better with the Google enterprise ecosystem, people still use Slack instead, and take advantage of its integrations with Google apps instead. Regardless of platform or ecosystem, Slack supports your use-case, such that it’s easier to get everyone in an organization to agree on Slack than to get them to agree on a platform/ecosystem. Dropbox thinks it can pull off the same play, for the “file explorer” use-case. Dropbox wants to add enough functionality that the “best-practice workflow” for an enterprise—the one that onboarding docs get written about, the one they train people in—will involve using Dropbox to move files around and open them in various apps, because that’s simpler than the docs they’d have to write to explain how to do the same thing in the different paradigms of each platform the enterprise supports.

It’s an enterprise B2B play, though, and sadly, there’s already a neutral third-party “Windows Explorer in the cloud” that has beat them to capturing this market: Box. They’re definitely trying to fight Box over market-share here, and I’m not sure they’ll manage it; Box focused much more on things enterprises really want from the start (like document security—IBM can put its customers’ data in Box without worrying, etc.)

All of our tools having silos of data and only having difficult to implement one-to-one integrations seems broken- it does not feel like it has to be this way as part of the nature of the software.

Here are two reasons we have not yet seen this executed well:

1) If you're Atlassian or Microsoft it's likely perceived that it's not in the best interest of your business model to spend a non-trivial amount of resources on deep integrations with 100's of popular 3rd-party apps but instead it's much easier to see how it is in their best interest to just clone those popular apps and deeply integrate them into your suite. This way they keep users using their software and are able to charge for the new app (or eventually charge more for the suite).

2) So then there's space left for a software solution to enter the market that does world-class deep integrations with the 100's of popular SaaS api's and a great UI/UX that makes working across all of these apps intuitive- potentially an entirely new level of usability in modern productivity workflows. But as a startup idea this actually does tend to fail and I think it's primarily because it's a non-trivial engineering problem to build these integrations and a startup, with scarce engineering resources, is forced to choose ~1-3 integrations to start with as their initial customer-facing version. This then results in a product that is not compelling and just seems like yet another one-to-one integration solution.

It seems that if a new level of software interoperability enabling a new level of user experience is to happen the startup would have to be very well funded with a decent "stealth mode" runway. Or a large software company would have to throw a decent chunk of resources at the idea (not PM's convincing the business case for an integration piecemeal).

And then there's one other way this could happen:

If you look at Android and iOS you see that they already have thousands of productivity apps integrating deeply with their native API's. And already this has enabled things like iOS Actions Extension API where you can send something like a pdf to any app you have installed that registers its ability to handle pdf's. On Android features like Slices allow an app developer to put a "slice" of their UI into other apps based on the intent or action happening on the other app. I can see a future where Apple and Google increasingly push their mobile operating systems to the desktop-size screen and the productivity user base. While it may seem unlikely now it may be that iOS and Android are best positioned to introduce a new level of software interoperability to the modern enterprise productivity market in the form of a better desktop experience.

I would never use Google Drive because it's a piece of shit. Whenever I used it I ended up with data being corrupted and this happened for both the standard Backup and Sync and the new Drive File Stream. Files being corrupted or missing is the worst scenario possible for a file sync service. Not to mention it's really, really slow and inefficient.

I keep using Dropbox because it's the only one that works.

Also I don't get what the point of the Google Docs integration is, but who knows, I might end up using it.

That reminds me of a pretty famous Quora answer (here https://www.quora.com/Dropbox-product/Why-is-Dropbox-more-po...) that described why Dropbox succeeded:

> Well, let's take a step back and think about the sync problem and what the ideal solution for it would do:

There would be a folder. You'd put your stuff in it. It would sync.

They built that.

Why didn't anyone else build that? I have no idea.

"But," you may ask, "so much more you could do! What about task management, calendaring, customized dashboards, virtual white boarding. More than just folders and files!"

No, shut up. People don't use that crap. They just want a folder. A folder that syncs.

"But," you may say, "this is valuable data... certainly users will feel more comfortable tying their data to Windows Live, Apple's MobileMe, or a name they already know."

No, shut up. Not a single person on Earth wakes up in the morning worried about deriving more value from their Windows Live login. People already trust folders. And Dropbox looks just like a folder. One that syncs.

"But," you may say, "folders are so 1995. Why not leverage the full power of the web? With HTML5 you can drag and drop files, you can build intergalactic dashboards of statistics showing how much storage you are using, you can publish your files as RSS feeds and tweets, and you can add your company logo!"

No, shut up. Most of the world doesn't sit in front of their browser all day. If they do, it is Internet Explorer 6 at work that they are not allowed to upgrade. Browsers suck for these kinds of things. Their stuff is already in folders. They just want a folder. That syncs.

That is what it does.

Previously when they bought Mailbox or when they introduced Paper (which I never used...) I thought they are up to something exciting and innovative regarding how we work/do common workflows. Now it looks like they outsource the most important parts to others and accept being the glue in between. Integrations are just not that exciting

It's simple: no company wants to pour money into bugfixes. Managers / PMs / "product owners" who advocate for big, new changes (something like "integrate services" to "drive user engagement") get funding.

In a business view, if you're standing still you're at risk of being left behind. As long as software is tied to a company, it will never remain simple and do just one thing. The incentives are simply not aligned.

Investor demands for growth. Dropbox already did one thing well. But they took money on the promise that they'd do more things and make more money than they could with that one thing they did well.

In my view a lot of products could be frozen once they are mature . MS Office could have stopped most development a decade or more ago, Gmail could have stopped years ago. Windows could have stopped UI changes with XP or 7. But what are all these people supposed to do if not tweaking their product?

When you're a startup, you do something new and (hopefully) do it well. You get customers and you grow.

Eventually you become an established company. You do your thing really well, and customers are happy to pay you the price you ask. You make a healthy profit margin and times are good. Competition takes notice.

You keep doing things well, but your competition has a second-mover advantage. They get to work with newer tooling, no legacy codebase, all the benefits of a fresh start. They start to win your customers away from you.

You're doing things well, but it no longer really feels well, because your success in the marketplace no longer correlates with the maturity and quality of the product you're offering. You may have an incredibly mature and well-supported product, but it feels stale. It turns out that customers appreciate qualities like "refreshing" and "modern" that your product seemingly lacks.

As you start to lose customers, your declining revenue forces you to lay off employees and your stock starts to decline. Without a big change, you go out of business and shutter your doors for good. The executives are forced to sell the IP for pennies on the dollar to some patent troll as part of the company's bankruptcy and liquidation proceedings, and might open-source the IP if no buyer can be found.

Turns out that it dies if you try to grow it near walled gardens. The soil doesn't suit it.

Like what you might end up with with this approach and selecting best of breed: Dropbox, Slack, Zoom, Office 365 desktop, Google Apps (email), Some CRM solution, Github, client security solution, VPN solution, Jira, Confluence (wiki), Zendesk (helpdesk).

If you want things like single-sign-on and some additional security and management capabilities then you typically need to pick some higher pricing tier for each service. The price per user per month adds up. And as a added bonus, you also need to spend time managing all these and handle the monthly invoices/receipts.

What Dropbox is now doing is of course not solution to my problem. The only solution to the issue I'm having is consolidation of the services or smaller players teaming up and giving me unified package (like Dropbox+Slack+Zoom). Fully integrated packages like Microsoft 365 are quite tempting, even though I know the individual pieces are not "best of breed".

It was seldom the thing users wanted and could use, and ended up being relegated to the dev-oriented UNIX userland.

Do you ever right-click a file on your desktop and expect to be able to do an “Open With” action to open it in a Zoom meeting?

Dropbox is trying to recreate/recapitulate that functionality—the functionality of OS file-explorer GUIs, and how they act as a launchpad for feeding files to third-party intent providers.

This relies on composability, integrating together several such components into a coherent whole.

Users don't understand composability or want to do it. They want the integration to already exist and just work.

I work at a place with enterprise O365. When you've got things like Teams, well, you might argue that Teams isn't as good as Slack, you think Dropbox is a bit better than OneDrive, and so on, but it's really hard to argue paying for all those things is worth it when you've got something that e.g. lets you record your Teams meeting, run it through voice recognition, and turn it into a OneNote transcript to sit alongside your repo of project docs for the same meeting.

Sometimes well-integrated solutions are more than the sum of their parts, and that's the problem Dropbox is facing.

VC Money.

1. https://www.odrive.com/

Take a look at Front (a YC company I believe) for an example of a place trying to do this

Love this quote.

BUT... I know my group is trying to address exactly what Dropbox seems to be aiming at here. How do you find all the hundreds and thousands of pieces of information that are being generated in just a small group of people? Sharepoint is Microsoft's current attempt, and even though my megacorp uses it, my group has asked me to create an alternative, because it sucks (and hard, given our implementation). There needs to be just ONE BOX that searches EVERYTHING.

I just finished a prototype of a search tool for firmware dumps, based on Elasticsearch. It works even better than I hoped. It only takes a few seconds to search across thousands of images for combinations of hundreds of yes/no questions. (Albeit quite a bit longer to marshal the actual values.) My current though is to create an index to dump all Office documents into, and let Elasticsearch do its thing. I can create a taskbar app to drag files into, and a spotlight-like search box to dig up anything dumped into it.

Tell me there's a better way. I don't really want to write this app. This is an obvious problem for an organization of ANY size now. (It's a problem for my church's staff of 10!) I, for one, am glad to see Dropbox taking a stab at it.

\s

Also, required "fuck Google" quote at the end.

For a bit now all the big email players have been getting acquired as part of some larger "marketing cloud" that attempts to fully integrate that as the hub for an audience platform that then ties in with other external touchpoints and such. One of the aims seems to be that owning the audience and performance data has inherent lock-in, and thus forced stickiness. Really interesting to see in context of recent BI tool acquisitions.

Out of curiosity, why does Dropbox even need to care what the filesystem is?

One example, Airtable, has paid plans. In order to get the feature I want, I need to upgrade to the second paid plan for $24 per month. I don’t care about the additional collaboration features. I don’t care about having 10gb or whatever for attachments. So tired of this pricing scheme.

A. Cannot be shut off, and

B. Upgrades my Dropbox client whether I want it to or not. Even with Google's very determined auto-upgrader, I finally figured out how to shut it off. Not Dropbox.

Here we go again. Every constant-growth oriented company with happy customers eventually decides to go to war with said customers as a last-ditch effort to extract more revenue, and thus forces them to its competition.

I contacted support a few weeks ago because I couldn't find the file(s) I was looking for. They keep changing the UI. They told me to use the search feature. That feature is lacking and it doesn't help that I don't know the filename since it was an uploaded photo from my phone. I left them feedback that the UX sucks and that they need to stop changing things for changing sake. Things are/have gotten worse regarding their UX. I think their devs are thinking and selling themselves on their ideas of what improvements are rather than current customers. If they want to try new things, leave the existing product alone and a launch an entirely new(er) product like DHH and basecamp do without disrupting their own existing paying customers![1]. Don't upset happy customers and give them a reason to re-evaluate your offering and other options.

[1] https://businessofsoftware.org/2015/10/david-heinemeier-hans...

Also really annoyed about the price change. It seems to me like they know most people don't use the full 1 TB, or anywhere near it, so it's practically meaningless to extend to 2 TB. You really have to want to use all their collaboration tools to make paying $12/mo worth it. Otherwise they're just sucking up more margin.

Wow. I literally never see UI clutter, because I never log into the site, and only rarely use the iOS apps. DB is mostly just multi-system sync & versioning for me, and in that regard it works GREAT.

Well if you're using ZFS you can create a zvol for your dropbox folder and format it in ext4 and it'll work: https://pthree.org/2012/12/21/zfs-administration-part-xiv-zv...

Seems like there's a really clear "SKU" that could be continued and refined, alongside this new initiative, to keep people like yourself happy, paying customers. Why would they be so shortsighted to think everyone would want this new thing?

A thousand times, yes - are you listening Dropbox?

If you don't do this, you're going to get 'Zoomed' (i.e. basic company like Zoom comes along and eats your lunch for just doing the basic offer)

I don’t understand how anyone outside of photographers and people working with audio or video could need that kind of storage.

I have used Dropbox and Google Drive with around 1TB of Logic Pro X projects before, but that’s a ton of data to keep laying around (without using selective sync) and represents much more than the “active” projects I actually need to keep handy.

As a normal personal user, I’m probably closer to your estimates of 200-300GB of data and that’s mostly iPhone photos data. I currently stored my photos with Google but am planning to move my data over to iCloud since all my devices are Apple and performance seems better.

The only real place where files still live are with developers and designers. And even then, the move is away from locally-hosted content and stuff that only exists on someone else's server. VS Code remoting, Sketch Cloud, etc etc.

Dropbox is just fighting against the tide of the entire Internet. I don't disagree that it's disastrous, but what are they going to do? Their core product is going away. It's like being an oil company nowadays.

edit: Took 93 seconds to load a couple of the gifs which seems to have blocked rendering of the entire page. <sigh>

10 - 15 seconds to load a page is the result of poor code rather than 'because it's a client-side app'. Consequently you need to compare a poorly built client-side app with a poorly coded server-side app, or a poorly configured cache, for it to be a fair comparison. And, sadly for us all, there's every chance it'll be just as slow if was rendered somewhere else.

The answer to slow pages is to build them better no matter what tech is being used to drive them.

In the case of this page specifically, loading 17.3Mb of gifs is the main problem.

I don't see why they would not put the content to the middle, have a static background so the only thing that changes are the gifs and text as you are scrolling and perhaps pick a more readable, nicer font (though that is probably highly subjective).

Overall, I feel like the Dropbox app UI shown in gifs and the blog are from two very different companies.

It feels rough on the edges.

Unintended copy of the comment below...

I do a lot of UI/UX design as a part of what I focus on, both at work and for fun. This page is a juxtaposition of well thought out elements and things that make me go `???`.

Like:

- Good product marketing messaging

- Well done images and GIFs that get to the point

- News-site like past first article scrolling, I bet it drives more engagement. I even like how the UI elements change color when you go to another article.

What?:

- Huge spinning circular thing at the top

- Content not taking the whole size of the page but strangely taking the right 2/3rds~

- Non-retina images

Would love to see metrics on:

- Tweet highlight integration. Does it drive valuable KPIs?

- Font: They are using https://sharptype.co/case-studies/dropbox/ . The case study from the foundry that made that font has a section with color `rgb(181, 208, 230);` font on a `linear-gradient( #d20b28 , #d20b28 );` background. That's light blue on somewhere between scarlet, crimson, vermillion or venetian red color space. My brain slightly breaks reading it. Does having your own font drive engagement? What do the KPIs on that look like?

I am continually dismayed at how difficult it is to choose the best way to do a simple task. Sharepoint? OneDrive? Online Word vs. Offline Word?

Choose the wrong one? Too bad! You now have to spend 20 minutes figuring out what went wrong and why the doc you sent around to your coworkers is suddenly in this weird purgatory state of part-online, part-offline, and you aren't sure which one to edit anymore.

If only Fastmail would build a product like this, them I would trust...

If I have to leave Dropbox, I honestly don't know what I'd replace it with. It works well enough on all 3 of the platforms I use it on, that I really don't want to switch to some janky duct-taped alternative.

Meanwhile, it seems like every other hot startup product has this somewhere in their FAQ:

Q: Will you support Linux?

A: Here at Foocorp, we all love Linux! Seriously, we're huge fans! However, we've decided that we can best serve our customers by focusing on our Windows (and maybe Mac) products and giving the middle finger to you annoying Linux users.

That's probably where Dropbox sees itself headed: the corporate office suite space Microsoft currently dominates. I don't think Dropbox has much of a chance there. There was a time when Microsoft was in a shaky enough position for someone to knock them down, but then they got a new CEO and convinced people to take another look.

There are several providers that setup an instance for you with an admin login. I cannot stress enough how happy I am with that solution.

Big company: iCloud or OneDrive

I just went full Linux and I am looking for a good Cloud storage for my docs and pics.

https://syncthing.net/

Same thing with airbnb, uber, &c. They constantly release side projects that are forgotten after a month and never used, even internally. Fonts, CSS frameworks, &c.