Dropbox App Won’t Die | Hacker News Reader

Dropbox App Won’t Die

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28 pointsplg7 comments

Right when I was contemplating actually paying for Dropbox to use it as a proper cloud backup system and get around the 3-device limit, they pull this BS. At least it happened before I handed over my card details...

Seriously Dropbox, you used to be the simplest, easiest-to-use cloud-storage system on the planet. That's all you needed to be. You'll wind up like Evernote at this rate, destroying your originally exceptional product and your reputation along with it. Here's to 10 years as a loyal customer, and no more!

> At least it happened before I handed over my card details...

> 10 years as a loyal customer, and no more!

So, not a customer?

Lately started using my self hosted NextCloud and it's amazing!

Good bye Dropbox :)

I don’t completely get the tweet. Maybe I haven’t been updated to whatever that is. But for now i much prefer the convenience of Dropbox over doing it on my own like you’ve done. It’s not even close for me. Just my personal opinion.

Looking at other replies to the tweet, the Mac version is randomly launching itself and making itself the front-most window with focus.

I stopped using the Dropbox app a while back and switched to interfacing with Dropbox via Mountain Duck instead on Mac & Windows: https://mountainduck.io/

How do you manage it? Do you have backups and redundancy in case of problems?

I have a nextcloud instance (alongside a few other things). I run it on a $10 VPS (disk is a RAID1 array between the local VPS disk and a remote disk (ceph?) that the provider gives. That's the 1st level of storage redundancy.

I periodically (every 10 minutes) rsync everything across to another VPS (different provider). (you can use mysql replication, mysqldump, etc)

Every hour I run an rsync with --link-dest to a storage VPS and once a month I tar everything up (I take the midnight backup of each day) and it goes to long term storage. The resulting archive is only marginally (10-20%) more than the real size on disk as it mostly contains diffs on top of the actual data. I can failover easily between instances if the primary one goes down so it's reasonably highly available.

If you want less complexity you can use the S3 backend (IIRC nextcloud supports encrypted data at rest) and just ensure that's backed up regularily. Nextcloud itself has versioning for changed data.

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