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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

I suspect the bundled OneDrive in Office365 is hurting them. Dropbox is better, but hard to justify if you already have something that's good enough.

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I left Dropbox because they count shared space against everyone involved, which makes me cannot share the "photos" folder with my wife (unless we both purchase the 1T plan). Not sure whether they changed this practice. I am a satisfied OneDrive+Office365 user now.

> Not sure whether they changed this practice.

Nope, just confirmed again. The only way around it is to go with a business account, which even the cheapest option costs 2x the price of just you and your wife both having Plus accounts of your own.

Or share one account with your wife.

Not entirely unreasonable but might still not be convenient or desirable for them. Even married couples might not want to share everything with each other.

2 individual free accounts + 1 shared paid account?

It's a solution not without compromise in terms of management and accounting but does achieve an outcome that would fit the apparent need.

I had this happen recently. Our photographer from our wedding shared the photos on dropbox but we couldnt see them because we didnt have dropbox pro and the folder was over the free size limit! Why does it matter how much space I have if someone else is sharing them with me?!?!

It's not about your space, it's about your payment. If someone like a pro photographer shares their stuff with clients all the time, then their dropbox subscription won't necessarily cover all of that bandwidth. [1] Companies like dropbox only mention bandwidth in fine print or buried somewhere deep in the FAQ, but bandwidth is a key resource that every dropbox user consumes and dropbox has to pay for.

[1] It might if dropbox was a more lean operation, but it isn't.

I wonder what their ratio of ingress to egress bandwidth is. I would assume most people write more than they read from the service or does Dropbox actively push any changes to all devices?

> or does Dropbox actively push any changes to all devices?

I may be misunderstanding your question, but it seems to me that this is literally the whole point of the service. Dropbox is a folder that syncs. You change something on one device (one write), it updates everywhere (multiple reads).

They do have some tricks to lower their bandwidth usage. AFAIR, if multiple devices are in the same LAN, only one gets synced with the cloud, and the rest sync to that one. Also, they have (recently introduced) a sync option, in which fake files are visible in your file system, but no actual contents get put on the drive until you try to open them.

> "Also, they have (recently introduced) a sync option, in which fake files are visible in your file system, but no actual contents get put on the drive until you try to open them. "

I thought that was a first in the earliest of versions and was one of my favorite. At some point they removed it and made you choose which folders to sync. At which point I abandoned using it. So maybe they are reintroducing it or I am misremembering something.

I've been using Dropbox since its early days and I don't remember seeing this feature until very recently. But it's possible I missed it in the past; I always treated Dropbox as a syncing service, not storage service, so I synced everything to every device (and later opted for selective sync on some devices; e.g. I didn't need a copy of my personal photos on a laptop I use for work).

The mobile clients only show you what's there and download on demand, at least that's the default.

But it doesn't integrate with the file system. On the desktop (at least on Windows), you still have a regular folder that syncs, full of folders regular files that sync - except now, you can make some of those files and folders to only look real, but actually store no data on the drive itself, and transparently fetch it when needed. It integrates completely seamlessly with all the other software you use on the machine.

(I think a good Linux analogy would be FUSE, things like sshfs.)

If it's the bandwidth that's so important, why isn't Dropbox charging the receiver for Dropox Transfer files?

The postal system solved this problem ages ago, you charge the sender postage. Done.

You'd have to increase the plan's price (bad) or charge a fee per share (horrible).

It makes sense when you look at it that way. But as a customer it leaves me with a crapy taste in my mouth since its the only cloud service I have encountered that has that restriction. But then again, the free tiers for the others are all 5 GB or larger so I never would have had this problem in the first place.

What about P2P transfers...

These are often blocked by network configuration and firewalls , although with some effort you can probably by-pass this issue. The dat protocol is a good example.

They don’t want people to combine free accounts to get a storage increase. They want people to upgrade from the free accounts, obviously.

Yes this annoyance stops me from wanting to upgrade. I don't need these shares synced but either I delete my grandmother's funeral photos or upgrade.

That wouldn't surprise me - I had seriously considered subscribing to Dropbox many times, but the price was just too high for my needs. When they forced me to make a decision (by enforcing the 3 client rule), I evaluated the costs/benefits and ended up going with OneDrive - cheaper overall and I got Office 365. I much prefer Dropbox's sync technology, but not at double the price.

What's baffling to me is that OneDrive already has the same technology as Dropbox (block-level syncing instead of the more common file-level syncing), but they have arbitrarily only turned it on for Microsoft filetype extensions (mostly Microsoft Office files). If they enabled it for all filetypes I'd switch over tomorrow.

Supposedly, that was coming in 2019:

"Differential sync brings the ability to sync only the parts of large files that have changed, not the entire file. This makes the file synchronization process faster for these files. Currently OneDrive supports differential sync for Office 2016 files. Later this year, Microsoft will bring the ability to leverage differential sync to all file types stored in OneDrive and SharePoint."

https://mspoweruser.com/microsoft-announce-onedrive-improvem...

Edit: It went live on November 4th 2019:

"To complement these large uploads, we announced availability of differential sync for PC and Mac, bringing the ability to sync only the parts of large files that have changed, not the entire file."

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-OneDrive-Bl...

Neat! Looks like I have some transferring to do this Christmas

100%. I shut down DropBox at last $dayjob (mid-size) after piloting OneDrive. Saved tens of thousands a year.

OneDrive was inferior, no doubt, but good enough. And will only become better.

More importantly, I cannot imagine anyone building better integration with Office (live editing) than the actual Office company.

“More importantly, I cannot imagine anyone building better integration with Office (live editing) than the actual Office company.”

After working with their stuff I totally can :)

Joke aside, MS is doing a great job commoditizing the space around Office 365 with Teams and OneDrive. I think DropBox and Slack are feeling a lot of pressure right now.

> OneDrive was inferior, no doubt, but good enough. And will only become better.

I'll hold my breath. Dropbox basically had sync across all major OS's ready to work very early in its life (10 years ago?). The fact that OneDrive and Box's desktop sync performs so poorly leads me to believe this is not where their engineering effort is and nor will it anytime soon (it's probably more on the back-end admin for enterprise clients).

In my experience, if you're not doing programmatic access into your synced folders, onedrive and Dropbox perform similarly enough to not make a noticeable difference to the average user. But if you do large amount of read / writes to the folder, both of them struggle with it.

My company currently does this currently, as we wait for a more seamless system to be set up. So it does a write every minute of the day to a Dropbox sync folder. Which only syncs up once every few minutes. So essentially I do miss a few minutes in a day, but since it's just a human consuming the data, I don't mind.

OneDrive just added differential sync last month. So, very late to the party, but maybe finally spending some R&D money.

As a OneDrive user, I'd say it got much better in the last year or two. Before that it was kinda janky, but now it's fast and reliable on Windows to the point where I trust it as much as Dropbox (occasionally I use it too).

It's also the only cloud storage provider that allows you to have files-on-demand feature on free tier account on Mac OS. Others (Dropbox and Google Drive) only enable it at on Terabyte plans.

> integration with Office (live editing)

The protocol is actually available for any cloud storage vendor to work with: https://wopi.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Landing page: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/office/cloud-storage-p...

It’s hard to imagine a product as fragile as OneDrive though. People do lose files on it.

I would have loved to use Dropbox, since they have a proper official Linux client. However, it’s impossible to have multiple Dropbox accounts sync to a single user on a computer (1). “Better” is relative to what you need.

(1) exception: you can have one personal and one business account

Technically, you can run the dropbox client inside docker...

You can use Maestral[0] for that!

[0] https://github.com/SamSchott/maestral-dropbox

Cool, then I’m back to unofficial clients. And stuck without windows support. I appreciate the effort, though.

You can have multiple Linux Dropbox clients running if you point them at different home directories.

First run (installation): `HOME=/path/to/client-specific/home/folder dropbox start -i`

Subsequent runs: `HOME=/path/to/client-specific/home/folder /path/to/client-specific/home/folder/.dropbox-dist/dropboxd start -i`

Edit: Each "home directory" here can be any folder; you're essentially presenting a fake home directory to each Dropbox process. The dropbox processes can run under the same user.

How do you do this on windows? I’m working in mixed env. All documentation indicates it’s impossible.

A second account, and a shortcut using "run as"

http://semi-legitimate.com/blog/item/multiple-dropbox-instan...

This requires a second windows user account - meaning files will then be owned by that account. That’s a mess.

I have the same feeling, OneDrive is garbage compared to Dropbox, insanely slow and terrible UIX and yet it is widely used. Classic platform move, bundle X with Office and it will be used by millions.

Edit: I use Google Drive because of Google docs. sigh

Also, a fair amount of big companies block access to every other storage platform via MITM after they buy OneDrive. Which forces vendors to buy OneDrive to interact with their bigger clients.

how often have you used OneDrive lately? Which onedrive, the web interface, or the desktop sync client, or the mobile app?

I doubt very much. The OneDrive has had a better website than Dropbox since it was called SkyDrive. Dropbox used to have a better desktop client but I would say they are on par now.

The enterprise OneDrive is SharePoint, not SkyDrive/Live. The interfaces coalesced, however, in the past they were two different things, each with their own quirks.

I use Dropbox only because of Linux Support. In India, All of Office 365 is stil cheaper than Dropbox, but no linux support stops me from using it.

Onedrive is unbelievably cheap in India. I think I initially bought it for ~Rs. 3700 for one year. Every fucking year after that they've been raising prices and sending me an email about it. And every year I check up on competition and nothing else looks this good (you need a LOT of features to make up for not offering Office 365).

I've moved to the US after that, but I didn't bother changing the location on the MS account.

There’s an unofficial Linux client that works okish for people that don’t fear getting grease on their hands. Console only, though.

Which one? They all looked mediocre to me compared to the unofficial CLI drive I'd be migrating from.

I want to be able to pull/push/ls directories at a minimum.

O365 cuts off the oxygen for everyone. You can see with large companies, where even large sales forces moved to Skype for Business conferencing.

Yep, my uni got O365 so good luck trying to convince them to consider Dropbox, too bad for those of us with Linux workstations! I have seen multiple unofficial clients but I'm not convinced of trusting them (or me configuring them) with valuable data.

Dropbox is much better. Data is important and the difference between a premium service and one that is a complementary is that the later will be full of bugs and will corrupt your data.

Dropbox surely had its share of problems but in my experience with the 400 GB archive that I have is that Dropbox was the only one with a decent client that actually works.

In general you get what you pay for and €10 per month doesn't break the bank.

The stock chart for Dropbox from March 2018 to now seems to indicate something pretty bad is happening.

That may be true.

I hope they'll survive because I don't think I can find a good replacement.

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