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Comment by datashow | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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