Genesis of requiring a "Dropbox folder," versus designated folders | Hacker News Reader

Genesis of requiring a "Dropbox folder," versus designated folders

quora.com

196 pointsbrezina31 comments

The core take-away from this, especially for the early startup, is doing less better is a far superior strategy to doing more worse. At the early stage, nobody is going to care about how many features you have. They care about how well you solve the small problems you are solving.

It's not even that, it's KISS for users

I liked the way Drew put it:

It's also one of our core design principles to do fewer things rather than half-ass anything...

Totally agree. I would also add that the long-term effect of doing more could have been really detrimental here. If they let users share tons of folders this would have made it much more difficult to work with a variety of platforms and devices. If you don't have to put in a feature, don't!

It's interesting to see how a decision that seems mostly based on a technical difficulty (how to make it work simply with multiple or any folder), had so many positive consequences in terms of user experience.

The fact that it doesn't take forever to do the first sync,* that you don't get to mess up your existing documents, that you don't go over your quota right away, etc.

On top of that, having a Dropbox folder is fantastic for branding.

* I'm having this problem with my BackBlaze account that has been uploading the first batch for the past 6 months…

I find it incredible that this is the first post in either thread to have mentioned branding (and disingenuous on the part of the Dropbox CEO to have not mentioned it, as if it played no part).

I must admit that the first time I looked at Dropbox, the single folder design made me stop the train. It wasn't until months later that I realized I could set up symlinks. It was a bit of an "I feel like a dumbass" moment.

With this in mind, it's easy to see that the Dropbox made the right design decision. With symlinks, the problem was already solved for them in a way that power users are already familiar with.

Can you elaborate?

Take a look at the Wiki article on symlinks: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_link

If you're a Windows user think of a more hardcode version of shortcuts. You can create them in Windows Vista / 7 from the command line through the `mklink` command.

Basically you can set up a symbolic link from inside your Dropbox folder to any other directory and Dropbox will start syncing the folder without you having to actually copy or move files.

Or use a shell extension: http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlinkshellext/hardlinkshellext...

Dropbox and symlinks is what I do with config files like .bashrc, .vimrc, .gitconfig, etc.

Then when you setup a new machine - install dropbox and let it sync, then just symlink them back up... everything is back to normal.

Really a nice setup so you can continue to change your config files and not worry about saving the changes to some backup gist or something

So the problem Drew mentioned, of mapping between different sets of sync folders on different machines, is transformed into mapping an identical folder hierarchy (i.e. the dropbox folder and contents) to arbitrary sync files/folders, done by the user, for that specific machine.

You get the simple, instant user model (dropbox folder), which you can customize to any arbitrary user model, as much or as little as you want, when you want it. And simple syncing.

I just keep my config files in git. Having to commit changes is a good thing, not a nuisance - being able to track changes is hugely useful.

It's most definitely a more easily understood mental model.

I also run Live Mesh to sync my music between work/home, because it has the neat feature of non-server syncing (it allows you to sync an arbitrary amount of data, but only between two client PCs, no server storage).

However, an odd feature in Live Mesh is the capability to add an already-syncing folder to an existing machine in the group. There's no UI to allow you pick where on the remote PC you want the data to end up, so it's possible to push a bunch of data to a drive that you didn't want to.

Plus, moving this data is also weird:

- Stop syncing the folder

- Move the folder

- Ask to sync the folder, and point to the new location

There's a certain level of "is this going to work?" going on in your head when you complete that last step. I'm guessing this sort of problem exists in both Live Mesh and Dropbox, although with the single-folder paradigm in dropbox, this scenario probably doesn't happen that often.

> It's most definitely a more easily understood mental model.

That doesn't mean they shouldn't offer an alternative for those would prefer to sync specific folders. I've ended up simulating this behavior by using symlinks, but that's a real hacky solution and still doesn't solve the problem of selective syncing.

They definitely realize that they have to offer some sort of solution, hence his "stay tuned."

It was a big UX and strategy choice to offer the a one folder dropbox and it paid off. Now's when they can roll out what people want.

They do. Run the betas, you can change the folder's location and run "selective sync" - just set it to C: and turn everything off that you don't want to save.

I'm running the experimental version on Linux, and I see that they do have a selective sync option. But I don't see how to specify a generic folder to be synced. All I can do is change the location of the "Dropbox" folder.

I think I'll read that question/answer every time I've got to choose between "Complex to explain but powerful" vs "Easy but trivial to explain". It's so hard sometime to take the "easy" route as a programmer who know you can build the powerful way.

By and large I agree, but as I'm using Dropbox for more and more things, I really would like 2 small adjustments to existing features:

1. Allow me to sync any folder - i.e. don't require the creation of a "Dropbox" folder.

2. Modify Selective Sync so that I can omit folders on the client from syncing.

If those two features existed, I could select my home folder to sync and exclude Music, Photos, etc if they were too large for my account. I don't need a complicated remapping interface for syncing when this is done, and it maintains the mental model of a single folder that's synced.

I started writing this comment thinking how great this solution would be, but the more I thought about it, the more confusing it seems to get. What happens if I sync my home folder and I don't uncheck ~/Library? But I really did want my Firefox profile synced.

I think to do multi-folder sync, you really are going to have to provide a mapping interface: Folder A in the dropbox goes to Folder X on this computer and Folder Y on that computer. Complicated and definitely a power-user feature.

A possible solution would be to put "shortcut" where your folders in the Dropbox folder. Dropbox could then abstract that "shortcut". So, say on my desktop I create a shortcut to my mp3/ folder, I would see a "Mp3" shortcut on my iphone also. So, that fix the "What if multiple folders have the same name" problem since it's not about folders anymore but about shortcuts that need to have different names.

So, it's a simple solution that would make power user happy but still leave the easy install, easy comprehensibility, etc.

Also, I use Windows and Ubuntu at work and Mac and Fedora at home. All of them have different "home" folder structures and terminology. It would be a major pain in the back to map them with each other properly.

Don't know about you, but I already switched from Dropbox to Windows Live Mesh 2011.

One of the reasons (after unlimited p2p sync and 5GB cloud sync) was the ability to sync ANY regular folder on my HDD...

Turns out they didn't consider the UI as too confusing or complicated.

perhaps this helps clarify which approach is succeeding:

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=live+mesh vs. http://search.twitter.com/search?q=dropbox

Fun comment, and Dropbox probably is winning by quite a bit, but Dropbox's referral system for free storage could be the explanation for the Twitter traffic.

https://www.dropbox.com/referrals

Twitter comments don't pay the bills.

I'm with you, although I do think the UI leaves something to be desired. I'd probably recommend DropBox to my parents -- at least until Windows makes "Live Mesh" just a built in part of Windows.

Question for you, in the old version of Live Mesh there was an Explorer extension, where I could right-click a folder and say, "Add to Mesh". It appears that this is gone and I have to go to the Live Mesh app to add a folder. Is there another way to do it?

How well does that work on Linux?

I seem to recall an older version of the Dropbox client (0.6.384?) allowed you to actually designate the name & location of your "My Dropbox" folder and get around this feature/limitation (if you're so inclined).

I know I did it when I first installed the software -- for as long as I've been using Dropbox I've never used "My Dropbox" - it's always been "Documents" for me.

I just did some checking and it looks like that version of the software isn't availble anymore (at least not via official channels). I know that upgrading to future versions does keep that setting -- I'm running v1.0.10 and it's still "Documents" for me.

From a scan of their Wiki, looks like symlinks and/or other utilities are the preferred method. Frankly, I understand why they made this design decision and it's worked well for them, but for advanced users (me & a lot of other HN readers , I presume), it would be nice to have a slightly more direct way of accomplishing this.

one word, symlinks!

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