Open-source Dropbox client, with multi-account, no-device-limit and M1 support
github.com
github.com
1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
2. It doesn't actually replace a USB drive. Most people I know e-mail files to themselves or host them somewhere online to be able to perform presentations, but they still carry a USB drive in case there are connectivity problems. This does not solve the connectivity issue.
3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?
I respectfully disagree. You got trolled and you can laugh about it, thats a win in my book.
The second one is legit. Most of the times I must give a presentation I'm requested to send the file earlier. (And I go with a USB drive just in case.)
And the third, ... I think it's still a problem.
It was enough to get a decade of VC money and even start breaking even in 2020, but it's a far more tumultuous journey than their initial user uptake would have indicated.
How is this "somewhat" correct? The competition turned out to be trillion dollar companies implementing the exact same thing, not linux sysadmins.
I used to do that, but not anymore... why not use an E2E encrypted Element/Matrix channel instead?
No-one creates anything original any more.
:troll:
After you grow as a company and hire lots of engineers and your core product is "good enough", you have to try to pivot/stay relevant/compete/innovate I guess. Lots of manpower (I have no idea how large their engineering team is) need to be kept busy I guess?
This one is over 5 pages, with 5 different sections which don't even look triangle-shaped as you can usually expect from increasingly-priced plans.
I don't know if I would call it horrible. Money makes the world turn. Capitalism and all that.
They need to compete with what the competition is doing.
The product sucks in lots of other ways.
There is nothing like changing an excel file, having it correctly modified locally but still seeing the old data in a linked PowerPoint because OneDrive didn't update.
It also managed to lose me a day of work once despite having saved the file regularly. None of my modifications were properly synched to the history.
I also hate how it pauses itself when I'm sharing my phone connection and tends to struggle when I restart it.
I used to really dislike Google Drive before my company migrated but between that and the abysmal outlook search I really miss Google.
Google forced the new Google Drive client on me...
On my M1 Mac it crashes constantly and the Finder pops up Google Drive disconnect dialogues constantly.
Two days into finally relenting and giving the update from Backup & Sync to the new Drive client another try, it's still churning through my files!
It may never finish at this rate it constantly crashes!
Google Drive on M1 macOS is bad. Really bad. :-/
More that it crashes constantly!
It could be the volume of files it's churning through. But still... 'cmon Google!
If I use new Drive with my personal account, that only has ~200 or so files. Then no real issues.
However, when I tell it to sync to a Google Drive account that has ~200k files.... then it chokes.
I'm also telling it to download the files and store them on an external SSD, so they can be backed up by a 3rd party service!
With a large number of files, the new Drive client isn't having a good day! :-)
I do not know if this is still the case nowadays.
Nothing in between..
https://i.imgur.com/uTH75ex.png
It comes with Dropbox Paper, etc. Also, Dropbox, if you're reading this and are thinking about taking it away from me I'm switching to OneDrive immediately, I'm already paying for Office 365 anyway.
Also, more proof: https://i.imgur.com/BThdxTD.png
> I feel like they are missing the mark when it comes to marketing to consumers here.
I get the impression they're relying on name recognition and first mover advantage to keep the simple users flowing in, while all of the extra features and GUI fluff are built out to attract some other audience that makes decisions by counting up how many different features are listed on each product page.
These days, I'm just happy that I haven't had to force-kill the Dropbox client in many months. I wish there was some way to go back to the days where they just synced my files for me, let me share a few things, and I didn't have to fight with their GUI all the time.
Since I joined over a decade ago, they have removed an extremely useful Public folder with the capability to generate direct links, limited the number of devices, and added a ton of features I never wanted from them, like Paper.
- I’m stupid and I kept a git repo in there, it became corrupt. Doesn’t surprise me but wondering what else is fragile in dropbox.
- Uploading pictures on mobile is really really slow. For some reason google photos on iOS is so much faster, like incomparably faster.
- Google photos also allows you to quickly get to all your pictures. Dropbox is… at best cumbersome, at worst really slow at fetching lots of pictures.
- make public folders a thing again for paying users. I’m sure this would create an awesome ecosystem of websites.
The problem with some of the competitors is they do not treat photos as its own thing separate from files. I think google did a great job understanding that photos are not just a folder of files but that they require their own dedicated software.
Also they took away the extra storage I had gotten from various deals.
Saved them 3.8 GB or something, lost them an unpaid sales representative and got them a few posts like this on the internet.
It used to be really great, you just have an "ender chest" folder that shows up on all your computers with a public folder that shows up on their web server. They screwed up the public folder pretty badly and I left after that.
Now we have syncthing anyway which is better anyway for a number of reasons and most people know git which works better on mobile devices.
I don't even know how to make it open my folder for me in the file explorer any more. I just ignore their thingy and go to the folder by myself now.
Wait a second. Did they? My Dropbox client is currently working on my Arch system.
It didn't really make sense either and I know several people moved away from Dropbox because they were using xfs. I'm using pCloud with their lifetime 1TB plan.
That doesn't stop me using Syncthing though. I just use my iPad less. Which is a shame. I like the handwriting recognition it has. There's an app called Mobius Sync which promises Syncthing support but doesn't work quite as well.
Also it would silently refuse to sync some files which eventually I realised were not valid windows filenames though they were perfectly fine under Unix.
Has it gotten better? It’s free so I’d be willing to use it if I could trust it.
Unicode is hard.
However the rest of the product is crap. Dropbox had a solid business with a "magic folder that syncs" but has been chasing new features and product lines with little success. Even the enterprise offering was far behind Box.com for years and now has tons of competition.
1. https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/rewriting-the-heart-of-o... 2. https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure
Can confirm without any references etc that I have found it to be vastly superior to all other syncs. Top of the pile for me is that it handles small changes in large files without reuploading the entire thing. That said, I havent used it for years.
Concretely, I had a certain folder with 100,000+ small files for some research I was doing with a collaborator. It took my laptop 24 hours to sync this folder, and throughout my CPU was at 100% throughout. For comparison, rsync got the same job done in a few minutes. See https://help.dropbox.com/accounts-billing/space-storage/file... , the above terrible experience is in line with this caveat.
Rsync is great for taking a snapshot and replicating it elsewhere, which is probably a better fit for research projects anyway.
Now if only the iPad client could actually background upload files when you save files using the system file picker...
Seems to me that the correct strategy for Dropbox would have been to be super focused on the core product and on not hiring in too many people/taking in too much capital. That would of course have introduced a market cap, but if 1% of everyone had ended up on a reasonably priced personal plan it would have been a roomy cap.
As it was, Dropbox has grown into yet-another ms-office-in-the-sky and there is no way they will make it against their competitors who can burn the cash, and who are slowly catching up on sync technology.
This is really a shame too: Dropbox is just the gold standard for sync. Before Dropbox I was using unison[0] and tried every other sync product, but nothing came close. TBH I am still using Dropbox every day, getting around the device limit by sharing stuff with multiple free accounts...
- 2 TB on Dropbox is £7.99 / month
- 1 TB OneDrive is £59.99 / year
- 1 TB on S3 is $23.99 / month
How can Dropbox and OneDrive be cheaper than S3 at all, let alone after providing value add on top? Is it something to do with lower reliability and availability guarantees? Is it possible to buy direct access to their underlying storage?
https://www.dropbox.com/individual
https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-365/onedrive/compa...
I have 4 O365 accounts and I have 700GB on it myself but the other 3 accounts have nothing. I doubt the average usage is more than 100GB.
Glacier is worth noting as a comparison point, $4 or $1 per TB per month with more limits.
Backblaze said a couple years ago their cost to provide a low-redundancy TB per month was a bit over $3.
And like others have said, users are charged for storage that many don't use so there's a lot of revenue padding. Same model used by the other clouds for consumer storage like Google Drive.
I don’t use any of the add-on services like Paper.
I used to be disappointed that I couldn’t get an account larger than 2TB at a reasonable price, but then I adapted my workflow to split my data into hot/cold, with hot staying in Dropbox and cold going elsewhere. Because of this I could probably adapt to a smaller Dropbox account now.
- Stuff I am working on, documents, small stuff: iCloud Drive
- Stuff I want to consume (lossless music, movies) and larger files I occasionally need but that I don't need to update: https://www.transip.nl/stack/
- Stuff I want to archive and maybe need to retrieve at some point in the future: B2
But then I got richer and with a 40TB NAS, a few $ per year hostname, an ip refresh script for the registrar and a vpn server included in the nas, well I have a monster dropbox equivalent and now that I have 5G, I dont even understand anymore why people dont just do that. You lose the ability to access docs offline but then you have massive space online without having to share it with american people (Im in China). In terms of reliability, modern NASes are really good and I only ever lost stuff when I got caught in trying btrfs lol
And with the recent temptation to scan cloud stuff for dangerous data, I feel more at ease with the NAS solution.
Also, I use OneDrive at work and even if I like its integration directly within Office (especially Excel), I have issues daily with the sync. Lots of conflicts, lots of "can't sync"... And even if I keep removing it, I keep getting two or three shortcuts on the left sidebar in Explorer and it annoys me quite a lot.
So for now I'm staying with Dropbox but I will have no issue switching ship if I see something better elsewhere or, worse, if they make bad choices.
They're supposedly breaking even for the first time this month, after ten years, but growth is slowing dramatically. They have over 700 million users, but only 15 million paying users. Growth in paying users from 2019-2020 was only 8%, down from 12% the year before, and the numbers are more dramatic the farther back you go.
They're at cost parity with their primary competitors for the most basic plan ($9.99 for 1TB), but there are cheaper alternatives, especially for family plans. Dropbox doesn't have the economies of scale that Microsoft, Google, et. al. have, so storage remains a loss-leader for them. The only way they can make money is trying to upsell addons that most people don't want. If not for the inertia of being first to market, they wouldn't have many paying users. The year-over-year growth in paying customers says it all.
Using Syncthing now, and it's been solid.
OneDrive (I use it at work): if one file fails, all files stop syncing. It sometimes tries to sync some files from teams and just never finishes. It also has very strange file name restrictions. if the file name is bad (eg whitespace at the end) it will just stop syncing anything. Still better than Google Drive as it is a standard folder. if it crashes your data is HERE.
google drive (I used that at work): on MacOS is it is utter crap as it is not a folder but a mounted thing. So it is not "there" when you login. So every application that tries to open a file on google drive just fails. Because it is not an apple FS a lot of apple apps will complain. MySQL Workbench will often fail to save and often destroy files. If not running it is not mounted and none of your files are here. you also can't copy out google files (writer, spreadsheet, etc). For whatever reason.
iCloud: some strange folder nested hundred levels deep. I only use it because of some ios stuff.
So yeah, Dropbox might be pricey but through all the years it really worked very well for me. (And I really don't care about any of the other services they have)
That's Google File Stream. There is also a client called Backup and Sync that works like Dropbox, I'm using it now. These are apparently being merged into a single client to be called Google Drive Desktop.
I wonder if this is a retreat from that strategy, or if the single program will be used as a way to nudge Backup and Sync users to adopt the File Stream flow.
I've found that inSync is a wonderful client for GoogleDrive and OneDrive for all major platforms. It has some nice features like out of tree syncing (sync a cloud folder to anywhere on the filesystem and keep it synced), and .gitignore like ignore syntax.
I'd recommend it heavily. It's a one-time-payment application with no limitations.
They've added dropbox support recently.
If you feel inclined, give it a try again.
Just because I slap on a "business tier" sticker on a water bottle doesn't mean the water bottle is better equipped at solving enterprise needs.
I know someone using Dropbox for video editing, they've been using the Synology Dropbox client which also uses the API. It hasn't been a problem.
The large video files (tens or hundreds of GB) are ingested once and never edited, the only edits to files are the small project files (megabytes), and some graphics files (hundreds of megabytes). Re-exports of rendered video causes the whole file to change anyway due to the nature of video compression so binary diff doesn't help there anyway.
The biggest problem I have with these 3rd party clients is sometimes things just don't work right. Like for example gimp just fails to open files in the synced folder (google drive not the OP project) until I copy them out and open them. Not sure what the issue is though.
10 TB / 1 month.
> 60 MB?
In the post they replied to.
That's ~32Mbps.
Also it's not even that bandwidth expensive with most users' workflow. Maybe this should be a concern for video editors. Majority of people who are just editing word documents (or code, for what I believe is most HN's audience), wouldn't notice the difference.
I honestly just want an app that sits there any syncs a folder of files to cloud storage for me. Add some settings and status information, keep the nice features like partial/"smart" sync—along with some shell integration so I can share stuff easily—and it would be absolutely great. I just want to give them some money in exchange for providing some useful services.
But it takes genuine effort to make a UI this unappealing. Why is it using it's own non-system font?? Why is the text blurry – in some places, and not in others? Why are all the checkbox icons broken? Why does it include a terrible file manager application??
Bah, I know I'm just yelling at clouds and the reasons are more complex. But I am definitely finding more and more apps that I've used for ages are just getting _actively worse_ for my use-cases and it's so frustrating.
Dropbox was an exceptional product with perfect OS integration and interesting features like the “public folder” with an added web server, a versioning system, etc.
My use case was not storing big backup files in the cloud but synchronise files between several machines: keeping compatibility with older systems/devices and smaller but cheaper DropBox (100GB?) sizes would have kept me as client.
At every update the OS plugin has become more bloated and incomprehensible…
I thought Dropbox disabled this feature?
From here: https://help.dropbox.com/files-folders/share/public-folder
Excerpt:
Using the public folder to render HTML content :: As of October 3, 2016 Dropbox Basic (free) users can no longer use public links to render HTML content in a web browser. If you're a Basic user, and you created a website that directly displays HTML content from your Dropbox account, it will no longer render in the browser.
Effective September 1, 2017, Dropbox Plus and Business users can no longer render HTML content, and the Public folder and its sharing functionality have been disabled.
The creator is doing good stuff.
Now can someone do this for OneDrive? As bad as we might complain about the new Dropbox app, OneDrive is a giant garbage fire.
Even if MS would build a client it would probably be Linux only which still won't help me for FreeBSD.
The NC client (and I assume also OC) can still generate conflicts even on a single machine, when the network/server connection is not stable. I also remember the Nginx default settings for OwnCloud being suboptimal.
Long ago, the NC/OC client was slow to sync, but now it's snappy.
Also, tab completion.
I use YouTube-dl on Reddit, so the headline becomes the file name. Lots of emojis in Reddit titles. On the “nature is fucking lit” subreddit, it seems to be a rule to start your title with a fire emoji.
* Not affiliated with seafile, just really like their software.
I switched after Dropbox started imposing a device limit. There was a but of a learning curve to get it all set up and the quality of the client software can be hit-or-miss. That said, the core functionality (syncing files between devices) has been rock solid.
Does anyone have insight on what's taking them so long? I assume they forked an older version of Electron that doesn't support m1.
You can't build a file sync client with Electron. You need very granular filesystem access, which is something that Electron does poorly.
I then shifted into using it to also back up my photos from my mobile and camera, however my photo storage started to grow and this year I switched to Google Drive & Photos for much much less than Dropbox was offering per month. I think 100GB of Google Drive & Photos is $25.99 per year opposed to $184 per year for 1TB with DropBox. I don't need 1TB but 100GB is perfect compared to 10GB with Dropbox (that I had).
Edit: the toolbar on a new "Paper" doc allow me to insert an image, media, dropbox file, table, timeline, to do list, and code blocks. I can link a calendar event to a doc, Oh, I can hit a button to switch to "Presentation Mode"... and I can highlight text to comment on it. So on second thought it seems very similar to google docs.
Mind you, this is a company that went out of their way to port a Linux client in 2011.
To see them hesitate with m1 is shocking
Besides gaming, when consumer software stops support for macOS, it doesn’t look good.