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Comment by manigandham | Hacker News Reader

Dropbox still has the best syncing tech [1][2] which handles complex situations with lots of files and responds instantly. That alone is worth it if you need it.

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

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Maybe Dropbox's is the best out of a bunch of mediocre syncing solutions. However, I do wish to add that Dropbox struggles with scale: lots of small files slow down sync to a crawl and spin CPU at 100%.

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.

Sure, but Rsync and Dropbox are very different. There's really no software option that handles that many small files well with the same features (realtime sync, folder moves, binary diffs, file history, etc).

Rsync is great for taking a snapshot and replicating it elsewhere, which is probably a better fit for research projects anyway.

Sounds to me like git has basically all those features (although you need to have plugins for the binary diffs and realtime would require frequent pull/push/rebase).

Both the official Dropbox client and Maestral take hours at high CPU usage to complete an initial sync of my 7 gigabyte Dropbox with 30 thousand files. Maybe sync is hard, maybe Dropbox's data representation is inefficient, maybe it's because both are written in Python, an inefficient language.

> Dropbox still has the best syncing tech

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.

One particular advantage of Dropbox is that it's vendor-neutral and on pretty much every platform I can think of. This is good for people like me who insist on having one foot in every ecosystem. Good luck finding, say, an iCloud or OneDrive client for Linux.

Now if only the iPad client could actually background upload files when you save files using the system file picker...

There is a plugin for Thunderbird thats integrates with box.com to upload huge attachments there and paste a generated download link into the mail.

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