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>Dropbox (and iCloud) are meant more for cloud file storage than pure device-to-device synce

Device to device sync was literally the value prop for Dropbox when it launched > 10 years ago. That's why I started using it.

Dropbox does now allow a more cloud-native file system / cloud backup usage pattern, but its roots are absolutely "keep my files in sync across several computers."

That was 10 years ago. Yes, I also started using it because of that. These days the the more important feature (at least for me) is being able to offload rarely used files from my drive. SSDs in MacBooks are still crazy expensive.

> That was 10 years ago.

That's exactly what the article author is saying.

This comment thread is about how the author doesn’t seem to realize that the motive of these services has changed in response to fewer and fewer users wanting a sync solution versus a backup solution.

It's definitely not "fewer and fewer users wanting a sync solution" and instead "more and more computer users we can sell something to if we pile features into our overloaded app".

There's a criticism in there that I share because I miss when things were more modular, but I also understand and appreciate the value and opportunities that modern tech is bringing to people.

The back and forth chaos of progress and foundation-building is important but frustrating.

> being able to offload rarely used files from my drive.

> SSDs in MacBooks are still crazy expensive.

It sounds like an archival usage rather than syncing or sharing usage.

Well, above all, it's super convenient. The files stay where they are, you just mark them as "online only" and they don't take up space on your disk.

When you click to open such file or folder, it will immediately download back to your disk and you can use it again. You will lose maybe a few seconds once in a blue moon when you need one of them. But you easily gain hundreds of gigabytes of space on your SSD. Just yesterday I right-clicked some folders to mark them "online only" and immediately gained +300GB free space..

Plus of course you can access those files from your phone or ipad too, when needed. Basically I personally have all my work files in Dropbox and don't use additional backup (used Backblaze in the past).

Why not buy an external drive instead? You could also use it as a backup.

External drives are a thing of history. Too much hassle, too much inconvenience, can't access anytime and anywhere I want, etc. What's the benefit of external drive compared to Dropbox really?

Dropbox works well for small files that you need to share with others. However, if you use it to back up large amounts of data ... say >100GB, the experience of using it is very poor. It consumes large amounts of CPU continually. It takes forever to run to completion (literally in some cases, in my case it ran for weeks before I gave up on it). An external hard drive is of comparable cost to Dropbox, and a one-time cost, not something you need to pay for, forever. It runs to completion in 20 minutes. You can keep multiple versions of it in different physical locations. It's conceptually simple with fewer points of failure.

Personally I tried using several different cloud backup solutions, but I gave up on them. A few encrypted external hard drives, updated every month or two in a repeatable way (e.g. a bash script), one at home, one at work ... and backup is a solved problem. Of course, to each their own.

Then you had some problem. I have ~1TB in Dropbox, files small and large. No problems with sync. Once in a while it does go crazy, eats up a lot of CPU and takes 1 hour to get in proper sync. It’s annoying, but luckily it’s rare. And it goes with me everywhere. How do you access external drive from your phone anyway?

The point of the external hard drives is really just to have a backup. I don't have a 1TB collection of files that I need to access from multiple places. So I would never try to access my big backup from my phone. I don't do that kind of work from my phone, ever. If you're in that situation, something like Dropbox might help, provided that it doesn't eat all your CPU. Good for you! Glad it's working out.

It's cheaper and faster. What's the hassle or inconvenience of a separate drive? If anything, Dropbox is less convenient because it requires installing an application to use it.

The only drawback is that you have to carry it around anywhere you want to access it. A modern external drive is the size of a phone though, so that's hardly a dealbreaker even if you do want to carry it around. Although frankly, cloud storage is much better for filesharing.

I guess it’s just about everyone’s slightly different scenarios. My typical example: I have all my photos on Dropbox. Some of them a decade old. Don’t need them taking up SSD space. Don’t need to carry them around. But once in a blue moon I want to see a decade old photo from my phone while I’m on the other side of planet. Same for my ebooks, older work files, tax returns, etc, etc.

A million game devs cry out with their 500GB project backups on their external drive. Good luck Dropboxing that in a way that makes sense.

Way to take my thing and ruin it then be like "shut up it's old"

How can you claim it's your thing? Customers ain't paying for that.

Some were. But your point is valid; a company will move to what _most_ customers want. A FOSS application can keep servicing the (perhaps smaller) original crowd of users.

10 years ago, Dropbox was still storing your files on their servers so that your devices did not need to be online and accessible at all times in order to sync. It still operated in a fundamentally different manner than Syncthing. All that has really changed about the app is the marketing around it.

Dropbox still has my files on its servers. Not sure what you mean here. If all my devices are off, I can access anything in my Dropbox account from any computer's browser.

I think the comment was confused about what 'LAN sync' actually means within the context of Dropbox.

>>Dropbox (and iCloud) are meant more for cloud file storage than pure device-to-device synce

> Device to device sync was literally the value prop for Dropbox when it launched > 10 years ago.

It's what was advertised. I find it interesting that its initial reception on HN is so frequently slammed for saying "we could already do this, if we wanted to", and then... 10+ years later, Dropbox has had to switch to doing something people want.

The only value I ever saw people getting from Dropbox was in using it as a way to hand off files to someone else across the internet. Which is a use case Dropbox has spent many years fighting against.

Computers as I used to love them

A work of poetry.

> A major initial motivation for both the ARPANET and the Internet was resource sharing.

It's crazy how much I enjoy simple software. No crazy complicated APIs and complex installs. Just give me a binary I can call with a command line interface. I can play with it interactivity and easily automated whenever needed.

The only thing I ever use Dropbox for is requesting files from people that are too large or that their corporate Exchange environment prevents from being sent over email.

>The only value I ever saw people getting from Dropbox

Your exposure to Dropbox users is very very limited, then. I only very, very rarely use it as a medium to share. OTOH, I use it CONSTANTLY as a every-device file system, i.e. across my main machine, my backup, my iOS devices, and remote systems I work from. The sync is everything to me.

Yep and when it first came out it was by far the best option too. IMO it still is.

I have a VPS in Digitalocean that's running syncthing ever since Untrusted Enrypted Storage[1] has been introduced last year.

It's great, it's even better than cloud storage, since the VPS never has access to the encryption key.

[1] https://docs.syncthing.net/branch/untrusted/html/users/untru...

I haven't kept up with what's new, so thanks for pointing this out!

"Cloud" is fundamentally just another device.

Syncing is not a square peg, monetisation is.

There is no reason why syncthing cannot work on both a server in the "cloud" and an end-user device. Syncing files is a well researched and solved problem, at this point dropbox et al are not selling syncing, they are reselling IaaS + integration and gaffataping on anything else tangentially related they can conceive of to squeeze money out of users.

The fundamental value is already there to have for free and at a much higher UX quality, while paying for the IaaS directly... if only non-technical users were aware of it, and could access it as easily.

Exactly. It worked perfectly to sync my Android tablet data on my NAS, but I never tried it as a cloud file server. However it should be relatively easy to set up a VPN on a broadband (non NATted) connection, if it has a dynamic IP hook it to a free domain name using for example DuckDNS (.org), then redirect the VPN traffic to a *PI or similar board and a USB disk that will stay up 24/7, so that no matter when or from where, any other device with the right credentials can use that space as cloud storage from anywhere. The big difference being that there are no strings attached, no size caps, no sign this and that, no download of closed apps, no ads etc.

Startup idea: provide cloud backup service through Syncthing. End users install Syncthing and then add a remote host provided by your company that is bound to their account. That instance just keeps a copy of everything it receives on some cloud infrastructure. Slap a web interface and some modest data retention on it to recover files.

That will probably ruin everything the author liked about it in this post, because then you will have to add account creation, verification, ans sign-in steps. The horror!

Here's hoping storage vendors (Backblaze, Wasabi, etc.) take note and sees this as worthwhile opportunity!

Can already do that with rclone, although a one button setup for syncthing would likely get some play.

That's software done _only_ with end users in mind. It's the same model as redhat uses. IT companies suffer from the fact that they resist changing the design of the product s.t. the company offers much less value in the equation.

It doesn’t have an iOS app ready though

You can use Syncthing for "cloud" storage as long as you keep an instance online at all times. Syncthing's functionality is a superset of Dropbox etc. People absolutely use Dropbox for device-to-device sync. They are not necessarily interested in the "cloud" backup but just want to send a file to a mate.

Yes, except for "online-only" files and sharing files with others, which don't really work with Syncthing. But I use Syncthing heavily and have no use for those.

The opposite can be argued as well.

Dropbox is the entity who tries to fit the "extract money from the users" peg to this file sync functionality.

The cloud aspect of their solution can also be interpreted as "we need an excuse to examine all of your files while we are at it". So we can also get money from NSA or other three letter agencies.

If you change a file does it keep older versions?

Versioning is supported:

* keep x previous revisions, or

* keep old revisions for x time, or

* diy with hook script

https://docs.syncthing.net/users/versioning.html

I'm still looking for some way to have a nice (web) UI for this versioning though.

Using "External File Versioning" on that page you could probably have it commit to a git repository. Then view that repository on GitHub or Gitlab to get nice diffs.