Dropbox finally launches to the public (YC summer 07) | Hacker News Reader

Dropbox finally launches to the public (YC summer 07)

blog.getdropbox.com

144 pointsdhouston80 comments

Dropbox is the first and only sync / storage solution of its kind that ACTUALLY WORKS. Tremendous job, and I love using Dropbox every day.

Same here. Dropbox is the best YC-backed product to date, IMO.

Ahem, TicketStumbler.

Just kidding, I'm in love with their service and am a very happy user. They're backed by Sequoia and some other BSDs.

How the hell do you make something boring like file storage viral and cool? I don't know but Dropbox just did it.

How is it viral?

Not only have I enjoyed it so much I've told countless friends about dropbox, it also auto invites your friends to join when you share a file with them. That's in part why they already had over 100,000 beta testers before even launching.

And rejected from YC the first time, if I remember correctly.

Agreed. It's the second one (after reddit) I will actually use, and the first I would pay for - anyone know what pricing will be for going beyond 2GB?

Answering my own question: $10/mo for 50GB. Not bad.

I love Dropbox, but I've also used Foldershare across all my PCs (and friend's PCs) for years now and it's been great.

I prefer Dropbox now (it's superior), but I never felt like this wasn't something I didn't have access to beforehand.

Your comment really reminds me of this:

"...What you want to be able to say about technology is: it just works. How often do you say that now?" -- http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html

A damn good sign for Dropbox methinks.

What makes something a winner is often very small. What makes that essay a winner is this:

You can't just say "Err" to the user of a stove.

What do you mean "of its kind"? Windows Offline Files and briefcases actually work. Volume Shadow Copy actually works. WebFolders actually work.

They're just not as well connected or cross platform.

Rsync works too. But I'm not going to ask my Dad to install it.

I've been using Syncplicity, which offers similar functionality, and that works too. Clearly, their PR isn't as good - it's been launched for some time.

I find this misleading at best: http://www.getdropbox.com/install?os=linux

It's here, it's open source, and it's free software! Dropbox for Linux is finally available and ready for your everyday use.

Further down the page:

-- dropboxd is a per-user closed-source daemon process that makes sure your $HOME/Dropbox directory is properly synchronized.

They seem to be referring to Linux :)

Along these lines, I want to know what the catch is. Where/how are the files stored, how do they stop us from going past 2gb, is there anything in place for when the RIAA/MPAA come calling? More critical replies please, YC.

want the souce? get it:

http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/5143/nautilus-dropbox-packages/0....

That's not Dropbox, that's the Nautilus integration. That is, you keep the essential parts proprietary and closed, and open the parts where you hope others to do work for you. It's not the oddest strategy, but it doesn't live up to the promise either.

On the other hand, if you freed the daemon too, you could get included in Linux distributions, and people would know what all Dropbox is doing on their computers.

"It started in Boston’s South Station in November 2006 where one night, while waiting for the Chinatown bus to New York, I wrote the first lines of code of what eventually became Dropbox. I had forgotten my USB drive at home and was frustrated that I couldn’t get any 'real work' done."

Ha, classic 'founder story' as discussed 7 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=294663

It's funny because dropbox wouldn't help him on a bus... :)

Not like there's not mobile wireless, and there's even buses with wifi.

DropBox a winner? Xobni a winner? How did they do it?

The recipe is to not rush your product out there. I think most entrepreneurs do not understand "Release Early, Update Daily, Weekly, Monthly". Sometimes releasing early can work against you. Be patient.

DropBox did release early, though, didn't they? Just not publicly. My understanding was they did iterate a lot with early testers.

I know some people who have early clients installed that they can't get rid of :)

I routinely forget I even have Dropbox because it gets out of my way so damn perfectly.

Amazing job. And thank you most of all for the "undo" feature. I'm not saying that one day Dan accidently deleted all of our files, but you know, hypothetically.

Livingston did it.

Don't blame this on poor, sweet Livingston you knave!

Makes me giggle when I remember Joel's rant (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/05/01.html):

"Since 1988 many prominent architecture astronauts have been convinced that the biggest problem to solve is synchronization.

[...]

When did the first sync web sites start coming out? 1999? There were a million versions. xdrive, mydrive, idrive, youdrive, wealldrive for ice cream. Nobody cared then and nobody cares now, because synchronizing files is just not a killer application. I'm sorry. It seems like it should be. But it's not.

[...]

this so called synchronization problem is just not an actual problem, it's a fun programming exercise that you're doing because it's just hard enough to be interesting but not so hard that you can't figure it out."

You show him!

He seems to have embraced it, regardless of his earlier opinions on the subject: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/09/11b.html

You should add a link to your main site on your blog. I arrived on the blog from the HN link having no idea what Dropbox is or what it does. I had to manually edit the url to get to the main page to find out what it does. Lots of users would be too lazy to do that.

Snap. Also, the tour thing doesn't load on the PCs here at work (probably the firewall), so I still don't know what it is! The site could do with a bit of simple plain boring old html text which tells us poor people behind firewalls what all the fuss is about :)

I'd like to emphasize how well Dropbox works as a collaborative tool. Never having to attach and download shared files from email is a great help in staying organized.

A co-worker can simply shoot you an IM or shout across the office that a document has been updated, and it's already on your machine ready to be opened.

I hope people don't get this confused with a source code repository though, as it definitely isn't optimal for working on shared source code. Stick with documents, images, and media, and you'll be fine.

Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/70yy8/dropbox_gd...

Digg: http://digg.com/software/Dropbox_GDrive_Killer_finally_launc...

Already at the top of digg!

I have been using it for quite a few months and am officially impressed with the stability of the app. This is a good time to remember to backup - I will be saving some important photos immediately!

The only complaint I have is that it does not make explicitly clear (to me) what folders are public.

Is there an API such that an automated service could detect that someone shared a folder with it? Failing that, is there a Linux command-line client?

First impressions: Very positive

Dropbox will probably take over gmail as my primary file storage on the go... ;)

Now, one question though, is Dropbox smart enough to only access network when I am actually doing anything with it(ie transfering files from/to Dropbox), or will it occasionally do weird sync type of things even when I am not using it(but have Dropbox folder open on desktop)?

Weird issue with the website: On this page: http://www.getdropbox.com/install?os=linux if I move my mousewheel while the cursor is over that ascii dropbox on the right my cpu usage jumps to 100% and Firefox hangs for a few seconds. Using Firefox 3.0.1 on Ubuntu 8.04.

I can't wait to sign up... but would really like to see encryption. Is this on the todo shortlist? (third time asking!)

I think if you're actually interested in encryption, your best bet is actually not to wait on us to help you with it. If we're cooperating with you to encrypt your data, it's by definition not secure. A number of security-conscious users use us combined with TrueCrypt volumes.

Haha, you win. I'm signing up. Thanks for the reply!

I use an encrypted Mac OS X disk image on my Dropbox. It works well.

Every time you make any change to the image it needs to sync the whole thing, right? Seems wasteful to me, there must be a better solution.

I really doubt it. The whole point to encryption is that the storage area doesn't know anything about your files.

My impression is that cperciva is after this problem, but the wait seems indefinite.

It doesn't. It just syncs the byte changes.

But depending on the encryption scheme, a single byte changed in the unencrypted data can result in the entire encrypted image being different.

It's 128-bit AES. I haven't had a problem yet.

technically half the bits change, on average

I see a couple ways you could introduce encryption securely.

1. At the very least, encrypt data being transfered using SSL, to prevent sniffing on WiFi and other public networks. Public key cryptography (like SSL) certainly can be secure, and does or doesn't require "cooperation" depending on your definition.

2. Your client could somehow integrate with something like TrueCrypt, but leave it up to the user to manage their keys.

We definitely do use encryption for both data transfer and storage. I didn't mean to imply that those things happen in the clear.

And yeah, hopefully we can find a way to help users along the path of managing their own keys.

I must say that while I was already impressed by the product, the blog post announcing the public launch was just as impressive. It is very well written and portrays the company as having great professionalism and aptitude. You don't see many startups doing this.

Finally, yay! for being an MIT startup :)

There seems to be an explosion of these online storage services. They will become much more useful when/if there is a standardized API with per-app isolation and access control. The closest I've seen to that is Openomy:

http://api.openomy.com/2.0

This story has already been Dugg, and interesting to note there seems to be people signing up to Digg just to badmouth dropbox and plug sugarsync.

eg http://digg.com/users/supersaucer

EDIT - PS, love dropbox guys, good work!

Is this an intended use: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/09/11b.html ?

BTW, he's right about the URL. Wonder how much the squatters want for it?

That's awesome. I finally got the invite a week or so ago and I couldn't be happier. I already got 3 of my friends on it as well because it just WORKS. Beautiful

I've use jungledisk and MobileMe/iDisk, but on seeing this story this morning I thought I'd give dropbox a try, and I was blown away by how well it 'just worked'. Things like sharing, proper diffs, public folders all done properly and simply. Really need Mac Finder integration. I'm a convert!

Shame that someone else has the dropbox.com domain though ...

Congrats on the release! Just got an invite yesterday and believe this is a truly great product that provides end-users a beautiful experience.

Fantastic! Now if I could only get the Linux app to work with my Aspire One I'll be in heaven (libgio-2.0.so.0 is a missing dependency).

Looks pretty cool. I'm looking forward to using it. They're presentation at TC50 didn't go so hot though. I feel bad for the guy.

Great job guys! Dropbox is certainly one of the best products I have used, and you guys are definitely making it better...

What about privacy ? Data is stored in clear text ? Where is it stored ?

How about making it possible to setup a private server ?

I will use it only if it has a command that will mount the dropbox somewhere in my filesystem, no nautilus.

I started reading this thread and I thought, oh finally linux. But then I got really sad when I learned that nautilus was required :(

This smells like a perfect application of FUSE to me. Userspace filesystems rock.

W00t, congrats guys, and you're gonna make me regret that I didn't join back last February. :-)

Congrats! I'll pass the word around and see if I can't get some more people to sign up.

Highly recommended -- Dropbox provides an extremely rare, zen-like experience.

Does DropBox encrypt your files? I couldn't find anything on their site.

The tutorial video is great. One of the files was named TPS Report.doc.

"Sometimes you need your files on the run, and we were amazed that no one had made it easy"

What? Never heard of offline files, briefcases, SSH/FTP/SFTP/Web/WebDAV servers, Sharepoint, Groove...? (or any of millions of online file repositories?)

Keyword being "easy."

That seems an odd keyword for the sort of person capable of writing dropbox and for a site like HN which revels in arguments about what kind of threading mechanisms are preferable.

I don't suppose I'd win any favor for saying Offline Folders - you logoff your domain, they sync, you logon, they sync again. It isn't any effort once it's setup. Not even browsing to a webpage or entering a password.

a) Home users don't have Windows domains

b) Nor can they set up offline folders easily

congrats (again) drew!

Congrats and dugg!

Is a domain name change in the future? Drop the word get?

This is awesome; exactly what I've been looking for.

Congrats on the launch!

I liked this :

Now with lots of AJAX!

this seems like an easy backup solution for a small business.

Love it.

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