Maestral – open-source Dropbox client | Hacker News Reader

Maestral – open-source Dropbox client

maestral.app

175 pointslsferreira4240 comments

This is a great client but I’ll add the no Smart Sync caveat. It’s funny, five or six years ago, that wasn’t a deal breaker (selective sync was all I needed), but it increasingly is now. I preferred this until Dropbox got an Apple Silicon client, but I think I’m too dependent on Smart Sync to use this as my primary client on primary machines. On secondary machines where I don’t need to access stuff as often, it’s great.

What's Smart Sync?

Edit: https://help.dropbox.com/installs-integrations/sync-uploads/...

Smart Sync is pretty broken in macOS 12.3 fwiw.

Just wondering, but how doe these clients exist? Wouldn't DD send a cease and desist or simple modify their API to disable it? Or are the leaning on how ppl don't want to update clients so DropBox actually can't make breaking API changes?

Why would Dropbox want to shut this down? They publish an API, and they encourage developers to integrate with their API.

Dropbox isn't pushing ads at users, so it's not like Twitter or YouTube where unofficial clients are a threat to their business model. Very much the opposite, I think.

The official client has a limit of 3 machines for free users.

I would have probably converted to paid, or another service, if not for unofficial clients (on mobile where smart sync is irrelevant) allowing me to stay under the limit

There are all kinds of reasons why an org would want to shut down third party clients like these; perhaps they feel like they could be held liable if the clients misbehave / delete all files, or feel like they want more control over the “Dropbox experience”. Remember, Twitter at one time was also pushing people to integrate into their ecosystem, but then decided to kill third party clients.

In my case I’m super happy with maestral, as the vanilla Dropbox client doesn’t support my filesystem.

They push “ads” to get you to pay for more storage.

If you need more storage then you're have to pay for it regardless of your client. I doubt they get much money from people seeing upgrade CTAs and paying for stuff they don't need.

They push adds regardless if you need more storage or not. They constantly nag to do other upgrades too. It's annoying. Every time I work with Dropbox, especially their web version, I've to be careful what I click on.

If so, I'd very much prefer Dropbox stop shilling me with undisablable upgrade notices when you're getting near full, on their official client and website.

To be fair - that sounds like a reasonable conversion opportunity. I use like 100MB out of 2GB on a free plan so they'll never get my money.

What got me to convert was limiting the # of devices I could sync, not any storage limits.

I’m a very annoying way, like “URGENT: Your storage Blah Blah Blha…”

If this is just using API endpoints I can’t see the justification for a cease & desist

Although lack of justification has not impeded nastygrams in the past

I use maestral on macOS and it works great. More lightweight than the official client, and when I do a clean reinstall it's almost automatic via brew.

Good stuff.

But smart sync is a deal killer. I have a few hundred gigs of data in Dropbox at this point and smart sync is a big savior.

But this would be awesome for Linux.

"Unlimited number of devices" would concern me here: Third party clients generally aren't too problematic for service companies... unless they bypass revenue somehow. I can't imagine Dropbox is thrilled this app bypasses a revenue tier.

The device limit by Dropbox only applies to devices using the official client. This uses the official API, but Dropbox does not impose any limits on the number of apps using that. That’s why this doesn’t count towards your device limit. It’s not a workaround or a bypass, but just a quirk of how Dropbox bills for devices.

Ah. No easy way to get it working on Windows, sadly.

And the official Windows Dropbox client is a no-go. I have too many files. It just never starts the sync. It thinks it has downloaded all my files, but they are always zero bytes and I am constantly going into the web UI to check it hasn't erased them all.

Back to just download multi-hundred-gig .zips from the web UI to get my data out of Dropbox.

IDrive's app is the same. No easy way to get your data back out.

The only one that sort of works, but you have to go a folder at a time, is Mega's app.

(put.io is nice because you can FTP to your files, but I don't consider them a cloud storage provider of the regular sort)

Can't any cloud storage provider make a good app? Is rsync any good?

I wanted to use this, but it doesn't handle Smart Sync, a feature I find myself really taking advantage of. But, I'm glad this sort of thing exists!

I've been using this for a while from Linux because my Dropbox folder is on an NTFS drive. It's very nice.

Good to see this here!

I started using Maestral after finding myself increasingly annoyed by the unfortunately shitty experience of the official client on the Mac (and the lack of a native ARM release at the time). What I really like is that I haven’t ever really noticed it’s there, which is exactly what you want from a bit of software like this.

It’s a bit unfortunate that it doesn’t (or more accurately can’t) support smart sync, which is a very nice Dropbox feature. But it’s actually worth the sacrifice.

Why couldn't it support smart sync?

I can't use this because I'm on Windows, but it looks cool. I love the idea of more fine-grained sync control with gitignore-style pattern matching. Neat!

are there any limits around the number of files? The official linux client starts to bug out somewhere over 250k files and gets stuck on "syncing". Dropbox support have said they don't recommend more than 100k files.

Ugh. This might explain why my Dropbox client is forever broken on Windows too. I have hundreds of thousands of file. It will just never sync. I was about to start just pulling down multi-hundred-gig Zip files if the web UI would let me. Let's see if this app can do it.

Now, if only someone would make a client for IDrive so I can exfiltrate all my data from there...

Have you tried using rclone with their S3 backend? https://forum.rclone.org/t/setting-rclone-for-idrive/20822

Thank you. I tried this some time ago from another article and could not get it to work. I'll try from your link and see how I get on.

It's not my project, just a very happy user here!

you can also run more than one dropbox account on the same machine using maestral

soft links do not seem to work on MacOS

I wish Dropbox was actually competitive. It is $20 more per year than Google, much slower speeds and caps, 2GB size limit, etc. The only people picking Dropbox are those that are naive or are connected to the brand.

I tried out Google Drive on Windows years ago when I was already using Dropbox, but its performance was terrible. It might be better now. To fix sync I had to reinstall and resync, I couldn't just point it at an existing folder with the files I had. I've used various incarnations of onedrive and it also doesn't hold up to Dropbox's performance.

My main use case is all my audio recordings from my DAW - each take generates a small .wav and .reapeaks file. I use this as my live working folder - I read and write into my Dropbox folder while it's syncing.

These add up (more count- than total-size- wise). I currently have 378k files, 23k folders, 754 GB and Dropbox is the only client that hasn't skipped a beat with it (even before they rewrote it in rust - it used to be python???? insane). It runs well on a 10-year-old CPU and even ran well before I moved it to an SSD.

It's not perfect - onedrive keeps infinite document history, Dropbox a max of a year - but for anyone looking for sync performance I'd suggest looking at Dropbox first.

Hello from a fellow musician! I have a very similar setup, but using Studio One DAW which allows seamlessly converting any recorded WAV files in the project to FLAC — wondering if Reaper could do the same. Reduces the amount to sync by 2-3 times, which is very significant.

I do the same but with Google Drive and it’s been working fine.

I don’t sync nearly as much content as you though.

Considering how easy it is to get banned on Google, I am not surprised.

$20 is a negligible cost for not putting all your eggs in one basket.

That is there most basic personal plan. The costs savings are substantial with Google once you evaluate business plans compared to GSuite. Dropbox just doesn't compete and they are a dying product because of it. HN doesn't like to hear it, but it is the truth.

Google Drive doesn’t have a client for Linux and not everyone wants to use Google products.

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