Dropbox Backup | Hacker News Reader

Dropbox Backup

blog.dropbox.com

I stopped using Dropbox when it started asking if I want to back up every USB drive that I plug into my PC, and started to pollute my removable drives with a configuration file. (Because for some reason that's the only way it can know that I don't want my removable drives backed up.)

All I've ever wanted is a folder that syncs automatically. Nothing more. And for a while Dropbox was the best at fulfilling that role and getting out of the way, but it seems feature-creep has taken over.

Too late. They could have done this nearly from the beginning, when people were still using Dropbox and asking to sync any folder on their computer.

Instead they junkified their app and alienated most tech users, who won’t suggest using it anymore.

I hope that documents stuff works out for them though.

I don't know if 'most' tech uses are alienated though. I feel their offering is still quite good.

If not alienated, the need for Dropbox is not as high as it used to. If you have a Mac, you can sync the documents and desktop natively directly to your phone and can right click any file within them to get a link or share it with other Mac users. This won’t cover every user but it was enough for me and several friends to drop Dropbox.

It is fine for what it is however all the large tech companies have some comparable offering(Google Drive, Icloud, OneDrive) for which the barrier to entry is much lower.

Yep, after setting to strict limits on their free plans, I abandoned them, and built my own, local "dropbox" (syncthing), and haven't looked back since.

I tried using syncthing as I liked the idea of not relying on a cloud provider, but it seemed to be really slow. So slow that I gave up and setup Google Drive. (even over a local network syncing a 2gb file was going to take hours even though I could download that file from the internet in a couple of minutes - is special configuration required to make it use the local network?)

There shouldn't be, somethings going wrong for you. I use syncthing to sync gigabytes of music from my computer to my phone and it takes a couple of minutes over wifi. Syncthing will automatically exchange all known addresses that your device can be found at between your paired devices, and it will then normally use the local network. Not sure whats going wrong for you :/

The Syncthing developers themselves are using Syncthing to sync dozens of megabytes of data. I saw in one of their forum comments.

I tried to setup a drive with roughly 2TB of data. It was extremely slow to get synchronized between my mac and linux. Both in same LAN. Syncthing seems to be a lot of checksums.

I have all the computers connected via (my own) VPN servers, and the only limit for me was my connection speed (which on cable was 1gbit, on some random wifi, slower).

The nodes are set by default to have local discovery, but you need port 22000(?) open for synchronization to work (if you have firewall enabled)

The percentage of customers who have the ability and desire to set up their own sync solution is so small for Dropbox that they are right not to worry about it.

Globally, counting "normal people"... sure.

People discussing this here in these threads.... i think atleast 80% of them have both ability and means to do so. .

I have the ability and means and still wouldn’t do it. Even $120/year is nothing compared to the time I’d lose setting up and maintaining the system. It just doesn’t make monetary sense.

Interesting. We both evidently did the same calculation when Dropbox started enforcing its limits, but ended up with different answers. For me, the time, hassle and money to run my own instance of syncthing or whatever exceeded the hundred bucks or so a year Dropbox wanted to do it for me. Wonder where our weightings differed.

I didn't want my data in the cloud, I wanted more space, less limitations and more flexibility in sharing (eg. share this folder with PC1, this folder with PC2, etc). ...but I had dropbox, it worked, and i was too lazy to move.

The limitations from dropbox were a push for me, because limiting usage to three devices basically broke dropbox for me, and forced me to move to syncthing.

Me three. When Dropbox hit me with the three-device limit, I decided to just move my stuff to OneDrive. Granted, my OneDrive account has 40 GB free space (through various grandfathered deals), but if it didn’t, I’d probably prefer to pay Microsoft (or Google) $19.99/year for 100 GB rather than paying Dropbox $120 for 2000 GB (the majority of which would go unused).

Dropbox has an obvious problem and it's not that. Their pricing has not kept up with the times. If you're willing to pay for a full year in one shot, the minimum you'll pay is $120. That's just too much for most of their potential customers. Maybe if the pricing was in the neighborhood of competitive those other things would matter.

Dropbox Shop - I had to check the date of the post to make sure it wasn't posted on 1st of April.

Dropbox Backup - Are jobs in Silicon Valley really in demand that they cant even hire someone to write product description?

May be I am just being moody in the past few days or weeks so I am overly critical. But something is wrong with most of the current Tech companies.

May be Web 3.0 isn't about crypto or blockchain. But a complete reboot of every single web company.

This announcement is deficient in multiple ways. Key information is hidden away in help pages elsewhere on the site. I had to search and find the duration for versions retained:

> How far back you can view and restore is referred to as version history and depends on the Dropbox plan you have.

> Dropbox Basic, Plus, and Family users have 30 days.

> Dropbox Professional and Business users have 180 days.

> However, there are several add-ons that extend your version history.

IMO, the Dropbox Basic, Plus and Family plans are useless with the meager 30-day retention period for older versions of files. It would’ve been better if this whole solution had a storage limit but allowed for longer retention periods. The purpose of backups is to be able to get back farther in time when necessary. That may be a week, a month or even a year. Limiting the version history makes this closer to the standard “sync and check soon if you accidentally deleted/overwrote a file you wanted” solution.

While I’m ranting about this, what’s wrong with the CMS used for the Dropbox blog and website?! The blog post wouldn’t even load unless and until I disabled ad and tracker blockers. Declining the cookie prompt shows an error page. Why have that prompt if it doesn’t work as it’s supposed to?

I’m kind of confused by this, even after browsing the backup product page. How is this any different than just regular Dropbox?

Same. My first thought was "I thought Dropbox already backed up your files? Does it not?" After reading it, I'm still not sure what it does that's different from Dropbox.

Regular Dropbox is where you move files into the Dropbox folder and it auto-syncs to all your computers and stores version history online (30/180 days depending on plan). Versions of the file in your version history don't count against your storage quota.

Backups would let you back up other folders on your PC, plus it won't auto sync to other PCs meaning you save bandwidth and disk space and the version history will be oriented towards backups, i.e. it doesn't expire, deleting the local copy doesn't delete the backup, and it isn't super frequent.

Thanks, the distinction makes sense. I thought Dropbox used to allow users to back up any folder (didn’t there used to be an option to “backup to Dropbox” in any folder?)

I haven’t used it in many years so I may be misremembering

From what I can tell (yeah it's pretty unclear), Dropbox Backup is a Backblaze-like plan that keeps a backup copy of your files without counting against storage capacity. I'm not sure if they also have a policy to delete backup files for deleted local files after X days, though.

EDIT: FAQ[1] for "what if I accidentally deleted a backed-up file" mentions the same "restorable up to 30 days" line as normal Dropbox, so I'm guessing anything you delete locally is gone from backup as well.

1: https://help.dropbox.com/installs-integrations/desktop/dropb...

- https://www.dropbox.com/backup

- Dropbox Backup plan - Back up one computer and one external drive for just $5.99/month

- Dropbox with Backup - Choose from one of several Dropbox plans that include Backup, starting at $9.99/month

I think it's interesting as this year many college alumni and students are looking into other options beyond google drives backup & sync after their license changes.

Can anyone compare pricing with other services?

I still have some stuff on a free DropBox account but in general I use OneDrive these days - MS365 Family works out stupid cheap if you actually make use of 2+ of the licenses. 6TB cloud storage + 6 copies of the Office suite for $100/year.

Google and DropBox pricing always seems much worse to me.

Just to add to this: there are usually two or three offers per year (black friday, Christmas and the like, just check Amazon) where your can get a year for the family plan (6 licenses, as mentioned, each one good for 5 devices or so) for around 40€ all in. They stack, so you can buy several just to be prepared.

Stupid question but how much storage do they offer for the $5.99/month dropbox backup plan?

They don't list the amount of storage on their sales page...

It's unlimited

It's unlimited, but it looks like the catch is the same as Backblaze and co: if you delete a file locally, it'll get deleted from the backup in 30 days (or immediately and become restorable up to 30 days): https://help.dropbox.com/installs-integrations/desktop/dropb...

So it's essentially a mirror of your local data + 30 days of changes.

Google One is cheaper at $99/year for 2TB it seems (and you can share it with up to 5 people—for the Dropbox plan you need to pay more for family).

After nearly two decades of trying everything else they finally came to the conclusion that a backup offering might fit really well with their file synching offering. I really don't get all the former unicorns trying to pivot away from their main product. Dropbox and Evernote wasted so much time and are now in a worse state than 5 years after launch.

I couldn't find any solution that works for what I want. Google Drive is the most similar to what I want (with a minor difference that bugs me). I want an external virtual drive on my computers that syncs my file on demand, that doesn't count against my hard drive quota (unless I download and work with these files).

Google Drive gives me that (I pay for it) and all my files are synced across all my devices. My problem is that I do not want one device to be "the owner", I want all devices to be the same because. Unfortauntely Drive doesn't allow that. So on the main device I can access the file in their local path, while in others they are in (for example): G:\Others computers\Laptop\Drive

I hate that the files are inside "Others computers\Laptop", because it makes me feel that if I ever lose the "Laptop" and lose access, I may lose all my files.

OneDrive gives you that too, it now defaults to stream-first for all files. Once you open them they're downloaded locally but IIRC they're just cached (unless you check "always available offline" for them).

Sadly, they're still in a OneDrive folder and not a drive, but behind the scenes it is a virtual filesystem sort of thing (Windows calls on OneDrive service to expand the files), and you can fake the drive letter with subst.

There is odrive that converts most cloud storage to placeholder model.

you can check out pCloud as well

The page effectively forces tracking cookies, because the option to decline them doesn't work

How does that force tracking cookies? If you revisit the page after seeing the error, the cookies banner doesn’t show.

Are you sure you’re not receiving those tracker cookies the second time around?

How do you think it knows not to show the cookies banner?

+1 hit the exact same issue, disappointing to see from Dropbox

My page immediate loaded to a cookie error page. I’m guessing safari’s tracking detection automatically blocked them, and Dropbox didn’t appreciate that.

Chrome on Android here, and I got the same error.

Why use Dropbox Backup when one can just use Google Drive, Backblaze or even S3?

Does anyone even use Dropbox anymore? Last time I checked they restricted tons of features and kept nagging me to upgrade. Hugely annoying.

Dropbox for sharing with others rapidly is still superior to other alternatives.

The delay in syncing up across multiple users is least noticeable with Dropbox.

I agree backup seems not to be the niche of Dropbox, because there it is not about fast and reliable syncing.

I don't know what the issues have been, but last couple of times I've sent large files with Dropbox I've ended up using GDrive/OneDrive, respectively, to send the files again because the recipient couldn't get the files for some reason. Might just be familiarity.

I've never personally had a problem with any of these, they all seem much of a muchness (ie about the same from a UX perspective)?

Dropbox will be the one service I’ll keep paying after I stop paying for every other tech service. It has effectively made me not need a single central backup location, all I need is a hundred bucks a year and I have full access to all my files , all 2 TB of it, from anywhere. It also ocrs and indexes scanned pdfs so my life is fully digitized across continents.

I am semi annoyed with some of their choices but I’ll still depend on them before i do Microsoft or google where cloud storage isn’t even in their top ten money making categories and can be axed any day.

Is this a reprise of the original HN comment on Dropbox?

"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."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

If it was then it could be a closer imitation. Let me try:

"For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting a Backblaze B2 account, and scheduling a cron job to backup to it via RClone. From Windows or Mac, this Backblaze account could be access through built-in browser software"

Nah. Note they mentioned Google Drive as an alternative. If you compare Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive, and iCloud Drive, you’ll quickly find out that Dropbox is the most expensive of the bunch, is the least flexible (their only paid plan is 2000 GB, which is more than most people need) and doesn’t give you any other fetures that aren’t file storage. The free plan of Dropbox also enforces a 3-device limit, and the space is a whopping 2 GB.

Dropbox used to be the only game in town, and they had a great no-frills experience. But now, the giants are doing it better, cheaper, while Dropbox is stuck in its old ways and is adding new “features” nobody needs (such as this selling-files thing, and their new resource-hog client). There is no point in using Dropbox these days, other than being too lazy to switch or shop around.

Me, because I've been a user for about a decade and it works well for me, why change it?

They're still one of the only two companies who do differential sync (Dropbox & Microsoft), and the first ones offering that feature. If your upload speed is tiny and you're editing a big file, it's great to upload just a few KBs instead of the entire 100MB.

I agree their nagging is annoying, but they're still (IMO) the most stable sync client out there.

How much storage do they give? (In FAQ they say either unlimited to backup a singe PC or as much space as your account)

What limits on file sizes? (In FAQ they say 2TB)

It's also not clear for extra storage, it seems you need to jump to the next plan to get a slightly larger capacity. This does not make sense since the biggest tier is business with 5TB cap. If you need more you fall under the enterprise "contact sales" tier.

So it's $6/mo, or £4.99 which is equivalent to ~$6.50 ... from UK it tells me the company providing the service is "Dropbox International Unlimited Company ... Dublin 2 / Ireland". Presumably, I can just purchase the service in USA (eg via VPN) to save 8%?

AIUI, supply of digital services in the UK accrue local VAT (? eg https://www.gov.uk/guidance/vat-place-of-supply-of-services-...) so the UK price is maybe less revenue (net of VAT)?

As a paying Dropbox of many years, I’d love for this to be available on Linux. I’ve tried to use Dropbox as a backup backend (for example with reclone), but with a great many files, I’m always hitting API quotas making it impossible to use Dropbox for backups.

If somebody has a working solution, I’d be very happy to hear about it.

The Maestral client does the trick for me: stays silent and works.

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