Dropbox deletes Rick and Morty creators account for secret TOS violation
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We learned the lesson, and never again trusted Dropbox, for anything.
(Best guess - a would-be client got pissed when software which they'd never paid for lacked a feature, and told Dropbox a story.)
EDIT: Only executables & related distribution files were on Dropbox, not any source code. We lost nothing...except our trust in Dropbox.
EDIT2: Yes, as several others have kinda pointed out, this incident was a collision between (a) naive human expectations (of high-skill, high-touch, highly-invested customer service for such situations) and (b) the actual business model of any huge / cheap or free / convenient cloud provider of X (plus just "internet reality"). Sadly, I don't see that either (a) or (b) has changed in the past decade.
This should be their slogan.
In isolation that’s all backups.
In practice it basically just means 30 day recovery for any modifications/deletions.
I used to work there FWIW. Internally it's certainly considered a backup solution for customers.
Ideally there would be more regulation around the ability of big tech companies to shutdown your digital life through a mindless algorithm, with close to zero recourse. Unfortunately I don’t see anything happening unless someone really powerful (say a member of Congress) gets bitten by this.
I think the real hurdle in adoption would be that most non-techies don't even register their dependence on big cloud providers as a problem yet. But I expect the day is coming. Similar to how Mastodon saw an influx of Twitter users when Musk announced he was intending to buy Twitter.
But it definitely needs more publicity. And if there is something that will bring down "big tech", I think that's it.
"cloud providers" should be treated like something that can fail. We already don't trust hard drives, that's why we have RAID, we don't even trust RAID arrays, that's why we have backups, and we don't trust the place where backups are stored, that's why we have off-site backups. Dropbox (and Microsoft, Google, etc...) is also not to be trusted, just like your hard drive can crash or your servers can catch fire, Dropbox can delete your data. It is not the same mechanism (one is a chemical reaction, the other is a mindless algorithm), but the end result is the same: you lose your data.
But once you take that into account, the value proposition of big cloud providers takes a hit. Often, big companies justify the premium price they ask with reliability. I mean, no one expects companies like Microsoft to go bankrupt anytime soon, and they certainly know about backups and redundancy, but what's the point if all it takes for your data to disappear is an artificial brain fart. Suddenly, the server in your basement doesn't look so bad in comparison, and neither are the smaller companies that actually have people you can talk to.
"Can fail" is certainly true, just like a hard drive can fail.
But we'd all be rightfully upset if someone at Western Digital decided to some to our home and proactively delete files from our HDD.
Why not?
The whole concept of ToS needs to be overhauled with vast amounts of practice that is currently considered acceptable thrown right in the fucking trash.
The idea that companies can change their ToS on a whim every day and push out walls of text that no one reads and everyone clicks through is insane. Why can't we modify the terms of agreement?
Let's start with that law, all ToS interfaces must include an interface for users to upload their own modifications and companies must have a human interpret them (not some shitty 'ai') and decide to accept them in a reasonable time frame, and if the company chooses to decline them they cannot ban the user from the service for this, the last ToS that they accepted must be the one that their interaction with the customer is conducted under. The entire process must be auditable by other by both sides and a neutral third party.
I'm sick of big companies hiding behind an opaque wall of bullshit, if this was a small town dispute between two individuals this would be transparently settled one way or another and that's exactly how it should be on the internet.
The laws haven't kept up with the times, and they haven't kept up with the creative ways people with money try to fuck over those without.
> you have no rights
> you promise not to try and exercise any right you think you have
> you will not do anything the company doesn't like
> the company can do anything it wants whether you like it or not
> the company is not responsible for anything ever
> the company makes absolutely no guarantees about anything
This is the really unreasonable part. Some convoluted internal process that ends up accidentally flagging a file as suspicious and then deleting it is bad enough, but still partially understandable if you're very conservative with assigning blame. But deleting the log files? Either extreme technical incompetence or plain malice.
At dropbox's scale, guaranteed logfile durability is expensive, and retaining them indefinitely even more so.
They either got auto-deleted or they were never there in the first place.
Here’s another Hanlon, it wasn’t Dropbox that deleted the files it was an authorized user, OP or coworker, accidentally who forgot or wouldn’t fess up
Deleting files from Dropbox's servers, that's fine, deleting files from my computer that I uploaded to Dropbox, that's bad.
Not if “smart sync” is enabled on the folder.
https://help.dropbox.com/installs-integrations/sync-uploads/...
Source: https://eclecticlight.co/2022/02/21/can-you-back-up-icloud-d...
Probably my most memorable lesson in unexpected failure modes for complex, automated software.
Back when Gmail was invite-only, most people used Hotmail or Yahoo Mail, which would offer a base level of (I think) about 50-100MB of storage at the time. If you wanted more storage; you'd have to pay for your email service - an idea I don't think anyone born past 2000 has even heard of.
Gmail came along, and suddenly offers us 1 GB of free storage, for free. This was around a quarter the size of some people's hard drives at this point.
Of course we didn't care if there was no support!
Are you kidding? I don't think Hotmail had support, either - (maybe I'm wrong?) - even if you paid for it; but here Google was offering a substantial value for anyone using any other existing mainstream email service, immediately.
They even had STMP and IMAP support, meaning you could use whatever client you preferred. Back in the day most people used computer-side email clients and had local backups of emails anyway - so if one went missing from Google's side it wouldn't be so bad.
There's a reason Gmail is still one of Google's strongest and unusually longest-lasting product of Google's. There's less reason now - but my God, when it was introduced it was an honest-to-God mindfuck as to how they were offering such a large amount of space and features for nothing.
The selling feature of Gmail was "Now you can keep all your mail and have a permanent searchable history of all your electronic communication".
"In-Q-Tel scouts the global market for commercially focused technologies with the potential to contribute to national security." - Source: iqt.org
Of course, now we all understand that they were harvesting all the personal data this gave them access to, in order to monetize it, and sell access to it to anyone who would write them a check.
And then we found out that this information was so valuable, and in such a concentrated place, that the CIA placed fiber taps on Google’s data center drops.
Also, can't they distinguish a spam account from a legit account based on the account history? I can't see why this is a difficult problem to solve.
Have you ever tried to fight spam at scale? It’s trivial to block the 50% of obvious spam accounts, but we are at the stage of humanity where the activity of very dumb humans and the activity of very clever bots, EASILY overlap. A lot.
Bots will use proxies that use residential IPs, they will maintain session info (Cookies, User-Agents, etc) they will move the mouse and introduce jitter, their access patterns aren’t random but are engineered to work in the day night hours that match the geo-data of the IP they are using. They solve captchas, at the same rate that humans do (time, error rate)
Some human accounts look like bots. They sign up and upload a couple of files which immediately get high traffic. They use NordVPN so their public IP is shared by thousands of “known bots”, their access patterns are weird and unpredictable.
Yes, you can use machine learning to try and identify theses but then you end up with false positives and real people having problems like the poster above.
And on top of all that, bots are constantly subverting detection so whatever solution you have now won’t work next week.
To avoid detection, you can't just make API calls for six months. You have to run the official client on the machine for six months, and then the official client can collect more data on your usage pattern. Imagine the cost to run hundreds / thousands those accounts.
I made a Nextcloud to host my references and storywriting notes. Nextcloud is horribly buggy, difficult to maintain, and has very poor user experience compared to Google Drive - but at least I don't need to worry about my entire digital life being auto-terminated by an overzealous robot, with no reasonable appeal process beyond "knowing enough people to make a stink".
Why do people always forget the 'cloud' is just someone else's computer.
Nothing important should ever exist solely on the 'cloud'.
I wouldn't even trust a backup copy sent to email, yet I see that constantly as well.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31652650 ("I've locked myself out of my digital life")
The article you referenced was getting locked out of accounts. We are speaking of having documents backed up, not google accounts.
The best way period would be to periodically backup to an external HD or even SD cards.
People need to get over this cloud bullshit years ago.
All of these problems have been solved since the advent of the internet, these are all self-imposed problems.
and where do you store those?
you really want multiple backups, and an encrypted cloud storage is one of them.
Honestly, that seems like a feature of many administrative processes, even those administered by government. So far, in the process of trying to become licensed as adoptive parents, my wife and I have been dropped twice now by licensing agencies, without any explanation of why or recourse to appeal the decision. As far as I can tell, the only way to gain the right to appeal a decision is to actually be convicted of a crime.
It's sad, I used to really like dropbox but now they just suck.
Dropbox is acting no different than any other scammer here, and there's a limit to how much time I'm going to waste on being polite. Somehow it is always a "mistake", and somehow those "mistakes" always involve money flows in the same direction.
Do it. I guarantee Dropbox cares far more about their relationship with the credit card processors than it does about their relationship with you (who just terminated your relationship with them), so maybe if enough people do chargebacks to resolve their problems it will incentivize them to make their system work correctly.
I sometimes wonder if I could do chargebacks for almost everything I buy online, since some companies don't even bother to answer the credit card company or PayPal to dispute or authorise the chargeback.
> No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
As a funny side story, at least I think it is funny... I used to manage the backend servers for Atari. The "Internet Police" used bots to send take down notices for copyright violations and emailed us saying to take down Atari's software because it was a copyright violation. Atari was our customer. This should have been obvious as the FCrDNS had their domain name in the PTR records. I found it hilarious but also saw how that was a bit of foreshadowing as to how the internet would devolve.
At least not until you mass-share (maybe the case here?) them.
The problem is that we've ended up with a situation where copyright is automatically:
1. Assumed to be owned by media-corporations
2. Assumed to be wilfully violated by users
3. Assumed to be that deletion is the correct resolution
4. Assumed the USA to be the jurisdiction of the copyright holder and user
All of these assumptions should be challenged. This isn't a technical challenge, it's a legal one.
Special treatment for VIPs isn't the answer.
Also, if anyone actually has a bone to pick with Dropbox over shared links, this is probably a very bad idea, because it would just be opening WB's far larger pockets to whoever Justin is pirating content from. There is no actual legal provision for "creators" to get away with copyright infringement that we cannot.
And let me be perfectly clear: It is not legal to copy media over any kind of file share, even privately within an organization, unless you have a copyright license, which they clearly don't. Censorship[0] on-demand in exchange for liability limitation is the world that all these media companies chose to live in. They screamed their heads off about the harms of noncommercial piracy over the Internet while also, apparently, pirating enough content internally that Dropbox needed to shut off their account. If they want their account back, then either pay for a license to every video file on that share or publicly lobby Congress to legalize file sharing.
Or this could have nothing to do with copyright and some internal spam filter just shat the bed very badly. The original linked tweet didn't clarify anything and Justin might just not even have anything to clarify with. I really hate how modern tech companies are allowed to do summary executions of accounts like this with no explanation.
[0] I am willing to accept the "copyright infringement is not speech" argument, which SCOTUS also does, but DMCA 512 still allows censorship of novel speech because the counternotice procedure is laughably inadequate.
Seems true-to-form. This has been Dropbox's product strategy for the last 5 years.
Wow, you've made a huge assumption here.
You have made a huge and baseless assumption that there was any copyright infringement happening.
This behaviour and any terms of service that allow it should be illegal. The fact that it goes on constantly is a scandal.
I'm genuinely curious the logic.
From my perspective, they're a company providing a service and can determine the terms upon which they'll provide it. You don't have to use them if you don't like it.
Your landlord can’t just turn up and start rifling through your stuff, and the owner of your rented disk space shouldn’t be allowed to do the digital equivalent.
Another analogy might be a long term storage locker. You, the customer, place your belongings in the locker, and return a month later to find it empty. All your stuff was destroyed by the storage facility, because they found pirated movies among your belongings!
But they might do something about how they handle this. Especially if it's an likely older account. Dropbox has many creators as customers. They should have more experience to handle this gracefully.
Sadly I’m not sure there’s a good advocacy group to push for this. Mozilla is funded by Google who definitely doesn’t want any user rights that conflict with their revenue. Maybe the EFF or FSF.
I'm not hugely optimistic about this. It's possible that the pushback against tech will enable something like this to get passed, but I'm pretty sure that pushback is for purely for political points and not being done with any intent to actually change much.
I may be out of the loop, but my experience with it has been great. It's a (mostly?) open-source, self-hosted DropBox(ish) clone - with a great UI, web browser support as well as native MacOS, Windows, Android and iOS apps. (I figure there's probably some sort of Linux client as well? I'd have no idea.)
I'm shocked that Adult Swim isn't using something like this internally to work around this very issue. I'm sure they send copyrighted clips of shit to each other all the time for reference material. They've never run into this issue before? Even once?
Lesson learned - depend as little as possible on services you can extremely easy replicate on your own. When my free DropBox storage ran out years ago, I installed OwnCloud and have never even thought about cloud storage since. It 'just works'.
Every now and then there is a similar post on hackernews.
If I'm working on something important to me... how comfortable am I leaving it in a stranger's house? If I wouldn't be comfortable doing it, I always make a local backup. This saved my ass when I inexplicably lost access to an old Google Drive account. I lost a couple days of work, rather than a couple months. I still have no idea why that account was disabled.
But I just checked their filings, the 700M figure is indeed "registered" users, not "active" ones. Which makes a lot more sense. There are not a lot of services with 700M monthly active users out there.
Granted, it's kind of splitting hair considering it's still gonna be in the 9 figures, which is impressive regardless of where it is in that range.
Yet I still use Dropbox because it’s way more usable.
Running the OneDrive agent is a hobby and it spikes my machine a few times a day. Running Dropbox is something that just works and has worked for 10 years without me ever noticing the sync app (a good thing).
I avoid Google because I wouldn’t want my gmail to turn off because of an event like this.
I run on MacOS and my cpu has spiked twice today already. When I hear the fans, it’s usually OneDrive.
I don’t mind the cpu as I have lots but it might take 30 seconds to sync a new word document before I can share it, so that’s annoying.
With Dropbox it’s almost instantaneous and the file just syncs up.
I’m not sure what OneDrive is doing, but it’s harder to use. I don’t want to slow down and wait for OneDrive to sync before I work with others.
If you're using it for work to sync build dependencies or your build tree or similar, it's easy to accidentally end up exceeding those limits and watch it eat CPU time totally ineffectually. Ask me how I know!
Granted I haven’t run the windows client in a long time so I’m talking about my MacOS experience. But OneDrive on MacOS does all sorts of shenanigans. The funniest is when it logs me out and forces a hard resync. As a user, I never want that.
So yes, there are alternatives, many of which are free or included in other subscriptions, but they lack the focus of Dropbox, which Dropbox itself nearly lost when it tried to become something beyond file storage, versioning, and sharing.
I only use it for one of my lesser used domains and it is the worst email/app experience I have had in ages.
For some reason the outlook app went blank and had to resync. Missed a really important email. It gets like 100 MS update emails which have zero relevance to me and then it sends random emails I am not sure how to unsub from. It shows notifications for all those random emails and actual important ones get lost.
I got it for the 1TB storage space and teams(let me not even start on that). But now I am seriously considering moving that domain to gmail and zoom.
I also look after another one for a company with several 1000 users' safety docs on it. Nearly all the clients are mobiles and tablets using the native client. This NC is more of a one way thing where one dept uploads pdfs and the drivers and co read them on their tablets. Office staff point a browser at it.
Office document editing experience isn’t the best on mobile but I don’t use that feature anyway. Markdown editing works well.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/dl...
It works for me because, in theory, all my data is on every HD in my house (which is really just two). So, I don't lose anything if Dropbox deletes my account; I've got it all locally.
That theory doesn't work anymore, however, because I have 399 GB of data in Dropbox and I don't duplicate it all to every machine anymore because of the size and the data transfer required to keep that much locally and in the cloud.
I really do need to start thinking about this again so that I can get it all duplicated locally.
Do you use a second line of local backups/versioning to protect against that possibility?
We have ~1 million files in our dropbox that we use for business. Lots of files change each day. And everything just works. It uses some CPU, but honestly for what it's doing it's not too bad. At least dropbox can handle it, other type of file syncing apps just stop working.
So for small-medium business I'm not sure what the alternative is to dropbox if you are file-system heavy unless it's just for throwing some random files here and there.
I suspect that's the case for a lot of folks. I'm not sure it'd even make the top-5 of such services I'd consider, if I had none of them and were signing up for one today.
* It works on absolutely everything. I have one foot in every major tech ecosystem and that immediately excludes anything platform-specific like iCloud. I also used to daily-drive Linux, which has no official OneDrive client, and the Google Drive client is notoriously bad on that platform.
* Mobile photo upload was extremely convenient when I first discovered it and it still works very well. If I need to take a picture of something I can use my phone and then grab the file on my desktop or laptop.
* The option to store everything locally still exists and is the default. If I get banned from Dropbox I will still have my entire Dropbox folder contents as they were present on my desktop's massive hard drive array. Backing up Google Drive in this way can be done, but only if you aren't using anything like Docs or Sheets, which can't be stored locally without a manual file export. Dropbox even tried to replicate this with Paper and I never touched it for exactly this reason.
But on the other side, it's easier to lose your account with google or microsoft, so this might be another reason people preferred dropbox, till now.
Shouldn't the files remain on the hard drive even if Dropbox deleted their end?
I switched to Spider oak for a while, but more because I wanted encryption at rest, I didn't have an issue with them beyond not adding that feature.
I then moved to just backing up locally and alternating between two USB hard drives, one of which was stored in a safe deposit box at my credit union, because a one time fee for a hard drive or three encrypted using Veracrypt (then Truecrypt? Memory is fuzzy) plus a safe deposit box is simpler and cheaper.
I like to keep things offline, and it was interesting when a bank I talked to about opening one in my new city was... oddly obstructionist about that ask.
(Has anyone else told a bank you're an aspiring journalist, would like to purchase a small safe deposit box to hold your birth certificate, passport, and a backup of your files, then tried to have a will drawn up to designate someone who would receive the contents of the box in the event of your death, then had someone break into your apartment and very obviously look into your notebooks?
I still don't have a good answer for that fundemental problem that devices can be hacked, but physical security is hard.
Anyways, sorry to go on a tangent, but it doesn't surprise me that maybe Justin did something very bad, and they just want to end the relationship and not interact anymore, but I won't get specific in a public forum.
Dropbox itself was kind of buggy for me, sometimes it'd fail at whatever their implementation of rsync did, and start filling my hard drive with multiple copies of my Dropbox folder, at best filling it up -- I suspect their shit code is one reason I kept having to have Applecare to keep replacing my hard drive.
That or the assholes who kept blasting me with malware... I suspect it was the same set of people who were skimming credit cards from Mother Bear's and uploading them to the dark web, if any of the feds who cyberstalk me are bored this morning ;-)
We also use it to cross-backup photo libraries with an avid photographer friend who lives across town.
It works very, very well.
I largely use https://github.com/bailey27/cppcryptfs with dropbox?
This would essentially eliminate any possibility of violating any terms of service as far as I can tell?
I'm not too comfortable putting any files on dropbox without some sort of encryption
fwiw, I've found that cppcryptfs is one of the better implementations of that sort though most (if not all) use the same library which seems to choke on certain files once in a while
Of course at that point you're not using all of dropbox's features, and some other rsync-style solution may well be cheaper.
I had an account there. Didnt use it much. Then I had a friend share a few videos for me to check for quality and content. They were on paid and I wasn't. The simple act of "sharing from their account" put *my* account over storage quota. I couldn't do ANYTHING with my account, including downloading any of the videos.
Basically my only option was to pay them for more "storage", even though my friend paid. They're effectively infinitely double-dipping for what amounts to a link.
I abandoned the account after that crap.
Edit: You completely rewrote you comment after I responded, that is considered bad form on HN.
I often add an edit immediately after I post, but unless it is fixing a typo, I always mark the edits.
I give myself 6 minutes to fluff around (or get bored of and delete) comments before they appear live for that same reason
I'll ping hn@ just in case
That said, in the past when HN seemed to be doing something weird, dang usually has a pretty great explanation for why, so there might be a good reason for this choice as well.
Although in the olden days it was nice in that if they detected a matching hash of your file, it didn’t actually upload it, you just had it. So that was super handy. For pirating as well as for situations where I have the same file in multiple location. I legitimately have disk images in dropbox because cheap storage and having them immediately sync and be backed up was nice to save on bandwidth.
OneDrive for example: you can't delete a file into the trash anymore. It gets just deleted, like a force delete. So if you are offline or OneDrive is not running or the file has not yet been uploaded to OneDrive, that file is GONE. MS response: use the online trash. It worked until they updated to the new 12.3 macOS sync system (icloud can delete to trash, so I fully blame this on MS). Also if one file does not sync for whatever reason ALL syncs are stopped until this conflict is resolved.
GoogleDrive. If in drive stream mode (which i think is the default) it is mounted as a volume, so it is not "there" when you login, so any files opened from there will not open until GoogleDrive is mounted. Also saving to this Volume mounted google drive with some apps will trash the file. MySQL Workbench trashed files very very often. You need to restore from the google drive backup in this case. If you switch to all files always local it is like Dropbox and works, unless you want to upload symlinks or something with characters that don't match googles like and then you have missing files. At least other files will sync. I also have no idea if they actually support macOS 12.3 file sync type fully ...
iCloud: Works ... except that what you see in the finder is not what you actually have in the Terminal because it is a mix of actual files and data folders from applications. Sharing is a pain between users. I also don't think it works well on non Apple systems.
Then you’ll need to buy disks
This is unfortunately a legal issue and no company big enough to have good lawyers will ever want to tell a customer why they're being banned as it exposes them to too much legal risk.
If there's a solution to this, it's probably to give companies some sort of protection from legal action resulting from incorrect application of their TOS. That's far from ideal itself, but it would at least remove some of the downside to honesty from companies on this sort of issue.
I can't blame Dropbox (or any other company who does this) given the potential downsides they face.
(I've been on HN how long? I'm old.)
https://twitter.com/ResNeXtGuesser/status/153459613350625280...
[0] https://ipfs.io
Given the source (a comedian), this part sounds like hyperbole, not evidence of an actual "secret TOS"
In other words, they tell you you violated ToS but no additional information.
Expensive
Alternatives easily exist, and im not even talking about self hosting. There are plenty of zero knowledge sync and backup services and if you're really stuck on using Crapbox or Google Dreck, you can use any one of a number of encryption services for your data first, so that these bigcos can't snoop worth a shit and randomly punish you for what they find.
and some encryption so that whomever hosts the data cant peep at it.
Also assuming the sun doesn’t end in a sudden heat death event.
Also assuming that my fingers aren’t removed in a thresher accident.
And assuming the provider has electricity.
Etc etc etc, it’s important to vet that services I pay for have SLAs and are competent.
This wouldn't happen with a $5 pitchfork and a stone threshing floor
In the event a provider terminates my account I could not care less. The files will be at multiple providers and HAProxy will automatically remove them when the content validation health checks fail.
Before downvoting, ask yourself: When was the last time a VPS provider scanned the disk contents of their customers? And when was the last time they booted someone for using full disk encryption?
Meanwhile, dropbox proudly proclaims how they scan the contents of their users' files.
VPS companies delete customer data for all kinds of reasons, just as arbitrarily as Dropbox. I’ve had VPSes at dozens and dozens of places over the years. I’ve seen them accidentally delete servers, purposefully disable stuff for what they claimed were hacked sites that weren’t actually hacked (so that’s scanning right there), I’ve seen them go out of business because the owner was 15 years old, I’ve seen them go out of business because they sold to Endurance or whoever, I’ve seen their data centers catch on fire — taking everyone’s data with it, I’ve seen them accidentally delete whole clusters.
And I excuse it in most of those cases because it is a VPS I pay a pittance for and don’t run production on, but the risk is always there. Trusting your data to Dropbox or OneDrive makes a lot more logical sense, especially if you aren’t knowingly violating any of their rules.
And yes, you can colocate. I’ve done that too. But I no longer have the energy to do that, especially if my box is in a data center I can’t physically access.
I backup about 5 different places because I’m always afraid of someone fucking me over. But for Dropbox to do this, is truly terrible. Especially for an unlisted rule.
VPS provider doesn't even necessarily have read access to your data, and because you aren't relying on them for search/index features, encryption is much less expensive from a functionality standpoint.
It is unfortunately more of a time commitment then paying for Dropbox (which I previously did, for years), but I won’t lose all my data because of them finding something to complain about with a hash of one of my files (or however they’re scanning content) and nuking my account. That’s simply not an option.
I dunno, communication is hard I guess :(
Name one feature thats not present in this stack.
Also, what you described is not "sftp + cvs + vps" ;D
Even before Syncthing, Unison existed since 1995. Which was the true free software version of Dropbox. You never needed a bunch of hacks to get automatic sync working on Linux. Syncthing is a bit easier to configure, IMO.
Ddg is your friend you know.
Syncthing + NextCloud + rsnapshot backups would have been my open-source alternative recommendation, but of course not everyone wants to take the time to learn that skillet, set that up, and maintain it.
Or are you saying, "well, with a completely different stack I can get closer to feature parity"?
Moreover Nextcloud supports WebDav which allows tools like Zotero to directly tap into that.
Like, I'm confident my tech illiterate parents could get drop box running. Ease of use and UX are features.
I'm not saying the self hosted stack is bad, and in fact it's probably better in many ways. But it doesn't have the same feature set if you consider usability a feature, imo.
1. You get a mail from your installation about the new version. Also desktop and mobile apps notify you.
2. You go to your "Settings -> Overview" click a button, enter your password. Upgrade starts.
3. Wait some.
4. "Disable maintenance mode and continue upgrade" button appears. Click it.
5. You're greeted with a "Start upgrade" button. Click it.
6. Wait some.
7. Page refreshes and you continue where you left.
No terminal, no commands, nothing.
I sometimes do it in the middle of the day. Nobody ever said, "Hey, uh, Nextcloud down?" yet.
Installation of the client is equally easy. You just need a URL addition to the username and password. The sync client is very competent too.
Our installation is facing outside and people are sharing public links and all. Not every member of the team is a sysadmin either.
I have forgotten if NextCloud does this, because I don't use NextCloud at this time, nor have I.
The main complication to implement is encryption at rest for the data (I use luks2 on a hd and the fs of a raspi controller) and secure remote access (wireguard works really well and is easy to manage).
I wireguard into my remote systems and have Syncthing configured only to local network (no relays etc). It works beautifully; not missing dropbox at all.
I am still working out a viable alternative for things like document scanning, but I have no regrets owning my data.
I'm suggesting a 30 line yaml file and the occasional `docker-compose pull && docker-compose up -d`.