Introducing Drag and Drop Uploading | Hacker News Reader

Introducing Drag and Drop Uploading

hello.corkboard.me

Dragging a file is not easier for me than clicking Save in whatever program I'm using to manipulate the file.

Agreed. This is more like Rapidshare than dropbox.

I like Corkbord but I'm hesitant of any offer of "unlimited storage." How many of us have been burned by those promises from startups that can't scale and end up going under?

Still, with this, I think we finally have a drop.io replacement!

Thanks filmgirlcw! We completely understand your concern. Simply put, that's why we're not offering it free. ;) Would love to hear your thoughts.

Why doesn't the plans page say how much storage the free plan has?

Hi glomph. We tried to design that page to show that the free version is remarkably different than the Pro version. Currently, the free version has no file storage -- it's also missing many of the features on the Pro version's list. Let me know if this is confusing.

It certainly is confusing. Saying the paid plan has 'unlimited storage' and not mentioning storage on the free plan strongly implies that the free plan has some storage.

Further how can you claim to be more convenient than dropbox, when for the majority of users (I am pretty sure the majority of dropbox users have free accounts) setting up a payment system just to share say one file represents a massive complication over the alternative.

Came here to say this. Unlimited is never good. People get really pissed off when it's not really unlimited. And you immediately will have some people trying it and blogging about it.

I think specific flavors of unlimited make sense. It sounds like Corkboard can offer unlimited storage but with a cap of 50MB on files. The number of people willing to jump through the hoops required to make that truly unlimited is likely very few.

We do a similar thing at LayerVault. We offer unlimited storage and versioning of design files, but only for design files we support.

I would just be worried about them going away because they cannot pay for what they promise. Or because of bad press. I have for instance around 8 TB of log analysis PDFs which are around 20-30 mb per PDF. I know that's a special case but this is then a lot 'cheaper' for me to share with everyone who needs to see that growing amount of files than the way we use now.

I can't help but comment here... on the marketing.

Making the comparison to Dropbox steers people to evaluate the service in comparison to one of the best out there.

I'd instead just explain why corkboard is great on its own merits. Claiming to be "easier than Dropbox" is probably effective at grabbing eyeballs but I'd question if it's the best strategy to acquire actual users.

How about add client side encryption for selected files? I'm doing that with dropbox manually now, but I would like to be able to drop files, for instance, on an iron corkboard (part of the screen) which first encrypts and then sends. Obviously you cannot share those (or you can but no-one can read without private key).

Interesting question. Shoot me an email at tim@corkboard.me and tell me more. If there's a way to do it I'm sure we'd be able to make it happen.

Client-side encryption? I don't think that solves a real problem. If it's that sensitive, I would not be putting it on Dropbox anyway.

edit: be nicer.

Well it does solve a problem for me; I want my sensitive files to be backed up as well. How often do I read stories of people who have EVERYTHING backed up in the cloud but their sensitive files and at first disaster they are screwed, because well, they have everything in the cloud besides the files they ACTUALLY needed for day to day work. And encryption is strong enough to do this.

Where do you put your sensitive files as backup? Harddrive? CD/DVD? USB stick. Problem is that that's not very safe :) I have been backing up on harddrives (applies to cd/dvd/usb as well) since begin 90s and thus I have quite a LOT of harddrives. Time passes and those harddrives get into cupboards, you kind of forget them. When you need them they are often corrupt (esp USB sticks!), but you forget about the older ones after a while (20 years is quite a bit; you'll have kids in that time maybe, move 2-4 times etc). I'm quite sure a bunch of those hds/cds are potentially in the hands of people who could abuse them if they were interested (they are not; my sensitive stuff is not very sensitive). I like the cloud idea more as I don't 'lose' things and stuff is always there on every computer/device. But I just would like simple encryption. For dropbox I have a directory where I put stuff like that ; I have a background software which GPG encrypts everything there before sending to dropbox. It's great. But it still is a bit of a hassle.

Mashable story here: http://mashable.com/2012/07/10/startup-corkboard-dropbox/

I'm a big fan of using CorkboardMe as a collaborative workspace. This makes it that much better.

Can I use it to store files that aren't as social? Such as GPG encrypted tar files?

Absolutely. Our Pro plan also allows you to password protect your boards or make them completely private - so share your information with who you want, how you want.

Sounds incredible. Would you really be happy if I, for example, uploaded a 1 GB home directory encrypted backup after I finish work each day? Keeping each backup around indefinitely?

We don't allow that file size yet. We hope to, but to prevent scaling issues we've limited files to 50Mb - we hope to grow this in the future as demand increases.

If you have a special case and would like to tell me about it, shoot me and email at tim@corkboard.me. I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Well if it's unlimited for just a few dollars I could move all of my data storage into it. I could break down my many GB backups into 50MB chunks and just shove them all up on a cork board.

To me 50mb is way to little for me. In that sense you are no way like dropbox.

Is there a file size limit?

Hi Bootz15. Currently yes - and that's the only limit. We've set it at 50mb for now. I'd love to hear how that works for you.

The problem is -- people can split zip their files. So file size limits are kind of moot, yes?

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