Dropbox announces new gen server hardware for higher efficiency and scalability

These kinds of upsell decisions aren't coming from the same people who work on technical topics.

I think their former head of growth (Elena Verna), stated on LinkedIn that everybody in the company hates those black patterns too, yet every single experiment in removing them and providing alternatives resulted in unacceptable revenue losses.

Yesterday they sent me an email inviting me to use "Dropbox Passwords".

A service that they decided to abandon: https://help.dropbox.com/installs/dropbox-passwords-disconti...

I bet some people do. Nobody has "apps" and that many integrations like Dropbox. Plus, it runs on all major platforms, and integrate many services. So you don't have to pay for a bunch of services if you pay for Dropbox.

I still do and I mainly use it for backups of important photos and docs. I also trust it more over Google Drive because the latter has given me poor first impressions when sharing links and file size limits

They are losing tons of customers each quarter.

I switched to Google Drive and plan on switching to Syncthing once I get off my lazy ass. I already have some stuff on Syncthing and so far so good.

I do. It Just Works(tm), has never given me any issue, and it gives me a space to have my personal files my own way. My Google Drive is full of files and folders shared by others so not sure I would be able to organize it without making a mess. And OneDrive just doesn't work, half the time I want a file I don't have stored locally I am faced with obscure errors and have to fight the software for a while.

I do. Google Drive is not an option to me because I don't trust Google at all, ie when some Google robot decides to lock me out of my account for unspecified reasons, I can't talk to a human to resolve it etc. The idea of putting anything important to me life in Google's hands scares me, so I try not to.

I have mail with Fastmail for similar reasons.

I guess I could be using Syncthing or the myriad of other competitors as well, but Dropbox still Just Works, and has for a long time. They've not enshittified their product as much as one might expect, so I remain a paying customer.

Enjoyed 20GB for free for some years thanks to a deal with Samsung when I bought a phone. Once that expired it was free 5GB or 1TB, with the 1TB being way too expensive in my view. So rather than paying them a little I paid them none.

Due to other reasons I ended up paying for a family subscription to Office 365, and after that there was zero point in paying the same for just storage with Dropbox.

Closed my account after the Mission SF soccer field incident and never looked back.

“Who gives a shit about the neighborhood?”

I interned there a decade ago and still have 1TB free from that; I would have switched away a LONG time ago if not for that. I hate how sending anybody a link spams them with a million pop ups, i think the intrusive ads almost make it seem like they need a dropbox account to view my file. Sending files to my friends is embarrassing, sending files to my grandparents impossible.

Google drive for private stuff, One Drive and Box at work.

Last time I used Dropbox was for a project around 2011.

Still the best cloud service for me for my Windows. But I'm interested to hear how you set up Drive and Syncthing. Is the UI as familiar to use as the the standard Windows folder?

My 2 to Dropbox is my primary storage location. I can freely access it everywhere, move countries at a whim and don't need lousy drives with me.

(I do backup my Dropbox occasionally to s3).

Google drive is okay but im not trusting my entire file history on top of my email history to Google only to find it locked up one day. It gives me calm that my files arent entrusted solely to one Google account.

Still using it every day. Works on every device I have. Not expensive. I've only had one problem in the past 10 years that required technical assistance, and I was able to get a human to help me in a reasonable time.

One reason I stick with them over Drive, iCloud, or OneDrive is that file sync is 99% of their revenue. They have every incentive to keep it running as smoothly and reliably as possible. More incentive than companies where files are just one of several services.

I use it for smaller side businesses where I need an easy way to have a shared file repository. There may be other ways to accomplish it, like what you've described, but it works well with little configuration on my part.

Never stopped. I save some semi-sensitive data as well now, but inside Cryptomator.

It still works few times better than Google Drive and, if I could pick a safe estimate, some 100…000 times better than i-bloody-Cloud. The latter is not really a compliment. The latter is just an empirical example of a mammoth company churching out subpar software year after year to a captive fanbase (distinct from a customer base) in its infinite arrogance and non-h/w incompetence.

I did try alternatives like Mega, Tresorit (my god, this solid snappy native app sucks in functionality!) et cetera but nothing came close in reliability, smooth operation and consistency. So there I am still tolerating one of those few last remaining non-native apps on my devices. I have Syncthing but that has a different role and usecase and I reckon not just for me.

I need to use Dropbox it because a) I need a Linux client b) I need a server in the cloud.

I used to use Nextcloud, but the software was very poor.

No I now use Google drive, Dropbox is arguably 'better', but it's far far easier to just use drive nowadays.

I would say though that I know some power-users such as design houses working with big 3D files still use it heavily. I assume that a dedicated tool gets to offer bigger file size support or something.

I've used dropbox for quite a long time (and still use), with a 10Gb free account (bumped up from the base by various deals, and things like the old summer treasure hunt when they still did that).

I still prefer it for automated backups off my phone (which is one reason that Google's incessant, dark-patterns-y, nagging to use Google Photos is so infuriating), before clearing them down to a NAS periodically, usually keeping the most recent couple of months available in dropbox.

Beyond that use, it's just occasional use to share files with people.

Yes. I’ve been paying for Dropbox for years.

I also have iCloud for photos and Google Drive from my Gemini subscription.

iCloud sync really doesn’t work well for files. I tried using it for logseq once and it messed it up.

Google Drive I have no idea. I’ve never been motivated to use it.

Dropbox has been solid — super low latency sync and I’ve never lost data. Also like most people here I use Dropbox because it the one major sync providert that has a maintained Linux client that works well.

This has been known for quite a while, in distributed systems single socket for storage is both far cheaper and typically faster. I remember building these with E3-v5 a good while back.

It's not really designing to be honest here, what they describe is more "specifying". These will just be fairly off the shelf designs with thier own choice of ram/disk/CPU and so on.

The pictures of Dropbox is from the rear of the rack, oxide is the front.

Oxide may well have a neater 'rear' though as they sell it as a whole system so will have bus bars and similar rather than PDUs and cables I imagine.

Areal is the adjective form of area.

You get linear density (for density along a line) and also volumetric density (scales with volume). So you're basically making it clear how many dimensions are important to your measurement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_density

> Surely 'density' is a measure of stuff per area?

Not really, the normal definition of density is mass per volume. If you mean something else (like storage capacity per area), it needs to be specified.

Its the same design. Actually, S3 is easier, because of the bigger scale, making it easier to support high perf.

The bigger the scale the easier it is to support high perf on HDDs.

Pretty sure they lost to rsync ;)

Aren't they out of the headlines because they cut ties with the tech community? Hired Condoleezza rice, spammed notifications, made sharing without account impossible (or hard?), broke shared links on purpose, bought and shut down mailbox. And all of that plus very high prices.

They do claim to be profitable though, if I read that correctly.

Curious why? I'm considering doing the opposite since I have to pay for iCloud anyway.