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Comment by gm | Hacker News Reader

I tried, it, really really liked it. LOVED the cheap prices for larger capacities, and was about to give them my money to share stuff with other people...

Until I discovered the hard way that files shared across accounts CANNOT be synchronized to the local hard drive... It was a "What the fuck???" moment, surely MS cannot roll out without this critical functionality... Yet, it's correct, you can only sync to the local hard drive stuff that belongs to your account. If it's shared from someone else's account then you can only see the files online and need to download them if you need it locally.

Big fail, and a showstopper for me. Dropbox does this just fine, BTW. so I am reluctant Dropbox user.

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I actually spoke to a SkyDrive team member about this one. The root problem is that once you have a truly shared folder, it takes up both people's quota (it has to, otherwise you could link a lot of free accounts to get extra space). The way it is implemented now makes it an explicit operation to move something to your skydrive, so you know the quota implications up-front. That said, they are trying to figure out a better solution for this.

Ironically (or not), this is the reason I quit Dropbox, because they do not warn you that a shared folder will ruin your quota. Someone shared 50GB of photos, it started syncing, maxed the quota, and resulted in some important documents never making it to the cloud.

Neither is an ideal solution. Nobody's solved this problem yet.

Edit: The other reason was security; auto-sync is an excellent vector for malware to enter the system. Get into one person's skydrive, infect their shared folders, rinse and repeat.

Very true, all your points. But the need is still there.

And I hear you about the quota problem. They should just make it take up the quota of the person doing the sharing... Or am I missing something? But in the meantime I am using Dropbox and I really, really did not want to become a Dropboxer.

You are missing something.

A person could conceivably create a ton of free accounts then fill them to the free space limitations. Share it with their primary account and then they have unlimited free space.

Make it only work on paid accounts. Problem solved.

The current situation sucks.

^^^^ this

They've said only 2% of accounts are paid.

Sharing is a cornerstone of what DropBox is.

Restrict sharing to only the 2%?

No, make sharing stop double-counting for the 2%.

Re: "Dropbox, because they do not warn you that a shared folder will ruin your quota. Someone shared 50GB of photos, it started syncing, maxed the quota, and resulted in some important documents never making it to the cloud."

Yeah, Dropbox rolled out "Dropbox for teams" - not perfect. I think Pay Users should only be charged once for files shared among people - Dropbox only has one copy of it.

DropboxForTeams: "If everyone invited to the shared folder is on the same Dropbox for Teams account, the size of the shared folder will be counted against the Team's shared quota once."

I can give one example of shared folder madness. When Palm announced new WebOS SDK beta 2.5 years ago, they distributed the sdk via dropbox shared folder among the beta users. The sdk was whooping 500+ MB of size(Linux, Windows, OSX installers were added). Among those users there were some users having free 2GB account. As sdk size were added to their quota, some of them regularly deleted the sdk folder to save space. As the folder was shared, it was also removed for other beta users. Palm regularly had to regularly had to add the folder again. Hilarity ensued :) They even had to put some dummy text file naming "PLEASE DON'T DELETE THESE FILES'.

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