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Comment by rm999 | Hacker News Reader

My first thought: I see no reason not to switch over from dropbox, it should take me about 10 minutes to switch. I could even run both at the same time for redundancy.

My second thought: from an investing perspective the danger in this space is the easy commoditization. This will lead to high competition and low profits, with hopefully some differentiation on quality (especially dependability).

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This has been the case for me for the last couple of years. I used to see promotions like this constantly (even going back to when 8 free GB was on offer instead of 50), and as a result I have a small collection of different file storage services that add up to an okay amount of storage, mostly due to the couple of 50 GB promotions.

The one thing to be careful about with Box is the limitations they put on access; The promotion I got some time ago for 50 GB has a file size limit of 100 MB and doesn't allow download of folders with a free account. This makes it impossible to store a few large files and inconvenient to store many small ones (though WebDAV access makes the latter less of an issue.

I also signed up, but had a very different feeling. Sync is hard to get right, and so far (other than a brief but inexcusable security sanfu) Dropbox has been rock solid. Just absolutely rock solid, which is something I can't say about many services. There are many ways to screw this up; just look at Apple.

Dropbox is also the most transformative pieces of software I've ever used. It's not an exaggeration to say that it changed the part of my life that involves a computer. Finally I can keep multiple computers in sync easily, and if a system ever goes down or I get a new one I can have all the data/documents I need on it in one step. This is ONLY possible if I trust that system completely. I'm not sure anyone will ever unseat Dropbox for me. I pay them with a smile.

> I see no reason not to switch over from dropbox

First thing I did was check for local syncing abilities on the various platforms: no luck on the Linux front, although they seem to offer WebDAV access — a far cry from a syncing solution such as Dropbox or AeroFS.

seriously, they probably know it already but no linux client? not that google (google) drive is any better but thumbs up for dropbox for being so easy to use and send to a friend of yours a pic or a zip file...

> no luck on the Linux front, although they seem to offer WebDAV access

You can always use davfs, it worked out for me:

http://linux.die.net/man/8/mount.davfs

I had the 50GB free account from an Android promo awhile back and I couldn't find a way to use it. It definitely wasn't going to replace Dropbox. Since it was sitting around doing nothing, I recently started doing monthly WebDAV + rsync backups of local files.

I'm still evaluating but it's easy enough for me to run and I'm using the space now.

Box.net has a 250MB file size limit for free accounts. Dropbox does not have any limits, AFAIK.

At least Dropbox has never complained about my ~4-5GB files.

When I got my HP TouchPad during the fire sale I got the free 50GB Box account, and this is exactly why I didn't switch. I keep various ISOs and DMGs in dropbox. What is the reason for this file size limit?

To incent you to upgrade to the paid version?

That can't be it because the business version has a 2GB limit as well. That's too small to store Windows, OS X, Debian, or FreeBSD DVD images.

The "enterprise" version has a 5GB per-file limit which would meet my needs - for now - but surely they're not expecting a single user to purchase an enterprise account.

It keeps out all the free and essentially unaccountable users who would like to use them for movie/software/game piracy.

Could be to discourage people from storing media there. OS images and videos are probably the biggest things people would store. They're also the most pirated content. My guess is either: a) they don't care to host 100TB of pirated content, or b) they're afraid of the legal ramifications of it. Imposing a file size limit keeps a huge bulk of usage away and a lot of the piracy concerns while not really inconveniencing the vast majority of normal users.

Depends on how much you make use of the social element of DropBox. Friends, Family, Colleagues, coworkers all share their files with me through DropBox shared folders. About six months ago I finally bit the bullet and just bought a subscription.

For whatever reason, I've never had a folder-share request for anything but Dropbox, and, it's performance has been flawless for me across all my systems.

In comparison, photostream, which only needs to sync across a limited number of platforms, all controlled by Apple, has been consistently unreliable, and i frequently have to hop into my iPhone Photo application to get it to sync pictures over to my Laptop.

Syncing is hard. Dropbox has it nailed. I have zero desire to mess around with anyone else in the near future, so, they've won as far as I'm concerned.

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