Amazon turns Cloud Drive into a Dropbox rival with file syncing

You could say that about any company that is mostly digital and uses Amazon for a majority of their infrastructure (i.e. Netflix).

It's not like Dropbox is remotely on the same page with pricing vs others. Really they are a rip off, even before Amazon.

Their client was just the best (well still is)

I can't wait until Dropbox runs one of the largest deployments of Openstack Swift in the world. I'm sure they get very generous price discounts from AWS, but running it in house must make sense at this point.

Mmm, given my (limited!) experience with AWS, I think Dropbox has a pretty solid advantage in the "Making a sane, user-friendly UI" department.

If Dropbox hasn't been working on a way to get off S3 this whole time, well, that's a huge oversight on their part.

I was also under the impression that Dropbox uses S3, but then I read this article in Wired: http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/06/flash-data-cent...

"But if you walk into the right building and down the right aisle, you’ll run into a giant Dropbox logo. Clearly, the file-sharing upstart is proud of its data center gear. [...] Inside its cage, Dropbox is running servers equipped with solid-state drives, also known as SSDs — super-fast storage devices that could one day replace traditional hard drives. The company doesn’t use SSDs in all its servers, but it’s moving in that direction."

I'm not sure it's a smart move from Amazon. Their offering seems pretty lame (no Linux client, JVM required, etc.) and even if the Amazon price is half of Dropbox it's hard to argue that Dropbox is expensive.

From my experience, Dropbox is perfect; it would take me much more than a discount to switch -- actually, there doesn't seem to be anything a competitor could do that would make me switch. The only reason I would leave Dropbox is if they did a major fuckup (like losing all my data).

Why would Amazon compete with Dropbox? Don't they have other priorities? (I love Amazon too, but I just don't get this).

It syncs files.

Eh, no wonder it's a 69Mb compressed download!

I stopped reading at "Java security flaws are well-known"

The decision to use java was obviously made by a product manager that doesn't care about creating a competitive user experience. You want to compete with Dropbox then you'll have to make a native client for each of the platforms you choose to support. No silver bullet.

Java as a plugin in the browser yes, I've been bit by that earlier this year (thank you MS Security Essentials!)

However Java on your system like the .net framework is no less secure than any other runtime. You are running an executable you are at that executable's mercy

I recently tried SpiderOak, which supports client side encryption, lan sync, shared folders, backup, AND syncing.

It was dreadful: sync took hours for a single file, and once they fixed that it took five minutes. Dropbox took a few seconds.

Totally agree. Dropbox is perfect. It's super fast, even when you make duplicate copies of huge files (like Lightroom catalogs!). I have a local backup using rsync, and it's much slower than Dropbox.

Dropbox also syncs over LAN, which is a big deal if you use several computers from the same location.

I don't think $99/year is expensive.

(Search doesn't work too good, though).

You have mentioned backup and not 'sync' so for backup there are some cheaper (and good options) - BackBlaze, CrashPlan, Amazon Glacier (dirt cheap). First two are not exactly 25/Yr but are cheaper than SpiderOak especially if you go for longer subscription. Have been using CP for an year now but BB's interface is a lot better.

See if you can setup your own OwnCloud on your Linux server(this is an open source Dropbox like service).

I install crashplan on everything. Cross platform (java I think) crashplan+ is 60 bucks a year for "unlimited" storage and I'm pretty sure you can set up the client to be headless. You can also have them generate the encryption keys or just provide them with your own and not upload the private keys to their servers.

I used Bitcasa for a bit, back in the free version. The UI left a bit to be desired, and their encryption is lacking. (See http://blog.bitcasa.com/2013/03/18/we-dont-show-and-tell-inf...).

Right now it's not 100% cloud-ified, but my current favorite is AeroFS for syncing between machines. It works quite well. Here, the security risk is that someone gains access to your account and syncs all of your files to their system. I'm planning to work around the lack of a web client by installing a WebDAV server for myself, when I finally get around to it.

Been using Dropbox for all my files (I keep it under 100GB) for several years now. So far never had any problems, in fact they saved me from lots of tears when they recovered an accidentally deleted folder beyond the 30 day limit for me. The collaboration and sharing options are another huge plus. I frequently give out the link to a folder which results in a beautiful and intuitive website view of its contents for the recipient. I also have a shared folder with every member of my family which is much more convenient than sending file attachments around. These last two sentences are also why I wouldn't want to jump ship to Amazon despite the attractive price: At least in my case Dropbox has realized a network effect that more or less locks me in.

I did quite a bit of research into other options before and while using Dropbox: Tried GDrive and found the online interface (GDocs) not suitable for the amount of content I have, tried SkyDrive when it was still Live Mesh and had tons of problems with it (hour-long delays when syncing). At one point I tried a peer-to-peer type system (I remember their logo being red, forgot the name) and it was Java based which made it annoying to me. And I tried a system where files were encrypted before transfer (some Dutch company, again forgot the name) and the problem with that was that it was way too slow at dealing with all my files.

Bitcasa actually is pretty good, surprisingly, if you have lots of small files or good bandwidth. The clients are pretty buggy still though. I can stream mp3s from my home cable connection but videos and images are -pretty- delayed. It'd be impossible to use for something like storing a photo library. But it's a good place to dump all the legal media you've been torrenting over the years.

Dropbox is still the best in terms of experience and support in other apps. Price is quickly becoming not competitive.

Google Drive was crashing with folders with largish numbers of files in it (on OSX) so I couldn't test much after signing up and dropped it. It seemed fine, but Dropbox has more integration points.

Amazon Cloud was pretty useless until this announcement. But their cloud player is pretty awesome and if you sign up for their cloud drive, you get the cloud player premium.

Really, if Dropbox doesn't get something moving price-wise, this could be the end. But man, I love me some dropbox. It's just $$$$.

Switched from Dropbox to Google Drive a few months ago. the UIs are very similar, and Drive is much cheaper. My only complaint has been syncing:

1) After a week of repeated attempts, I gave up trying to get video from Dropbox to Drive. Maybe the files were too large?

2) Also, syncs are faster and more seamless across devices with Dropbox. There are noticeable lags for most syncs with Drive, even small, single files.

3) Event when Drive thinks it has synced, it hasn't and I have to restart the app.

There are other benefits to Drive, but I never had any sync issues with Dropbox.