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Comment by ccozan | Hacker News Reader

I think the success of the Dropbox depends on the common people wanting to simply share/keep their files and not necessarily if someone can keep 300k+ files in there.

For me as a hacker, I have at my disposal ( due also to higher income ) more powerful tools or hardware ( local/private NAS, higher bw, Amazon AWS, etc) real tools ( rsync, versioning, can customize/choose the filesystem, etc ) to achieve the same thing.

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Ok, that's fine, so what is there to stop dropbox from popping up a warning when this limit is exceeded? Or for there to be some means of deleting things from the server side without having to manually click through to delete N files at once (where N << total number of files)? Or customer support that doesn't drop the conversation completely out of the blue?

Having the system break irrevocably at any stage is totally unacceptable when you're dealing with people's data.

Presumably you'd have a problem if gmail stopped working irrevocably because you happened to have too many emails? Would that argument stand up for you then, or would you feel aggrieved you hadn't been warned and had no means of fixing the situation?

In some ways, it reminds me of Apple's attitude towards their Pro Users - these users make up less than 1% of their customer base, and their revenue stream (and effort/attention) is focussed on the other 99%. So, because 99% of the users will never run into this problem, they're going to put minimal/no attention to resolving it, while focussing all their attention towards the 99%.

The 1% hopefully realize this and migrate to things like http://www.filetransporter.com/ or http://www.filosync.com/ that might (or might not) suit your needs better.

3 years later with a Pro Account that I use every day - with a bunch of huge honking firmware images - I'm up to 3.02 GBytes and 1,965 items.

And I thought I was a power users.

80/20 rule. You have to do the least work that would bring the most value to the busienss. It doesn't make sense that they allocate that time to fix an issue for the 1% instead of 99%. I think this is just a logical business decision.

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