Dropbox for business | Hacker News Reader

Dropbox for business

gigaom.com

49 pointsdmourati36 comments

I'm a bit unclear how you can use this in business, since it is effectively unencrypted. If you go through the trouble of building your own crypto and key management into every mobile app with a "save to Dropbox" option, you might saw ell run your own storage infrastructure (or outsource it to s3). If you don't, you are storing confidential business data with a consumer file storage company and exposed to insider, compelled disclosure, third party attack, or implementation bugs.

People are lazy and ignorant. Just look at how many businesses default to Gmail without giving it any thought whatsoever.

Yes, but if your business model literally depends on people being lazy and ignorant, you may run into problems.

Why, are we running out of lazy and ignorant people? I beg to differ, there are a lot of us.

I'm looking forward to changing from gmail to a more secure mail service, maybe you could recommend something that's not US based and, at least as of currently known, secure and possibly encrypted, similar to how lavabit was?

Given that, as I understand it, lavabit deleted all of it's user data when the government won (and it will always win) - I am not sure picking such a service is a solid business idea?

For encryption, check out SpiderOak. I used to work with the CEO and know a few of their engineers. The privacy use case is looking stronger and stronger. https://spideroak.com

I've been a SpiderOak user for over 3 years. I like the "nearly zero knowledge" aspect of it, but the clunky, non-native, freezes-all-the-time user interface drives me crazy. Despite Dropbox's horrible privacy and security, I can't deny that it offers the smoothest file-storage and file-sharing experience that I've ever had.

I'm unwilling to trust a company to provide me with a binary that touches unencrypted data/keys AND also host all my data. It's just too easy to slip in a special backdoor on update (and failing to update = big security risk, too, and generally unworkable for general purpose products for features/OS reasons.)

What I want is a trustworthy client, ideally written to an open published standard, which can either backend with a service (with ideally several providers), or with a self-hosted binary (or appliance).

Unfortunately I had the same experience when I evaluated it a couple of years ago. You should check Wuala: while still not perfect (the client is closed source and java) the user experience has been pretty much as smooth as Dropbox'.

Been there, done that. I liked Wuala even less because its UI is not a reliable indicator of what it is doing at any given moment. For example, the upload/download queues would often be empty, even when Wuala is clearly transferring files in the background. A folder would show a green check mark, indicating "fully synched", but it would have a subfolder that isn't quite finished. Inconsistencies like that made me give up on Wuala.

If a program is going to be as slow as molasses, that's fine. Client-side encryption means that a lot of things that Dropbox does on their servers need to be done on my low-powered devices instead, so I can tolerate it to some extent. But at least I'd like to see exactly what's taking so long. </rant>

I'm currently doing EncFS over Dropbox, which works great. I'm also writing my own EncFS alternative for adding an encrypted layer over any backup program, which I will release soon (it already works well).

There are solutions like Safemonk - https://www.safemonk.com which layer Encryption on top of Dropbox and are exactly for these types of Enterprise customers.

<rant>

The copyright lawyer in me is irritated by the "(C) Om Malik" legend on the photo of a slide. Yes, photographers can get copyrights in the original elements of their photos, but this is just a picture of a someone else's slide from where he was sitting.

>:-(

</rant>

I took the mark as more of a: "look, I was there for the announcement!"

yes, this is daft.

Agree.

Not to moan on every single dropbox thread but...

I wonder whether the issues I (and others) encountered with large numbers of files would be a lot more likely to occur with a business account where that number of files is quite likely to occur, esp. with the bigger package deals (dropbox basically broke unrecoverably, no longer syncing anything and overwriting files as I worked on them at ~300k files.)

This has been a known issue for a couple of years already with no fix on the horizon, weird they'd leave that alone but push the kind of account that would trigger the problem.

I didn't realize this before, but has Dropbox for Business always been $795 / year at unlimited capacity?

This sounds like a very good deal to me.

Isn't it $795/year for 5 users and 1TB plus $125/user/year including an extra 200GB?

> Isn't it $795/year for 5 users and 1TB plus $125/user/year including an extra 200GB?

Sorta: it's technically "unlimited" space[1], but they want you to contact them and justify any usage after 1,000 GB + 200 GB per user after five[2]:

> Dropbox for Business equips you with all the space you need. You'll be given 1000 GB when you start your account (5 users). Each additional license you buy will give your team 200 GB of additional space. If you come close to approaching your limit, contact us and we'll work with you to accommodate your storage needs.

[1]: https://www.dropbox.com/business/pricing

[2]: https://www.dropbox.com/help/225/en

> has Dropbox for Business always been $795 / year at unlimited capacity

For as long as it's been called "Dropbox for Business", yes, but that only started in April of this year[1]. Prior to that, it was called "Dropbox for Teams" and it was $795/year for 5 users and 1 TB[2].

However, like I mentioned in a reply to kondro[3], while they advertise Dropbox for Business as "unlimited", you have to contact them to justify anything beyond 1,000 GB + 200 GB per user license after 5.

[1]: https://blog.dropbox.com/2013/04/say-hello-to-dropbox-for-bu...

[2]: https://blog.dropbox.com/2011/11/introducing-dropbox-for-tea...

[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6731075

It's a very annoying deal to me. Both the one year commitment and the minimum number of users feel like the kind of outdated package deals of mobile providers to me, where you pay for stuff you don't and may never need.

Been in the start-up situation twice where it's only 3 of us at the start and no idea how long we have to survive on a minimal budget.

Of all the services we used, Dropbox by far asks for the biggest and completely blind upfront commitment.

Honest question, what did your team of 3 need that required you to pay $795/year? What were you storing in it?

That's the point. We don't.

We just need the service Dropbox offers (and preferably from Dropbox, since that is so ubiquitous it makes it easy to use with third parties and integrate with other services).

But we can have either individual accounts (which doesn't scale, and doesn't have the convenient team-features) or commit to the whole $795/year and hope we'll soon get to the point where the benefits outweigh the costs.

Dropbox for Business is an all-or-nothing package-deal with 3 separate benefits (features, volume and accounts) which cannot be purchased separately even though most clients only need one or two in limited quantities. And to top it off it's an upfront whole year commitment.

It's dramatically different from the pay-per-use proposition of any of the other SaaS products we use.

I've done the "what do we want to get started" math twice in the past few years, and Dropbox for Business stands out like a sore thumb.

Sorry to be meta, but was this article translated from a different language or something? It's quite odd. From the very beginning:

> Dropbox has 4 million business customers. For them it now has a new Dropbox for business

That sounded unnatural. Then two weird commas:

> The company, so far was focused on getting attention of individual users and small work groups.

> Houston, claimed that a billion files are saved online.

I see that the author founded Gigaom. Maybe he just doesn't have anyone check his articles before publishing them?

I know what you mean. In the last paragraph he writes "If the real service is as good as the demo (and I have no doubt that it wouldn’t be)", which seems to suggest he does doubt that it would be (or that he has no idea what he is talking about).

Ha! Good find. I feel like I remember re-reading that but deciding that it did mean what he wanted it to mean. Clearly not, now that you point it out.

I never really used DropBox much. That's because I am able to easily have a script that watches a directory and performa rsync - or better yet, uses git - to commit to a remote repo. Problem solved.

And you can also have a hook in MacOS that lets you right-click a file and create a new public link to share for it. Every file in the repo would be private but when you execute this command it would make a symlink on the remote repo in a subdirectory of DocumentRoot of nginx. Done.

How's that work on your phone? Tablet? Windows PC?

I can see getting Windows working; monitoring a directory for changes is possible, and of course Git is available. I'm not sure if PowerShell is up to the task, and I'm pretty certain a Batch file couldn't do the monitoring part, so most likely you'd have to write a console app instead of a script. Hardly as simple as Dropbox, but doable.

Mobile devices though? That's tougher, I think.

Mobile devices? You just use web viewers to see the files. There are plenty of them.

Or do you mean being able to access the files offline? For that we have browser caching of the files and players :)

People could probably package all this nicely into a distributed Dropbox alernative anyone can host.

Any other questions?

Not sure what the big advantage of using Dropbox is when you are working with lots of confidential data or stuff that is competitive in nature. Better to host on-premises using FileCloud, OwnCloud etc. I wouldn't want to run a mission critical business relying on Dropbox.

Businesses with existing storage infrastructure can just host themselves using any Storage as a service model. Syncplicity.com is one good competitor

Am I the only one who thinks that mixing work and private data is a bad idea even if it encrypted and safe?

Dropbox for Business is still a public cloud service. The reality is we live in information economy where information and intellectual property is a first order citizens for any business. So storing your organization data to a public cloud (whether it is dropbox or some other service) is equivalent to giving keys to your organization's treasure trove. Also Dropbox being a high profile target, if the service hacked for some reason, it puts your organization data at risk in inadvertently.

We have built Tonido FileCloud (http://www.getfilecloud.com) to specifically address this use case where organizations can self host their own Enterprise File Share and Sync platform.

won't bittorrent sync do this and a lot more in another 6 months, for free?

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