Hacker News Reader

Comment by chii | Hacker News Reader

i m flabbergasted at the amount of money there is in this service (and related ones) - is it really that useful? I had a dropbox account since the early days, and i have hardly put any use into it.

What do people actually use it for? Share files? Backup solution?

View on HN

Dropbox has been a game-changer for me.

Maybe your interactions with technical people are different, or you don't share much between computers and devices?

Here's what's changed for me:

* 1:1 collaborations with people

* m:m collaborations within groups

* Me and my web servers are so, SO in sync :-)

* Sharing downloadable links to files and folders with people.

* Also: photo sharing because sharing a link to a folder of photos auto-galleries it.

It was exceptionally useful as a student when I was frequently using lots of computers. As a sort of USB stick in the cloud (with added shared-folders) it was brilliant. The sync, versioning and useful web interface "just work".

I can completely see that if you're a small team and are faced with the problem of shared folders, dropbox would be a good solution. It's not too expensive and a lot easier than setting up reliable and secure self-hosted file storage.

Dropbox has basically replaced my homedir and nearly everything I do now goes inside (documents, photos, git repositories).

It is installed on my home laptop, university desktop, smartphone and tablet. Goodreader (a PDF reader) can sync to a Dropbox directory with PDF files. So I can quickly access all of the papers I ever saved. This is a very convenient way of overcoming ipad's terrible sync-using-itunes mechanism.

Besides sharing files (for which Dropbox is great), I am increasingly symlinking folders to subfolders in my Dropbox to attain automatic synchronization between machines. It's just by far the most seamless and painless to set up solution I know of.

I recently became a paying user and I now store all my personal docs to my Dropbox. My main impediment to doing this was concern about security, but then I discovered and deployed Boxcryptor Classic (https://www.boxcryptor.com/en/boxcryptor-classic), which give me a great deal of peace of mind. It's a fully client-side, zero-knowledge file-system encryption app. I now keep all my documents in my Boxcryptor, which sits in my Dropbox.

I use it for both, but mostly sharing. Dropbox starts you off with 2GB but allows you to increase the size for free by referring other people, which I've been able to do. I've gotten it up to 8GB thus far. I don't rely on it to keep all of my most important data, since that goes well beyond 8GB, and I don't keep anything personally sensitive on there either. If my friends need something like pictures I've taken at a party, I'll put them on Dropbox and let them deal with it, rather than the hassle of email or setting up my own server.

While it's limiting, I like it a lot better than carrying USB sticks with me - I've lost a number of them over the when they'd eventually rip off my keychain :(

I use it as

- a backup. All important files, pictures go there. My phone automatically copies all my pictures to Dropbox. (although I occassionally move them over to Skydrive to keep within my limit)

- a git repository

- a way to share files between home / work / phone. (I rarely bother copying files over usb to my phone anymore. Memory sticks are gathering dust)

- a way to share files/photos with friends.

- a web server.. well more like a way to share html files with friends.

- an easy way to copy documents to Evernote (using Wappwolf)

Dropbox probably knows more about me than Google.

Anything meaningful I do on my mobile devices - photos, files, etc. - gets backed up to Dropbox. It's 100% automatic, and has been a real life saver. I also use it as basically a virtual thumb drive to "move" files between work/home. I'm the exact opposite of you: I'm flabbergasted that people don't use it. That said, I wouldn't pay for it. There are much cheaper backup solutions (Crashplan).

I use it to collaborate with a fairly non-technical person, where it's marginally easier to use than email. That's it. I'm actually rather horrified at the people using it for backup and git. These are stupendously bad ideas. Proper collaboration with multiple parties also dictates that some form of locking is required. Something more advanced than yelling "I got it!"

Most of the less-technical people I know who use it use it as a backup. The free tier can restore deleted files within a certain time period (30 days?). If you put your default file locations (My Documents or similar) inside dropbox, it works pretty well as a set-and-forget backup.

I use it for backups. Put important documents in a truecrypt volume. Copy said volume to dropbox.

For non-sensitive items like books, pdfs, etc... dropbox makes it easy to find items online and then share them across my tablets, phones, and other computers.

Cross-computer synching and implicit mini backup. Most of active work of any kind is saved in dropbox folders so I can pull it up anywhere. My desktop folder is replaced by a folder called "Current" on dropbox.

I use it so my laptop and desktop share the same files. I can code on my laptop and once I get home I have my desktop ready to continue.

Dropbox is the ideal insurance against laptop theft. If you stole my laptop right now, I wouldn't lose files that I care about.

I switch computers. A lot. Dropbox makes my life much easier without any forethought.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com