Box Refreshes Its iOS Apps, Gives Users Who Download Them 50GB Of Free Storage | Hacker News Reader

Box Refreshes Its iOS Apps, Gives Users Who Download Them 50GB Of Free Storage

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50 pointswj63 comments

The 250MB/file limit on free accounts is brutal. (It used to be even smaller, something like 100MB, but they relented and increased it somewhat recently.) Even worse, the client doesn't tell you when it's not copying the file because it's too big - it pretends everything is just fine and dandy.

I feel like I got 50GB from Box when I signed up like 2 years ago.

I still haven't use it at all. Dropbox, drive & even mega seem to be more seamless :-/

Fun fact: If you interview with recruiters at storage companies, they'll often add free space to your personal account.

Dropbox often recruits at my alma mater, they'll always have stacks of free 10gb/15gb space expansion cards (with some redeemable code) to hand out. Big hit with the students.

A few years back, I was supposed to have a sysadmin interview with Dropbox. The guy on the phone said, "Not sure why we're doing this, we already have someone in mind. Sorry for wasting your time. What's your email address?" As soon as I was off the phone, I had an extra 10GB of Dropbox storage for free.

I thought it was mighty classy of him for my time.

cloud.mail.ru offers free 1Tb for life if you register until 20 January. Yes the interface is in Russian(at least for the desktop app) and rough at edges, but still worth spending 5 minutes registering.

Edit. The interface of the Android app is available in English. Also, being an active Dropbox user, Mail.ru solution is obviously less polished and still in beta. But it is an established company in Russia(I would guess second biggest internet media holding), and you can somewhat rely on them.

Do you not need a russian phone number?

You could specify it as a means to restore the password, but it is not necessary. Other options include secret question, or alternative email address.

I wasn't able to sign up for an email account without one until I found this link http://e.mail.ru/cgi-bin/login?lang=en_US where you can use any phone number (but still require one to sign up).

Or you can just click "I don't have a mobile phone." and sign up with a security question...

Storage space is so cheap nowadays. I find it very hard to be enticed by even more free cloud storage. I doubt that offering me more and more would help.

I would be interested in an application that makes agreements with the ISPs that have throttling or download limits so that traffic to and from their servers don't count.

Indeed. Offering for free something that gets cheaper as time passes, I don't if can be considered as clever marketing or not.

not to mention you got 50g for referring a friend, or just registering a second account, so almost everyone already is at 50g

I believe that it was clever marketing when google first did it when gmail was first released. I feel like the storage is only part of the service, it's access to your files everywhere that they are really trying to sell.

Knowing that most cars are bound to depreciate quickly wouldn't stop me from accepting a nice, new, free one.

> Storage space is so cheap nowadays.

Someone tell Dropbox of this news

I pay $99 a year for >100GB. You don't think that's cheap?

A 1TB hard drive retails for $50. If you're only considering the cost of the storage itself, disregarding the value of the service it's attached to, $99/year is expensive.

> If you're only considering the cost of the storage itself, disregarding the value of the service it's attached to, $99/year is expensive.

Dropbox isn't storage (cold, unconnected drive). It's universal storage with multiple endpoints of connectivity, always available. This isn't to create an argument of any sort, but just to clarify they're two different things for those who might not understand that.

Not to mention redundancy. That's the biggest plus for me. Don't want to have to worry about hard drive failures.

You still do. Replication =! Backups. You should be taking snapshots in time of your Dropbox account (unless you're using their Packrat offering, which provides versioning).

If my hard drive breaks it doesn't delete the file from their servers. You'd need to have a hard drive break in a specific manner in which it corrupts the file and then have the corrupted file be replicated. Even then Dropbox maintains copies of all versions of your files for 30 days, so you'd have to not notice the corruption for 30 days in order to actually lose the file.

Be careful on both. The hard drive doesn't need to "break", you just need filesystem corruption. If the file is readable by the Dropbox client, away we replicate corrupted data. Also, there have been instances where Dropbox has been unable to recover lost data, 30 days or not. It's your data though, be as cautious (or not) as you feel you need to be.

Perhaps I am being too trusting of their service. Thanks for the wake up call. I'll back up my data.

https://www.google.com/search?q=dropbox+lost+data

I pay for Dropbox too because they have the best app/ui. However with all of these other companies catching up I am continually saddened Dropbox pricing hasn't come in line.

For 100GB

Drive is $60

SKyDrive is $50

Box is $60 (I think, confused on their free plan pricing) Then there's Mega with $10/month and 500GB

So yes, $99 is expensive in comparison. Eventually (if not already, I honestly havent looked) these other services and their apps will catch up.

Yeah, with storage so cheap who needs net neutrality?

I just got 50GB on Google Drive on my new Moto G, I'll use about a tenth of that, at a push.

It's at the point where giving away your product for free is no longer a large-impact sales tactic, wonder how they'll innovate?

This is merely to offer a service of equal value. I'm not sure as an individual service it's possible to innovate. It's what you build that plugs into that service that can make it more valuable, more useful.

I agree, though you may be underestimating the amount of space heavy users of file syncing services can consume:

For a single (1) robotics project in college we had CAD models, fundraising materials, reports, and documentation in dropbox. It's still there and consuming 3.8GB of space.

As soon as multiple projects (consecutively or in parallel) are using the same storage space, it even 50GB might get tight.

Mediafire also seems to be doing 50gb as well as Mega.

Now they just all need desktop syncing programs with easily accessible public sharing urls and decent traffic bandwidth.

What they really need are TAHOE-LAFS backends, so one'd get 50+50+50 GiB on free offers and have a generous 100 GiB of fault-tolerant secure storage (or 150 GiB, if they're greedy or consider services going down is not a problem)

;)

Personally I don't really need more storage unless it is in a really usable format. I have 10TiB in my personal computer for that.

Dear Tech Crunch staff. Please stop making your videos auto-play in IE and Chrome. Seriously ... 10 videos on one page and they ALL started up, playing. Conform to freegen standards from the W3C. I would have been ok with my IE browser, but it had the same bizzaro world experience in Chrome.

I've tweeted at them telling them that their home page had autoplaying videos with all sound on. What a nightmare. I stopped going to TC so much after that.

You're complaining to the wrong company.

Chrome has 'click to play' option for flash. Why can't we control video? Youtube conflict of interest maybe.

We can disable javascript, images, even audio. Why not Videos?

Screaming at webmasters to behave ethically, or app developer to not steal data is naive and idealistic.

Scream at google, mozilla, microsoft and the rest to give US control over our browser is that too much to ask in this day and age?

Or has following apple's "we know what's best for you" philosophy clouded their common sense?

The browser is to blame!

"You're complaining to the wrong company."

The company that embeds the videos should consider how said media is presented to it's users. It is a weird concept yes I know. Just try to contemplate it.

It depends on how you view a website-browser relationship.

If you believe your browser displaying a site is under third-party control, then yes, it's third party that's responsible for presentation issues. If you believe since something running in your browser then you and browser vendor are responsible for presenting the contents in a manner you want it, then, well, it's another way.

Actually, I think one should complain to both companies.

Outside frames are called parent for a reason. I'm pretty closed book on how I feel about the issue. Though I agree both should be complained to, just that responsibility falls on those who embed.

I really thought we made it past the auto-play era of the 90s.

Nothing auto-plays on TechCrunch here. I tried both Chrome 32 and IE 11.

Shame that a) iOS only b) iOS 6+ only. I wonder what they're doing that couldn't be done with software barely a year old; it must be pretty mind-blowing, world-changing stuff.

You use iOS5? The adoption rate of iOS7 is already at like 80%

iPad1. No other option.

I wouldn't design a new product for ipad 1 users. The tech is too old to invest any time into it.

I certainly wouldn't design a new product for ipad 1 users but - and, admittedly, I don't know how much effort is required - I would consider supporting them. In the same way that I wouldn't design a website for IE8 users, but I would certainly support them.

How old do you think it's reasonable to support tech for nowadays? Bear in mind that the iPad1 was released just three and a half years ago, and was then updated a year later. iOS 6 has only been around for just over a year. So are you suggesting that the maximum life span for a $500-800 piece of tech should be 2 years? Or 1 year? I'd protest at even 3 and a half years, personally.

I brought an iPad 1 to Florida for my grandmother to use. All I needed was Safari and Gmail. Gmail needs iOS6? WTF? Its not Angry Birds, its a damn mail app.

Mail app worked out with Imap, but still!

You should be able to download the latest version of the app that is supported by your version of iOS.

But, the ipad 1 is already 4 years old. That is pretty old when you consider how quickly the market moves.

Apple designs it's entire platform to basically drag developers to using the latest SDK and codebase. I can't even download the iOS 5 simulator in xcode right now. Shit starts breaking in the newer versions of things when you use the older way of doing stuff, and sometimes the decision is an exclusive or. Support %95 of the userbase using ios 7 & 6 and frankly give yourself less of a development headache or support ios 5 laggards who are less likely to pay for things as a group anyway.

Thanks for the info. Obviously, if it's literally a case of 'support 95% or support 5%', the choice is made for the developer. I assumed 'support 100%' was not impossible, or even particularly difficult, but I stand corrected. Although I would like to note that some developers do still support iOS5 - somehow.

I wish they'll put some effort to make Linux client. Definitely a minus for me right now.

A startup which core business is collect in just one place all the free storage provided as marketing growth tactic from other cloud storage startups.

But would you stripe or mirror? :-)

The though of psuedo-RAID6 across multiple storage providers makes me want to cry into a beer.

Would there be noticeable performance issues if one were to run Google Drive, Dropbox, and Box simultaneously?

What about Skydrive and SugarSync?

Looks like Android users are out in the cold on this one. Any filesize limitations?

1. Box offers WebDAV. 2. Zotero can store files in a WebDAV server.

I got 50GB by connecting to my LG phone not too long ago.

For a little over $200 I can get a 50GiB USB flash drive. If I can pay more and buy one five times as large, I can get below $1 per GiB. Why would I need cloud storage for these sizes?

Isn't this kinda missing the point? First of all this was free, but Box is like Dropbox, so it syncs files between computers and you can access them in your phone.

How can I not access a flash drive in my phone? It’s in my hand. I can just plug it in. If I want to access the files from a computer, I plug it into the computer.

That’s my point. “Cloud” storage is completely unnecessary for these storage sizes, as I can just carry my personal data with me.

You can get a 256GB flash drive for $200. A 64GB is only about $40 these days.

I'm sure the NSA is loving this.

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