Dropbox Pro – 1 TB for $99/year

Well, almost (I paid 79 euros for 1TB + Office 2013). I don't really see how Dropbox is going to survive this price war as the others don't need to directly profit from these services (at least not in the near future). Dropbox cannot really cross-finance the storage costs as this is its main business.

They de-dupe files and surely have negotiated with Amazon. Still seems like they should start opening their own data centers otherwise they never have a chance beating their own supplier at price.

How did you come up with that price?

As far as I understand Dropbox is still using Amazon S3. S3 according to their pricing calculator is roughly $26/month per TB (not including outbound traffic). I'm sure because of Dropbox's multi-PetaByte scale they have negotiated better prices with AWS. I wouldn't be surprised if they are paying $20/month per TB. The amount Amazon charges for data-transfer is quite crazy roughly $120/month per TB. If about 10% of data on dropbox is transferred out on a monthly basis than Dropbox total cost for storage is roughly $20 + 0.1 * $120 = $32/month per TB. Thus in order to break-even they are probably expecting the average paying user to use less than 30% of the 1 TB space. (In reality that is less since Dropbox has a free-tier they need to amortize along with marketing expenses, employee costs etc ..)

Have you switched to an alternative?

What do you use instead of Dropbox?

I had the same moral objections as you and I've been using btsync (http://www.bittorrent.com/sync) and must admit it works great. My archive is not that big tough, ymmv.

To be honest I won't use dropbox again, even if Rice quits, since btsync is vastly superior for my use cases.

Don't single out Ms. Rice. Have you checked who made your jeans? Or why tomatoes are cheap at the local grocery store? Or the latte you paid $8 at Starbucks?

ExpanDrive is one of those names I've heard for years, over and over. Looking at the feature list, I can see why. Thanks for making such an amazing app!

That is very shameless indeed... However it is warranted. I've actually been looking for something like this, especially a something like this that supports Hubic!

I've used ExpanDrive since about two major versions ago, and it's a very good product that I'd recommend to anyone that wants to interact with remote storage.

Any reason why ExpanDrive install FUSE 2.6.X when 2.7.0 is latest release? Anything on the horizon for Yosemite? Thanks!

I've been a daily user since before it was called Expandrive... I can't even remember the old name now, SFTPDrive? Anyhow it's been about 7 years that I've been using it. Definitely worth the money.

Thats how markets work. If you feel it isn't worth $100, then don't buy it. You vote with your money.

Dropbox has 'selective sync' in preferences on your computer. You can select what to sync and what not to sync. Comes in handy with only 128gb SSD in my Air.

Yeah my demeanor (as someone who already paid $200) went from super salty to pretty jazzed once I saw we'd be rolled in automatically

Get into video editing. I think my computer has access to about 6TB directly and another 16 or so in other various places.. struggling to find things to clear out :)

My experience with Onedrive (when it was Skydrive) was fairly straightforward: the OS X client crashed all the time, when it even started properly at all, and the Windows 8.1 integration worked flawlessly. Dropbox, on the other hand, works flawlessly on both.

I trust that Microsoft will be around longer vs. Dropbox in its current form, but I'm still not convinced that Microsoft 'gets it' yet. With the new third-party cloud integration in iOS 8 and Yosemite I think this is a great opportunity for both to pick up a lot of users, though, and it'll even the playing field as far as engineering goes, so this is a good time to be on either one.

I agree. I have the $99/year plan. It's like getting Office for free. I'd love to support Dropbox monetarily as I've been there since the early days, but having an integrated office suite beats it out.

What they should do is partner with Corel and offer Wordperfect X7 with Pro, or have a $129/year version that includes it.

I got 200GB for free with my Surface and I migrated away from Dropbox almost immediately.

The thing I like most about it is that it's totally transparent, moreso than the Dropbox client. It also does some kind of transparent archiving (easily switched off on a per-file or directory level) that removes local files if they haven't been used for a while and automatically re-downloads them if you try to access them. Perfect for directories full of photos.

The biggest flaw I've found is that it doesn't support long path names. npm stores its modules in very deep directory structure that absolutely will not sync.

You can use a VPN to virtually teleport yourself to US or many other places. Some VPN-providers even give you a free month, enough to sign up for Dropbox. A friend of a friend of mine (...) did exactly this with Dropbox. ;-)

Nope nope nope. I can't for the life of me figure out how to cancel my damn account with them. They correspond only in French and my wife (who happens to be French) cannot figure out how to cancel either. They keep dinging me with a stupid €1 fee every month and I can't make it stop!

It looks like you will be auto upgraded according to the site.

A truecrypt container on Dropbox isn't very ideal either, you'd have to up/download the whole thing instead of just the file you need.

I've heard that Spideroak is a better solution. https://spideroak.com/

I personally use encfs for my sensitive data.

mega.co.nz seems like the closest you'll get, but their Linux sync client has been "coming soon" for a year (you can always use the Chrome/Firefox plugins though, it's just not seamless)

Well buddy let me help you out. Since I have a system that does exactly what you're asking for on Debian Linux. I set it up a long time ago so I may be forgetting something.

Only an idiot would do "security stuff" blindly without researching on their own and my personal security hangups do not necessarily match anyone elses on the planet. So thats the disclaimer. Given that disclaimer:

Assuming a sane linux like Debian, as root "apt-get install fuse encfs". Make sure encfs shows up in the "lsmod | grep encfs" list. Make sure your username is in the fuse group, so "man adduser" or hope "adduser jareds fuse". If you add yourself to a group, you're not "really" in that group until you log out and log back in. That sounds like an awful amount of work but its really about 5 minutes. (and I do groups in LDAP, you probably don't, and I don't remember if this is proper syntax for old fashioned local files)

In yer ~/Dropbox, make a directory encfs

In ~/Dropbox/encfs make directories for your stuff. Lets be uncreative and make a directory called passwords to store passwords lists and things

Make a script in ~/Dropbox/encfs called encfs.sh and chmod a+x it so you can run it.

#!/bin/bash

# This script is ~/Dropbox/encfs/encfs.sh

# Dont forget to chmod a+x this script

# apt-get install fuse encfs

# make sure fuse shows up in lsmod | grep fuse

# make sure user is in group fuse as in adduser vince fuse and log out and log back in

echo We are now mounting your passwords directory aka ~/passwords

fusermount -u /home/jareds/passwords

encfs /home/jareds/Dropbox/encfs/passwords /home/jareds/passwords

exit 0

I'm making some assumptions about the locations of your home directory. You should be able to figure it out. I use AFS at home which makes for long path names. Others use NFS. Whatever. It seems self explanatory enough?

That unmount command will fail if its not mounted. Thats OK. The reason why this is necessary is if the system crashes or who knows what, sometimes the fuse mount gets stuck and can't be re-added by encfs. Annoying. But trying to unmount cures a stuck fuse mount.

Run it and I forget how you set your password. Likely it prompts. Been a long time since I set this up and I forget how to create. The script above is great for remounting an existing encfs, it is a somewhat edited version of what I use.

Anyway assuming you get it working go visit ~/passwords, and make a couple files. Don't matter what, just df > test1, free -m > test2 its all good enough. Go visit ~/Dropbox/encfs/passwords and see instead of test1 and test2, two filenames looking like line noise and the contents look like line noise. Edited to emphasize its one encrypted file per decrypted file, not a single giant file.

If you're ever bored, look at the xml file ~/Dropbox/encfs/passwords/.encfs6.xml So I'm using 256 bit AES with 1024 byte blocks, OK then.

Encfs is no speed demon. I wouldn't go putting 1080p high def video files on it. Then again I have no idea why I'd want to encrypt those.

(edited to add, I'm in "submitting too fast" prison, but to answer webmaven's question, wrapping in encfs also fixes the case conflict problem that dropbox has... you could presumably use UTF-8 filenames for all encfs cares, the encrypted filenames will look like 32 characters of line noise no matter what you name the file)

Boxcryptor i think will do what you want, I've not tried it myself yet thou.

It's quite heavy, but Tahoe-LAFS [0] is here for that. Dropbox becomes a simple HDD in the cloud, it only stores stuff and has no logic whatsoever. See [1] for an example of how you can use it (along with other providers to increase resilience of your data)

[0] http://tahoe-lafs.org/

[1] http://bitcartel.wordpress.com/2012/10/21/rbic-redundant-bun...

I was under the impression that a shared folder only uses up the original creators space, rather than on each shared member. Is that not the case?

edit: Clearly I was mistaken, thanks for the correction(s)!

I'd recommend Office 365 Home Premium. It includes 5 user accounts, each getting 1TB of OneDrive storage and access to the full MS Office Suite. The retail price is $99/year, but you can typically find discounts, e.g. here it's $70/year http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/917386-REG/microsoft_6...

The native integration with Windows 8 is also quite nice. If you're not on Windows it still might be worth considering just based on price alone (especially if you use MS Office).

Well, this is partly true. But this is a consequence of the fact that Google has a lot of other ways to make money than Google Drive -- like, say, those Chromebooks. (Does Google actually make money on Chromebooks? Google kinda baffles me, they have more 'loss leaders' than they do revenue sources, even though the sheer amount of revenue those sources produce means they're still totally profitable. Anyway.) Dropbox makes money on Dropbox storage. That's it.

Interesting. It's run by OVH and they seem to have been successful in building a business with rock-bottom pricing.

Impossible to cancel an account with them, see my other comment.