Poll: Did you “drop Dropbox”? | Hacker News Reader

Poll: Did you “drop Dropbox”?

441 pointsajani295 comments

A few months ago there was an intense discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7566069 regarding the appointment of Condoleezza Rice on the Board of Dropbox.

The linked page was http://www.drop-dropbox.com/.

Looking at Crunchbase profile of Dropbox indicates that Rice continues as a Board member.

I am curious to know how many users decided to drop Dropbox as a consequence of the above.

Don't forget to upvote the post itself to get more people to vote on this.

View on HN

I continue to use Dropbox and I'm pro the appointment of Condoleezza Rice as for the sake of our industry it is wise for us to have better political links to the US government.

(Politics is irrelevant to me, but power is not. The government can already twist your arm; being on first name's basis with somebody important will be invaluable.)

Edit: I thought we could openly state our opinions, but it seems I am getting punished with downvotes. Editing again because it's now going the other direction, but my point still stands: don't downvote or upvote just to normalise your own political beliefs.

If power is not irrelevant to you, then politics either.

I meant political persuasion as-in this isn't about right/left or good/bad for me.

At least for me, that's why you don't get an upvote (you'd get a downvote if I could give one).

You keep painting this as a political issue, when it isn't. The point is not that Rice is controversial, or a republican.

The point is that by international standards, she's a WAR CRIMINAL.

So you're not interested in politics. Fantastic. In 1930's Germany you'd be the idiot with his head in the sand, talking about how the Nazi party is really energizing the manufacturing sector and how great that is for the economy.

I am so sick of hearing people like you taking pride in how ignorant they are of the world around them.

She's in a board position at Dropbox which has nothing to do with Nazi Germany. She's probably not going to commit war crimes from this position...

And in all honesty I don't think you have any clue what my perspective would be if I had been there in the 1930s. I think it's quite likely that I'd be anti-genocide, anti-authoritarian and quite willing to stand in front of the persecutory masses and tell them what I believe. What I'm trying to say quite nicely to you, is can you quit slandering me?

I like your reasoning; it's always nice to encounter someone who doesn't confuse "ought" with "is".

(Also, anent voting patterns, anecdotal but perhaps still of interest: I've noticed, when expressing on HN political opinions which don't accord with the local consensus, that there will generally be a few slow downvotes early, followed by a quick spike of upvotes bringing the comment up to a net positive score, followed eventually by a few more scattered downvotes, with the net result being usually positive but not as much so as the initial spike would suggest.)

>when expressing on HN political opinions which don't accord with the local consensus

This is the case not only with unpopular political opinions, but anything mildly or even vaguely controversial. I'm convinced that it's mostly the same few individuals who sit on HN all day and downvote away.

I've also wondered about the possible existence of a bot or bots that downvote comments with certain keywords, in a misguided effort to avoid any Reddit-like dilution of HN's usual quality. What makes me think it might be bots is the consistent speed with which mildly controversial posts get downvoted once or twice. It seems too regular to be human-mediated (and if it is, then I worry for the mental state of said human).

I am certain I've seen Communist sentiments scattered around HN but with actual discussion. The same goes for Libertarian sentiment, however I think OP's comment seems flippant at least and reddit flair flippant at most. He contributed nothing by stating his opinion and seemed to be asking for a retort.

What makes you think down/upvotes are related to political beliefs? It could be that people think you are making a good/bullshit argument, regardless of their political inclination.

  1. The poll was framed in a way that did not make my opinion
  available.
  2. Nobody else had expressed my position so I thought that it 
  was uncommon.
  3. I assumed the poll was meant to try to force Dropbox to drop 
  her from the board.
  4. I expressed a position that wasn't that political but that 
  I knew would anger or confuse political witchhunters.
  5. It is quite common for people to downvote information that 
  does not agree with their ethical aesthetics.

I think those are good reasons and I think they're quite common. However if you think you can argue beyond a mouse-click go ahead.

Your "argument" wasn't that good to begin with, since you don't say why political links to the US government would be a good thing nor why she in particular would be a good choice for making/maintaining those links.

Well I didn't have long to type it so sorry if it wasn't great, but I would say that with regards to principles like Net Neutrality your idea that the tech industry doesn't need better political links to the US government is not well-grounded.

I couldn't possibly speculate on who the best people to make or maintain political links are, but my speculation is that the more connected to government you are the more you will be able to affect policies affecting the tech industry.

"with regards to principles like Net Neutrality your idea that the tech industry doesn't need better political links to the US government is not well-grounded."

I said no such thing. Seems like you're the confused one now.

I suppose the OP thought, like I do too, that it is obvious what positive effects come from fraternal relations with politicians.

Have you read the newspapers lately from ANY part of the world? Does it still need to be explained why, in general, being cosy with the politicos is usually a good thing?

You make a claim that,

  it is wise for us to have more political links to the US government.

but you fail to explain why. Perhaps that's the source of some downvotes.

You also write,

  Politics is irrelevant to me

which demostrates that your 'opinion' comes from a place of indifference, perhaps another reason for downvotes.

  > You make a claim that [...] but fail to explain why

Actually I did: "The government can already twist your arm; being on first name's basis with somebody important will be invaluable." I think it will create more opportunities for the tech industry to influence big politics.

  > demostrates that your 'opinion' comes from a place of indifference,
  > perhaps another reason for downvotes.

No, and in the next four words I very clearly explained to you what I am not indifferent about.

> but power is not

It should be. Irrelevant, that is.

"Politics" is discrete from ethics. Condi is a pariah, ethically speaking-- a war criminal walking free.

Political links to the US govt are also a bit of a hazard-- the more you willingly approach them and enable them, the more they will take from your pocket and the more they will push you around. The Snowden leaks have painted a bad picture of the US companies as a result of their compliance with ridiculous government policy, and these companies are being scrutinized fiercely as a result.

The question is whether it is possible to run a significant business in the United States without interacting with the federal government. I don't think that it is.

It's not like ISPs and tech companies went to the NSA and offered up their data--there is no proof at all of that. What the evidence shows is that the government used its force of law to compel cooperation from these companies.

The people's tool for controlling the force of law is politics. So, being politically connected is an important part of playing defense against government action.

Whether Condoleeza Rice is the correct person to fulfill that role is in the eye of beholder. I certainly don't fault people for opposing any connection to her. But I would fault anyone who thinks that that is a universal sentiment. There are quite a few people (in government and out) who still respect and perhaps even like her.

"The question is whether it is possible to run a significant business in the United States without interacting with the federal government. I don't think that it is."

That may be true. It probably is true once you reach the numbers-beginning-in-B level.

Nevertheless, there are lots of political operatives, former officials, and other contacts you could find without stooping as low as a former member of the Bush administration.

I'm certainly no fan of hers but "war criminal" is a label that's thrown around way too often with no basis or grounding. It's too often used to describe someone who engaged in some kind of war someone else doesn't like, so they're labeled as such. The actual term stems from The Hague conventions, which were not violated by her or the U.S. in this case.

From Condi's Wikipedia article: A Senate Intelligence Committee reported that on July 17, 2002, Rice met with CIA director George Tenet to personally convey the Bush administration's approval of the proposed waterboarding of alleged Al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah.

Direct approval of torture.

From Wikipedia's page on war crimes:

A war crime is a serious violation of the laws and customs of war (also known as international humanitarian law) giving rise to individual criminal responsibility. Examples of war crimes such as:[1]

    murdering, mistreating, or deporting civilian residents of an occupied territory to slave labor camps

    murdering or mistreating prisoners of war or civilian internees

Condi seems to fit the bill perfectly.

Well, "war crime" is actually quite hard to apply to actions of the US, because they refuse to recognize the authority of the International Criminal Court in the Hague who decides whether these conventions were violated or not.

War crimes exist independently from the ICC. Plenty of Nazis were convicted of war crimes despite the ICC not existing and their government at the time of their actions not agreeing that genocide was a crime.

Without support, governments have no power.

In the past, it may have been rational to overlook deeds, such as war crime, to reach a Nash equilibrium which results in a net positive outcome. And it may still be the rational move to cuddle up with a metaphorical Hitler.

However, there's a strong argument to be made in changing the dynamic, and spurning people/companies who think it's justifiable to optimise for power, regardless of the human cost!

The costs are lost lives, devastated lives, and the tearing apart of 'other' nations.

Don't care? That's for each person to decide. It's not like anyone can 'legitimately' come and rip Dropbox from your devices... other than your government, of course.

I'm a little lost. Are you suggesting Dropbox, perhaps through new-found political might, is going to end lives and destroy nations?

> us to have better political links to the US government.

Us? Are you on Dropbox's board? Why is wedding corporate power to political influence wise for this industry? Astonishing naiveté.

> don't downvote or upvote just to normalise your own political beliefs.

What a meaningless statement. Post on your blog if you don't want your opinion torn apart like a piece of meat. All the comments I've seen thus far are civil.

EDIT: It's too bad OP is unwilling to engage in any real dialogue on this issue. Other comments make excellent points which lhnz also ignores and dismisses.

Yes - if you work in the tech industry you are affected by policies which affect the industry as a whole.

Wedding corporate power to political influence is wise for the industry because that is exactly what we are up against already: corporate power has been wedded to political influence for a very long time and one can easily point out attempts that have already been made to protect previously established industries.

See, it's easy, I was able to argue back without resorting to name calling.

> exactly what we are up against already

There's that pesky collective noun again. Again, you labor under a delusion of a shared struggle.

> one can easily point out attempts that have already been made to protect previously established industries.

Such as a company that's raised over a billion dollars seeking to protect its position in a lucrative market by appointing politically well-connected board members? No way!

> I was able to argue back without resorting to name calling.

And so was I. What's your point?

  > I was able to argue back without resorting to name calling.
  And so was I. What's your point?

You use words like "naiveté", "delusion", "meaningless" which are clearly derogatory so you are wrong again.

Hilariously your comment "all the comments I've seen thus far are civil" completely rung true until you got involved.

Then perhaps we misunderstand each other. I used those terms to describe (accurately, in my opinion) your opinions, they have nothing to do with you as a person.

Nonsense. The things you say about a persons opinions are still things you say against that person. It just becomes more acceptable in some circles to describe someone as having naive opinions than describing the person as naive.

The best course of action is to leave the emotive language out of the discussion.

"Astonishing naiveté." "delusion of a shared struggle" "What a meaningless statement." "Post on your blog if you don't want your opinion torn apart like a piece of meat"

You have not been "civil". Quit being an ass.

Am I a tool or an ass? Do you have anything of substance to add?

yeah, I reconsidered the wording since 'tool' has a certain connotation that I didn't intend.

I was hoping to be part of the several voices that were telling you you were wrong, because maybe hearing it from lots of people would make it more convincing.

I believe the idea is that, given the choice between

- Nobody in the entire tech industry has influence over government

- A few key players like Apple and Google have influence over government

Your parent is saying, the latter is better, because Apple & Google (being tech companies) have shared interests with other tech companies.

Certainly there is risk that the big companies would use their influence in government to trample smaller tech companies, but could it be that risk is smaller than the risks of the whole tech sector having zero say/influence in government at all?

I'm against Condi because she is partially responsible for the deaths of at least 100,000 (that 100 thousand) Iraqis. It was her job as NSA to temper Dubya's intransigence, but she did not. Such a person should be shunned and not given positions of status.

I did, and then I reinstalled it when I saw that it's the only thing that works.

Alternatives aren't as good as dropbox. Google drive is a close second, but without official linux client it's borderline useless to me - also their photo backup system is too complicated with g+, private/public albums, sharing, galleries etc and I don't want to spend time figuring it out when I just want simple photo backup service that I enable with one click.

I don't want spend time setting up my own servers, I don't want to use beta software, I don't want buggy 3rd party software, I don't want to compile stuff from sources.

I want to install something that works out of the box and is cross platform, and right now dropbox is literally the only option there is.

did you try duplicati? the fact that dropbox doesn't have client side encryption is a MAJOR issue

also duplicati is open sourced

That one seems to be targeted more at periodical backups than what dropbox does, which is more closer to syncing and backing up at the same time.

Anyway, no I did not try it. From the website "It works with Amazon S3, Windows Live SkyDrive, Google Drive (Google Docs), Rackspace Cloud Files or WebDAV, SSH, FTP"

I've heard of 5 of those, I know how to use 3 for storage, I have accounts with only 2 (gmail, outlook), but 0 of them have clients that work on android and linux.

And using different, non official, clients on different platforms just doesn't sound like a install and forget about it type of deal like dropbox has. Can I take a picture on my phone and see it a minute later on my computer and vice versa? My guess would be "no".

As far as encryption and it being open source goes, I couldn't care less about that. I don't store too sensitive data on dropbox so I don't care if NSA, dropbox or some other government agency has easy access to my data on their servers.

As far as the open source argument goes it's simply irrelevant to me. I don't have time nor knowledge to go over its source and I doubt that many other people do, as far as I'm concerned the fact that it's open source doesn't change anything regarding to either security or functionality of that software.

I still stand by my statement that literally not a single piece of software exists that does the same as dropbox in terms of stability, functionality, ease of use, and cross platform compatibility.

Try out Wuala or Spideroak. Dead simple and client-side encryption enabled so there's no need to trust anyone.

Full Android and Linux support on both. Wuala and Spideroak even offer automatic camera upload on Android.

> I still stand by my statement that literally not a single piece of software exists that does the same as dropbox in terms of stability,

That seems a bit odd, since 4 sentences previously you state that you are pretty unfamiliar with the space "I've heard of 5 of those, I know how to use 3 for storage".

>you are pretty unfamiliar with the space

Rackspace cloud files, as one of the things I haven't used from that list, is not even same thing as dropbox. I've researched software like dropbox when I deactivated it, I did not look into all possible file storage offers that may or may not work with 3rd party clients (such as duplicati, which doesn't have android client as far as I can tell).

Another often suggested option from comments here wuala did not work on my phone, it crashed instantly (not sure if it's fixed now). Spideroak was buggy iirc, I did try it but I'm not totally sure why I dropped it.

Also, both of those options are roughly 10 times more expensive than dropbox when you compare GB/$.

I use Wuala, which not only has a Linux client, but a FUSE module for true ease of use. It also does client-side encryption, and if you forget your password, you've lost your data, which is how it should work. I'm also reasonably pleased with the Windows and Android clients, though I don't use them nearly as much.

"I don't want spend time setting up my own servers, I don't want to use beta software, I don't want buggy 3rd party software, I don't want to compile stuff from sources."

May we invite you, provided you just need cloud storage and not happy-clicky-gui-sharing, to try rsync.net[1] ?

Just works on any unix, including mac, with nothing to install. HN discount, as always.[2]

[1] http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt [2] https://www.rsync.net/signup/signup_offer.html?code=710b50

Is there a way to use rsync on iOS?

Our service works perfectly with any SSH based tool.

I see there are a fair number of SFTP clients for IOS, and those would all work perfectly.

> Google drive is a close second, but without official linux client it's borderline useless to me - also their photo backup system is too complicated with g+, private/public albums, sharing, galleries etc and I don't want to spend time figuring it out when I just want simple photo backup service that I enable with one click.

My thoughts exactly.

There should have been 2 options for "I continue to use Dropbox despite being against the appointment of Rice" and "I continue to use Dropbox, with no opinion about the Board".

How about one for "I dropped DropBox in favour of an option with client side encryption"?

Wuala, SpiderOak, even GDrive/DropBox + EncFS/Ecryptfs/BoxCryptor. So many better options than DropBox for those of us with privacy concerns.

And for the more DIY people, there's OwnCloud, git-annex assistant (which supports encrypted remotes!), SyncThing and TahoeLAFS. Anyone know of a good sync client for TahoeLAFS though?

What you really want is "I dropped Dropbox for an unrelated reason". The poll is trying to determine whether the call to boycott dropbox due to Condi Rice's appointment actually got anywhere. The OP's suggested answers would make it easier to answer the original question. Your answer, as I see it, would just add noise.

Yeah, I'm just not sure why anyone would drop it over that specific appointment. It's already clear that DropBox can read your files for shits and giggles.

If you have privacy concerns, you're going to pick something where that's not possible anyways.

Maybe someone can explain this to me - is it just partisan political crap?

I dropped them due to the Rice appointment. Granted, this decision was made much easier by the fact that I rarely used dropbox and had nothing important stored there (mainly photos from stuff I was selling on craigslist).

Also, definitely a partisan decision on my part. I'm sure if the appointment was a "liberal/democrat" with a similar record of facilitating NSA snooping, etc, I'd find a way to justify not dropping dropbox.

At the time the appointment was announced there was a fair bit of outrage, and a big call to action around boycotting dropbox over it. It seems like following up on that call to action is actually a pretty interesting thing to do.

That makes sense. Added.

I don't see BitTorrent Sync in your list of alternatives. I've not used it myself, but I've heard good things about it. I just wonder if it's secure at all, given the open nature of BitTorrent itself.

BitTorrent Sync is not open source or even open protocol and I personally caught them lying about their cryptography by reverse engineering it a bit. Found calls setting up 128 bit AES rather than 256 bit as they claimed in documentation. Posted it on their forum and was told that I was correct and the docs were outdated.

I didn't take my RE any deeper, but trust it at your own risk. I'd recommend SyncThing over it as a good open alternative, though it's admittedly not as polished yet.

Admittedly I am listing several closed tools, but only those I've had good experiences with.

Thanks, that helps. I was wary of it in the first place, but now I know I'll stay away.

I do love the idea of OwnCloud, and I've tried it a few times in the past. But it almost feels like they are paying more attention to making a "virtual web desktop" with the new file editing stuff, and less attention to proper file syncing. I've tried to use them for syncing in the past on my CoLo file server, and on a fast machine in my home, and it's just too slow and buggy for now. I wish I was a competent programmer so I could contribute in that department.

Late edit: I just realized you took my statement about BitTorrent's "open nature" to mean open source or protocol. I apologize, I didn't mean it that way and should have worded it better. What I meant was "open for all to see what you're transferring". Basically, the contents would be easy to snoop from what I understand. Sorry about any confusion.

Looks like the BitTorrent Sync specs have been updated http://www.bittorrent.com/sync/tech-specs

Yes, they updated them after I mentioned it. However, it leaves me questioning other things which I didn't look at and overall, I'm just not happy trusting a closed cryptosystem.

I'd be willing to accept closed source if they at least published a cryptographic protocol, but closed source and closed protocol, where I myself have seen that the little bit of vague documentation that they do have has been incorrect in the past, is quite untrustworthy in my opinion.

Considering the number of alternatives available - may as well just use something else. I'll give it another look if they open the protocol in one way or another as they do surely have the ease of use nailed down.

Exactly, I dropped Dropbox for Spideroak after the NSA fiasco and have since moved to Owncloud on my own servers. It works perfectly. I honestly think Owncloud has the nicest desktop client around.

And at the very least "I dropped DropBox for some other reason".

Yep, dropped Dropbox for SpiderOak ages ago due to a number of really poor security failings on Dropbox's part. (Remember the day they accidentally allowed blank passwords to login to anyones account?)

When was that?

Had to look through my emails but it looks like it was in June of 2011.

edit: http://www.geek.com/news/dropbox-security-glitch-meant-any-p...

I did the same when that incident happened.

I dropped Dropbox because Google Drive simply offered a better product in general for cheaper.

Dropbox is probably the LEAST feature-rich and mid-range to high in the cost part , compared to all the other file sharing services out there.

Dropbox's strength is the simple and consistent GUI that's available in all platforms (desktop, mobile and web). I've moved to SpiderOak and it works perfectly for me, but it's not a UI I would recommend to my mother.

I've been using Seafile, who continues to consistently improve the quality of their software. It's still hard to set up for non-technical people, but I think they may offer a hosted service for such individuals.

And to be clear, the actual client you install to make the backups is extremely easy to install and use, it's just the server that can be tricky to set up.

In your first line, you say to drop Dropbox due to lack of client side encryption, and in your second line you mention that you can just roll your own while still using Dropbox...?

I loved dropbox, it was very useful. The Rice appointment was totally surprising, and the drop-dropbox page was fairly well-written, so I dropped Dropbox. It became immediately clear the company I thought they were and the company they are diverged some time ago. It doesn't really matter when, now.

My .bash_profile is much more of a mess now, but I'm more aware of where all my hard copies are. Before, I relied on Dropbox way too much to keep important stuff around.

Besides, tarsnap has a better CLI, am I right? ;)

Same here, though it helped that they appointed her about 10 days before my paid renewal was due.

I miss the ease of use and I've had to put much more work in to (mostly) match the features I gave up. Owncloud, cron, rsync, and a few other tools are all tested and working now, but it isn't as slick and requires occasional maintenance.

I miss using Dropbox but there are some things that are unacceptable to me, and require a permanent change even if burdensome. It isn't that I trusted Dropbox before - I used client-side encryption for most files. It's appointing her and the huge 'fuck you' message it sends to those of us who care about privacy. There's just no overlooking it.

This poll is a spectacular example of selection bias, and the uselessness of polls. There's not a chance in hell that 20% of active Dropbox users have stopped using it, even among tech circles.

I would be amazed if even 20% knew about this in the first place, and amazed if as much as 1/10 of those people truly stopped using Dropbox.

No one is claiming that this is a scientific poll. You'd have to be naive to assume that the results could be generalized to the population at large. That doesn't mean this poll is useless.

Yes it does. It's a poll of all the people who chose to do this poll.

I suspect that is massively biased towards people who did drop Dropbox.

At the very least the results useless unless we can estimate the self-selection bias.

Nobody but a fool would ever mistake a poll on HN for a poll of the general population.

The entire point of a poll on HN is to poll HN users, not the general population.

This is not a poll of HN users. It's a poll of HN users who clicked a headline about dropping dropbox.

I'm dropping Dropbox but haven't had a chance to rescue my data yet.

It's not specifically about the appointment of Rice, but in general the whole collision between my data and foreign (US) politics, given the privacy disclosures in the past few years.

I already have Owncloud set up on my own private server for less money than I pay Dropbox each month and that kind of setup allows me to share files publicly online (and use owncloud to host sites) as well as even an in-browser text editor to alter the files. I can host and edit a website using nothing but Owncloud!

I support Condoleeza Rice and GOP, but that wasn't enough for me to start using Dropbox — Google Drive is fine for me.

Not everybody is left-leaning here.

Not everyone who dislikes Rice is left-leaning neither.

Yeah she is female and black so plenty for the right to hate.

While a large swath of people believe that conservatives hate women and people that aren't white, this is not the case.

Racists prejudice a specific race. Sexists prejudice a specific gender. Conservatives, however, are just people that have a different view on how a country should be run. These three things are completely separate qualities. Some people may exhibit several of these qualities, while others do not. I imagine this is why you are being downvoted.

> Racists prejudice a specific race. Sexists prejudice a specific gender. Conservatives, however, are just people that have a different view on how a country should be run.

For everything else, there's Fox News ...

Actually I doubt many people truly believe that "conservatives hate women and non-whites", it's just a rhetorical hammer used by those arguing against conservatives. Whether the argument is fallacious and/or inaccurate really doesn't matter.

I was about to say something like "welcome to modern politics", except we have evidence of this kind of thing going on since elections in ancient Rome, and it's probably far older than that, too. So "welcome to human nature", maybe.

Not everyone who dislikes Rice is left-leaning neither.

In right-winger logic they are, of course.

Please, don't.

Use complete sentences?

You don't need to be left-leaning to consider Rice and the GOP unethical extremists.

Basically, most of the people on this planet that consider themselves conservative wouldn't want to be associated with the US Republican Party.

I'm not sure I consider myself "left leaning" per se -- I guess it depends on the issue. Before Bush Jr. my nomination for best president of the last hundred years would have been Dwight Eisenhower (R) and my worst would have been Lyndon Johnson (D). Bush has likely edged out Johnson for worst.

Interestingly both Lyndon Johnson and Bush Jr. were Southern Democrats. Most of the craziness about today's GOP can be traced to the fact that they were overrun with former Dixiecrats. Bush was basically a Dixiecrat who ran as a Republican.

The Southern Democrat position combines everything bad about the Democrats (big government, high taxes, etc.) with everything bad about the Republicans (fundamentalism, warmongering). (Bush did raise taxes, just indirectly. Taxation equals spending as per simple double-entry accounting, and Bush raised spending and increased the size of government considerably.)

I switched to Syncthing for everything apart from photo syncing. Haven't looked back. http://syncthing.net/

Am in the process of switching....

Do you know a good GUI that will tell me about things that happen and files that failed to sync?

It has a built-in web gui - try it!

I know, I don't like web GUIs. Also this cannot notify me during work.

Well it has an event api you can use.

This looks great. Do you have a server or are you just syncing between PCs?

I'm wanting to set up a backup server for music and such, but most virtual server providers (like Linode, DigitalOcean) don't seem optimized toward hard drive space. Could you point me in the right direction?

I sync between PCs. One side must have an open port.

I dropped Dropbox post-Snowden revelations. I am now a proud user of Tahoe-LAFS[0].

[0] https://leastauthority.com/

Awesome - is there a decent sync client for Tahoe-LAFS though? I'm currently an OwnCloud user but I'd really like to try this option as I have several servers I could use for storage and mirroring, but they'd have to have encrypted storage.

You mean something like Dropbox autosync? There is a drop_upload option in the tahoe.cfg file. I believe it works fine on GNU/Linux. Not sure about other OSes. You could always use 'tahoe backup' command.

Interesting, but not really what I'm talking about. On https://leastauthority.com/ there's mention of development of a "Magic Folder" tool that seems to do more of the sort of thing I'm looking at.

That site boasts "take back your privacy (...)" and then loads tracking from analytics.leastauthority.com (even with an expired certificate). Privacy my behind...

Privacy theatre?

I stayed on as a customer.

I really don't keep magic lists of people that are cool or not-cool.

As far as privacy, it remains a concern, but Rice has absolutely zero impact on that, so the whole thing was not germane to my internet activity.

What concerns me more about Dropbox is this practice of giving away space -- but only for a limited amount of time. I bought some products and got a huge amount of space, but only for a year or two.

Now what the hell am I going to do two years later? Download 100GB over my satellite connection? They've effectively trapped me into doing business with them. That's the kind of thing I find much more objectionable than keeping a roster of who plays on which team in SV.

What concerns me more about Dropbox is this practice of giving away space -- but only for a limited amount of time. I bought some products and got a huge amount of space, but only for a year or two. Now what the hell am I going to do two years later? Download 100GB over my satellite connection? They've effectively trapped me into doing business with them. That's the kind of thing I find much more objectionable than keeping a roster of who plays on which team in SV.

This is my biggest issue with them, once you get past the privacy issues. I have a 500GB colocated file server that I can use OwnCloud, rsync, btsync, etc. on once my 30GB of "free" Dropbox space runs out. I've already got it all backed up to that server anyway using rsync. Now I just have to figure out which sync method works across all of my devices (GNU/Linux, Windows, Windows Phone, Android, OS X).

Didn't you know it was time limited? How did they "trap" you?

Besides, who says you need to transfer to your home? There are ways of doing cloud-to-cloud transfer. The most basic of which is simply getting a cheap VPS with a couple of TBs of storage (mine costs 20€/month) and pull from there.

I kept Dropbox because they appointed Rice. Dropbox is forced to navigate complicated political, regulatory waters. To do that successfully you need someone who knows how they works. People move from the public to private sector all the time to do exactly that.

(edit: why would you downvote this? that's crazyballs!)

Um sorry I am confused. Are you saying that C. Rice is going to help dropbox "navigate political regulatory waters"... in favor of their users?

Am I understanding this correctly? C. Rice watches out for me?

Yes. What do you think happens when a public official transitions to the private sector? That they are a plant still serving their old employer? Or, perhaps, that they are applying skills and knowledge learned in their old job to a their new role for a new employer?

I know exactly what happens.

But I think we have a disagreement on who that employer is. The employer stays the same, no matter which artificial side, the "employee", takes.

I thought that much was clear, in today's world. Maybe it isn't. Maybe I am way too cynical. Who knows.

Just don't get confused about who Condoleeza Rice is working to support. It's not you, the user, it's Dropbox as a company.

There are many decisions that Dropbox will have to make which will not be in your favour but will be in theirs. If you're lucky, they'll even tell you about those decisions.

I dropped Dropbox immediately after their first "anyone can enter your email without a password and access your data" security flaw.

We've switched to owncloud not for Condoleezza Rice in particular but for general privacy concerns, the possibility to self host and pricing issues.

We really recommend the product, it may have some disadvantages to dropbox but it's very very usable, evolving and we're very happy about it.

Me too, it feels better :-)

Would you mind elaborating on the disadvantages? Also what are the advantages in terms of pricing, how much less is it costing you?

I'd also be curious how much maintenance, setup, etc., work you estimate is involved.

One of the main disadvantages as of now is that there is no over wifi syncing so if there's a big file upload, everyone will have to download it at the office. This hasn't been an issue, but I guess in some scenarios it could be.

Another disadvantage might be that their mobile apps are not free, they are at a more than reasonable price and I don't mind the business model but it could be a little bit uncomfortable, do the employees pay the $1 and then get it back, do you send them as gifts? (Google play doesn't support gifts for example). Not the end of the world but still.

Well, we didn't pay for a Dropbox enterprise account or anything, we always try to minimize costs, that meant that you wither needed to switch between personal and business accounts or use the web interface for one. It also meant that we were constantly overflowing our limits. Dropbox is no offering more than when I last checked, but right now it would be for 22 users €3,168 per year.

I was not so closely involved with the setup but I believe it was pretty straight forward and we've been using with basically no troubles. The software works nicely.

Do continue to support ownCloud financially by purchasing their Android client, but you should know that since it is free and open-source software the Android client is available on F-Droid for free: https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=com.owncloud.and...

Paid Android apps are not available in most countries so this is why you'll see some released in both markets like this.

Tell the employees to grab it there, and make a donation to ownCloud if that's easier for you.

I would have loved to switch away from Dropbox (for example because of Rice, but also because of NSA), but I haven't been able to find anything that works for me with as little hassle as Dropbox. Lock-in by delivering a superior product. Those bastards.

I switched to Copy.com, because it was the only option I could find which met all of my criteria:

[1] Actually works, reliably

[2] Works on Linux

[3] Generous free quota

Of course, I'm probably not the best customer profile to target. I'm a shameless freeloader, and would never even consider paying money to go beyond a free quota. Until my home Internet service is an order of magnitude faster, these services are only useful to me for simple file sharing and photo backup.

Truth be told, I would drop Copy.com and consolidate around Google Drive if they had a simple "automatically backup my cell phone pictures" feature. I can get Drive to work on Linux, and that's already where most of my word processing documents reside. Unfortunately, Google's photo backup feature is tied to G+ rather than Drive, which makes it useless at best.

Just keep in mind that if you're not paying, you're the product, not the customer.

I "dropped dropbox" for privacy reasons a couple years before Rice joined the board.

No option for this.

I dropped Dropbox for Google Drive long time ago.

If Google Drive would release a native Linux client, I would as well. They've been promising one is coming soon for years now, though. I should probably just give up.

dropbox support across EVERYTHING is why I continue to use dropbox for frequent stuff...

I use BTSync for "heavy lifting", since there is no cap on usage (other than bandwidth caps) but it doesn't run on everything.

My web dev company uses Google Drive for everything and we use FreeBSD exclusively. You can access it all from the Google home page. In Chrome, there's a button on the tool bar.

I like Google's pricing a lot better, but it really does not deal with locking/conflicts as well as Dropbox.

Does Google Drive have a different privacy policy to GMail?

My only concern with using Google Drive is worrying about it's future. Who knows if it will get axed like Google Reader did. At least with using DropBox or other alternatives you know what the companies MVP is.

I dropped Dropbox because I no longer found it useful. The composition of a company's pro-forma board of directors is quite possibly the last on my list of decision procedures when making choices about what technologies I use.

Board appointees aside, I "dropped" Dropbox as my cloud backup solution because the Windows client suffered from frequent memory crashes when syncing large numbers of files.

Google Drive suffered the same crashes (it's a 32-bit memory limit thing), so I'm currently using Backblaze for entire PC backup and it's been working great.

I still maintain my free DB account, as it's the most commonly known/used "file sharing" service known to my clients.

I originally jumped from DB to GDrive because of pricing, but this was before Dropbox answered Google's price cuts with their own new tiers.

A client dropped Dropbox when it took 2 days to download their 10GB backup on a >5Mb/s connection. The new solution is an external hard drive for nightly batch backups + Cubby's DirectSync feature for multi-systems, multi-locations & real-time propagation without actually using the Cubby 'cloud' service they pay for. 3-2-1, FTW!

PS: They were weary of BitSync b/c of BitTorrent pirate news but the news about the celeb nudie pictures helped them finally come around to what I've been saying all along: RETAIN CONTROL OF YOUR DATA!!!!!

Haha, I'm back after I read the question below the title. I just ASSUMED this being a tech site that this was a technical poll. Doesn't political BS polls/posts send a mixed signal while YC & HNers continually talk about meaningful input, relevant discussions & not devolving to the lowest common denominator like some other news aggregator sites? Here I have been making a meaningful effort to keep my opinions to myself, stay my hand when I feel that wise-ass niggle coming on(exactly like right now) and only include pertinent knowledge & experience to the discussions rather than go /b-tard and you went ahead and created an entire thread dedicated to the problematic behavior. Is this a honeypot...?

Edit: -derision

For me, the choice of board members is second to the quality of the product. Sure there are other options, but none as effortless and universal. If you work with clients or team members who are familiar Dropbox it's too easy to pass up for company politics. I think it might be a tough sell to change your shared storage system because Condoleezza Rice was appointed.

Now privacy concerns are another matter. In my case this is not a particularly important issue. But if it were, Dropbox gives us enough reason to leave in that department.

The real truth is this poll is not a representative of regular dropbox users. Vast majority of them don't care who is in the board or even at the helm of the company. For many the thing that matters are whether the product works for them or not? Are they getting the value for their money? Switching costs . Etc..

Undoubtedly dropbox has one of the best offering in this space. It is highly unlikely for anybody to dislodge them.

I use Dropbox, but mainly for sharing files between a team and with clients. Also for the Camera Upload feature to auto sync photos from my iPhone.

I otherwise don't really have need for cloud storage for my personal files (1 machine for work and for home!)

I patronize other companies that employee people whose politics I don't agree with, so I don't really see the need to get rid of it for political reasons.

If Rice ran for president, I wouldn't vote for her. But I don't think supporting dropbox is helping or hurting the bad things she MAY have contributed to. They make a good product, and i'll continue using it.

I think the proper way to deal with the things she is accused of having done is via court. If it is believed she committed war crimes, then accuse her of it.

I massively dropped my usage of Dropbox after their security issues (and not getting responses to my emails to them on the topic), and eventually closed my free account around the time of the drop-dropbox.com push.

I'm not against a third party managing my data synchronization, but it was pretty clear our priorities did not align.

I didn't drop Dropbox. I'm glad someone like Condi was appointed. It shows where the founders and investors stand on issues of government cooperation.

It's far preferable to the situation with Eric Schmidt who was a trojan horse and ushered in Google's most egregious cooperation with intelligence agencies.

I would drop Dropbox in a hurry if other solutions would step up to the plate and implement a quality product.

Till date, out of OneDrive, iCloud, Google Drive and Dropbox, only Dropbox offers differential sync (delta sync). I simply can't imagine uploading the entire file when only a few bytes might've changed.

I leave my old data in Dropbox since it's a pain to transfer gigabytes of cloud storage, and I don't have to look for it since I already know where it is. My new data is synced with various things like Owncloud, Cozy, Syncthing, or BitTorrent Sync depending on what the data actually is.

ditto.

I still use Dropbox, but I've started using SafeMonk within Dropbox for sensitive files.

I dropped Dropbox due to the reports of security issues and personal files being scanned. SpiderOak seems to be the best choice at the moment though its application is not nearly as clean (due to a more complex feature set).

Started using after the appointment, but not because of it.

Dropbox "just works" better than any of its competition for our organization and is therefore worth the premium over more economical solutions like Google Drive.

I dropped Dropbox (except for when I have to use it at work).

The tipping point for me was Condoleezza Rice. But there were other issues that were building up. It was consistently eating my laptop battery, and on my desktop with traditional hard drives, it would take forever to start up and finish indexing files.

I replaced Dropbox with a mix of things. My documents went to Google Drive. I converted my old windows desktop into a xubuntu linux home server type thing, and installed BT Sync for the other files I had to sync.

I also do plenty of other things with my home server. Really wish I set one up sooner.

I dropped and then signed up again because I needed some way to sync my 1Password data from my laptop to my Android phone (I was previously using iCloud on an iPhone). Annoying, but I sleep fine at night.

Agreed on this point. If 1Password supported Google Drive (specifically on mobile) I would drop dropbox.

I use WiFi sync on 1Password specifically to avoid syncing through Dropbox or iCloud.

Anything stored on servers in the USA, UK, New Zealand or Australia should be treated as compromised, exposed or public information.

I certainly wouldn't hand my 1password file to random strangers in the street, much less anyone associated with any kind of law enforcement or intelligence agency.

So treat cloud storage as that random stranger in the street. Sure, E's always there with your bag of loot and E's pretty reliable about giving your stuff back, but you have no guarantee that E isn't letting everyone else look at what's in your bag (or that other folks haven't figured out a way to see what's going into and out of the bag, or figured out a way to determine what's in the bag without letting E know they're looking).

Replaced it with Spideroak due to general privacy reasons beyond just Rice.

I dropped Dropbox when the Snowden era began.

Since then I've been searching for a suitable replacement:

btsync (broke git index files) -> unison via star topoogy (no history) -> syncthing (0.9.17 - very promising, but too memory hungry for my synology ds213j) -> synology cloudstation (simply broken, conflict files everywhere) -> seafile via seacloud.cc (promising, but keeps on eating 100% CPU core) -> btsync 1.3.109 (1.4.83 is ridiculously broken) with ntp everywhere in the hope that my git index problem won't come back.

(blog post will hopefully happen soon)

I saw Dropbox on Snowden's files and dropped it as a sack of potatoes. Now I sync via HD. I do store some files I know I will share. It's been a year of no/low activity on my dropbox.

I dropped Dropbox when it was only giving me like 5GB of storage, and my Onedrive had like 1TB due to an Office 365 Home subscription. They waited FAR too long to upgrade their storage space.

I dropped OneDrive because Microsoft Office kept trying to sync to it instead of just saving files locally and letting OneDrive handle the sync. The result was you'd hit "save" in Word or Excel and it would lock all windows for 30 seconds or more while it was communicating with "OneDrive in the cloud". So I switched away from the Microsoft product and started using Dropbox because it was more compatible with Office.

As for Condi, I don't see the big deal. As far as politicians go, she's a little too left-leaning for me, but she's a nice enough gal and it's not like the Dropbox board is a government position.

Rice is a war criminal. The Government is full of war criminals. Both parties are led by war criminals. We don't need war criminals in tech. Its bad enough with all the brogrammers

Meaningless internet polls and all that, but I will say I don't expect that many people outside of Reddit and HN would know or care about this.

Personally, I continue using DropBox the same way I did before: that is not much. Several people I work with use it to share data with teams. I don't generally have much say in that. For me, a much more pressing problem with Dropbox is headless operation support, especially on Linux. Debian packages would be nicer than letting Rice go.

If it's good enough for GvR it's good enough for me.

I dropped Dropbox because they randomly disables ALL my links without mentioning anything about it to me. I didn't find out about it until I had 300+ people email me about not being able to access a file. Even after that - you had to manually delete the old share links in an arcane way & then recreate them. Really, really terrible UI.

I use Copy.com now - clean interface, but something about their sync takes longer than it should.

I was an early user of Dropbox but I'm no longer the audience they target. I've reconsidered what I keep in the cloud and what I keep in my own network. Now I just us it for filesharing. But even for that I've found other, better alternatives (wetransfer.com).

With the discussion of privacy and ownership I've backed away from lots of cloud services. The Condolezza Rice appointment just made it easier to do so sooner.

Al Gore sits on the Apple board; has anyone stopped buying Apple products for that reason? "But Al Gore wasn't part of an administration that killed thousands of innocents in a war!" Have you forgotten about Serbia and Sudan? "But Al Gore isn't a war criminal!" Have you forgotten that he was the one who convinced Clinton to start the entire policy of "extraordinary rendition"?

You can't compare any of that with the atrocity of going to Iraq... She's just too tainted in blood for me to consider rejoining DropBox. She should definitely be behind bars...

Most National Security Advisors, Secretaries of State, Vice Presidents and Presidents should be behind bars, if you take international law and human rights seriously enough to condemn Condoleeza Rice. Things like Iraq get played up by the media because American lives are at risk, but bombings and economic sanctions were similarly ruinious to Iraq and in many cases Serbia, even if to a lesser degree.

I continue to use Dropbox the way I always have: it's for stuff that I don't mind the rest of the world finding out. For example, I have my O'Reilly library delivered through Dropbox. I have cheat sheets, bookmark lists, cat pictures and what not on Dropbox.

I always treated Dropbox as if it was a wholly owned subsidiary of the NSA. Having Condoleeza Rice on the board doesn't move my opinion away from that state.

I've been wanting to for a long time, as you can see by the preponderance of purple from the end of the drop-dropbox.com page. http://i.imgur.com/oJ7kuhm.png

Unfortunately, I've liked the dropbox solution way better than all these others. So I still use dropbox. Anything I want to be encrypted on dropbox I store in an encrypted container.

Don't use anything now but am interested. So I made a list of alternatives used/recommended by HN citizens in this thread and thought I'd share.

  Copy
  Wuala
  syncthing (foss)
  Bittorrent sync / btsync
  Seafile
  Box
  Expandrive
  rsync.net
  pcloud
  Tresorit
  Google drive
  Hubric
  Amazon S3
  onedrive
  SafeMonk within Dropbox
  Spideroak 
  owncloud 
  Tahoe-LAFS

I've started using Hubic since then but I haven't completely gotten rid of Dropbox yet, I just don't use it for anything important.

I dropped Dropbox because of the appointment of Condoleezza Rice, becaue Rice is a warmonger, not because of her role with the NSA. Invading a country and killing the people who live there is what I was against, not the privacy thing. I don't imagine the protest even registered with the Dropbox board, but _I_ am not ok with it as long as she serves there.

I dropped Dropbox and wrote a web-only alternative, which is currently hosted on an Rasperry Pi. It's still a bit rough, and there's a lot of improvements to do, but combined with strong TLS, it suits my basic need for a private file server.

https://github.com/silverwind/droppy

I WAS going to drop Dropbox, then they increased my subscription to 1TB for the same money. That is just too useful to me to let go.

I continue to use it for work. Personally I have stopped using it but that is more because of the ease of use of Bittorrent Sync.

successful democracies have so many protections built in for open debates and protection of minority viewpoints, as well as labor law to protect people's jobs... it just seems so creepy to me the current trend toward squelching disagreement by attacking people's jobs when you disagree with them or if they hold an unpopular opinion.

I dropped Dropbox when I found Bittorrent Sync.

I dropped Dropbox because of too close relation to NSA. Switched to jottacloud. Not quite as good, but at least its in Norway.

I did the same. Like in Dropbox, everything I have in Jottacloud is encrypted. I wasn't a big user of Dropbox before, I really just use a cloud service to store a very small but important amount of files, so I the only difference I notice is whenever I wake up Windows I have to wait a couple of seconds, Jottacloud seems to make everything freeze for a short period.

I still use Dropbox, but I encrypt my data before it goes to their servers. I save encrypted archives of important data (duplicity with encryption key), and also use EncFS for poor man's encrypted sync (this may be a disaster waiting to happen but for now it worked pretty well for me, and of course this data is backed up elsewhere).

> Don't forget to upvote the post itself to get more people to vote on this.

It is against the HN rules to solicit upvotes for posts.

I keep my free Dropbox account, but I won't pay them any money while they have Rice on board. (I was a paid member of Loom, which they acquired. As a result of the acquisition I was to become a paid member of Dropbox's photo syncing service. Instead I demanded and got my money back.)

I did not drop, and do not plan to. (I did drop GoDaddy a while back, but that was because they offer a shitty product).

DropBox is still the best product, currently I'm in the free tier as well. And I also use the other competitor products, but they don't work well enough with groups of people.

Came here for tech discussion because I dropped dropbox for tech reasons. Got sucker punched by politics..

I'm in the process of switching to Wuala, which is secure and encrypted and everything. But my new phone came with Dropbox already on it, and Wuala doesn't have quite the convenient interface that Dropbox has, so I haven't cut my ties with Dropbox completely yet.

Because so many apps assume Dropbox, I still have it. Though I moved all private docs into SpiderOak.

Dropped it as soon as I heard about the appointment. Purchased some webhosting space and setup Owncloud and I haven't looked back since. Does the exact same thing and it's actually cheaper when you consider that I use the web host for other things as well.

Since you dropped Dropbox due to the appointment, how is having your files at some webhost (I'm assuming shared hosting but please correct me if that's wrong) different from hosting with Dropbox? I'm not knocking your decision, in fact I've considered it myself. I have a small reseller hosting side business and it would be super easy for me to spin up a host for myself and do the same. But in the end, your files are still being stored by a third party which you have no control over, and they might just have even worse data security policies than Dropbox. Especially when you consider that most shared hosting plans discourage use as a file server, you may even be violating the AUP of your provider.

I'd say the safest bet is a CoLo with an encrypted drive that only you have the keys to, or else a home server and VPN.

Dropbox is awesome. Everything else sucks. (Except google drive) which I don't use because a) tons of free space from dropbox due to phone purchases b) simple gui sync client that runs on anything. (yes I know about GRive, it's not the same!)

I've got nothing against Condy. That said... why does this matter? As someone who serves on a BoD for a non-profit... isn't this just an advisory position? I don't see how someone's politics is relevant to the running of a company.

I continue to use Dropbox as my company is paying for it anyway which makes my dropbox limit bigger than my hard-drive will ever be and it doesn't make sense to make my own life harder for political reasons. On the other hand I also use TOR :)

I did, following the appointment.

I haven't dropped Dropbox because I was unaware of the appointment of Condoleezza Rice prior to this poll. I've been considering dropping it for awhile for general privacy reasons, but this might be what pushes me over the edge.

I'm sure that was the purpose of this poll.

I canceled my paid account because of the appointment. Dropbox is still kicking around as a free option, but I'm okay with that because they're losing money on my business.

When I get some free time I'll fully switch to SpiderOak as well.

I continue to use Dropbox stuff I need to share professionally, but I'm migrating private stuff to alternatives for various reasons, Condi being just one of them.

But thanks for reminding me I need to check if I can downgrade to a free account now.

I dropped Dropbox in favor of Google Drive, which is more convenient for my use cases.

I continue to use Dropbox, I think the ios app is far better than any of the others, and the other day when my wife accidentally deleted 2000 pictures from the camera uploads folder it was relatively painless to restore them.

Why "drop" Dropbox?

Just use it with client-side encryption, as you should have from the start. It's easy (on OSX):

    encfs ~/Dropbox/freedom ~/Dropsafe -o volname="dropsafe" -o noappledouble

I switched to Tresorit, which claims to have client-side encryption.

That said, I'm currently installing my own file server at home over a VPN. Once I'm done with that, I shouldn't really need any other third-party solution.

I continue to use Dropbox, but treat it like a semi public storage. I do not particularly fear that someone will go around looking at my files, but if they do, they won't find anything very valuable anyways.

I switched to Google Drive just because it works better with Gmails and Google's other apps.

However, I just reinstalled yesterday because a partner on a new project I'm working on shared some files with me via Dropbox.

I got pissed off at dropbox because they keep trying to suck my entire Photo library into it, and the client crashes a lot, but I haven't gotten rid of them yet. It's only a matter of time, though.

I still use Dropbox for the sole reason that it has the fastest upload speed I've seen compared to alternatives. If anyone has any suggestions otherwise, I'd gladly consider them.

I tried Box and Copy, btw.

Thanks for following up on this. I was (and remain) outraged by Rice's appointment and dropped Dropbox. Maybe some enterprising startup should create a "Droppedbox" alternative. :)

i dropped it not only because of rice, but because they were going through people's files looking for DMCA content. You can read about this on /. I expect a cloud service to protect my files and not snoop through them, or even better encrypt them as they are stored, so the only one who can access/decrypt them is myself, or whomever I decide to share them with. Go Mega!!! BTW, my usage for this is to transfer/share files for business contracts/projects, not to steal video's.

Why would i ever use Dropbox when there's a better more private option out there like btsync.

All you need to do is run your own server which I already do and you basically have the same functionality.

How is btsync (closed source, possibly giving access to all your data to bittorrent.com) different from dropbox (closed source, storing your data on ec2)?

The protocol is open source and as far is i know you don't see it sending your secret key to some shady servers without permission at the same time the data is constantly in your possession be that one of your servers or your clients.

I admit that the client being closed source is not ideal however i would still call it more private then Dropbox or Google Drive.

Just a reminder that BTSync is closed source and the protocol it uses has not been released.

Better FOSS versions exist - the best one that I know of (and which I currently use) is http://syncthing.net/

There's also seafile

Sounds good I'll take a look.

Didn't really know about it, started using btsync when it launched never searched for alternatives since.

> Why would i ever use Dropbox

Because setting up and maintaining your own server is a lot more work than a click and a download. And a single server is a single point of failure, whereas Dropbox's architecture isn't, whereas downloads speeds will be limited to your upload speeds when you are away from home, whereas many other reasons such as sharing, and the Dropbox ecosystem.

Is that high speed really necessary or that high reliability.

So what if the sever goes down for a few minutes or a hour sometime, your files will just sync when it comes up.

A small virtual server in a data center can do a decent job of it.

> high reliability

For pictures of my family, yes that high reliability is worth it, I don't want to permanently lose a single photo because of a hardware or software failure. I backup my dropbox to s3 via Arq and also have a IFTTT that pushes photos to the free TB of space flickr gives everyone.

You have a backup on every device you choose to sync and if one of these devices happens to be a server with a copy-on-write file system like btrfs[1] i find it very unlikely you will ever loose those files to corruption or a single point of failure.

[1]https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Btrfs

> i find it very unlikely you will ever loose those files to corruption or a single point of failure.

Unless you happened to live in New Orleans in 2005. And really of all that sounds like a lot of work to set up and maintain for the near zero chance that some government type wants to spy on me to look at harmless and boring pictures of my pets and family.

If you really care for privacy, you should consider something for which source code is fully available and have client side encryption. To me, Dropbox, Google Drive and btsync are all the same.

I'm in the process of migrating off of Dropbox to Seafile. The migration is slow, and also I'll probably always have to keep Dropbox a little bit to share files to some friends.

I would like to drop Dropbox (not because of Rice's involvement though), but some apps I rely only (YNAB, 1Password, etc) don't really leave me with an option unfortunately.

I stopped using Dropbox because I enabled two-factor authentication security, but the SMS would always arrive 8-12 hours later, essentially locking me out of my account. Well then...

I use it with the Google Authenticator App, it works with no issue.

Call me old fashioned, but i have never used Dropbox or a similar service.

For the last 4 years, i have been using rdiff-backup in combination with a cheap, $10 100GB VPS and it has never failed me.

I dropped Dropbox at the end of 2011 when the NDAA passed. I felt that 3rd-party cloud storage was no longer private enough or secure enough. After Snowden, seems I was correct.

iCloud and GDrive have stepped up their game, making Dropbox no longer needed.

I don't let the politics of one board member of a company determine if I use their service or product.

I think I used Dropbox once or twice before the incident but now I mostly use Amazon S3, OneDrive or Google Drive. I might use Dropbox again if there is a reaason.

Did you expect this to be enlightening? It seems you would have been able to expect nothing but contentious debate, which is certainly not why I frequent HN.

While I use it, I don't USE it. I have some apps that still use Dropbox for backup/syncing, but otherwise I don't store files in Dropbox.

I dropped it because they are the leader in this space and have not championed an open-source technology for connecting with cloud storage providers.

Copy is quite nice. 15GB free. $10/month for 250GB.

https://www.copy.com/price

Dropped it for a while after the appointment. Got back to it because I was missing the cool integrations with Mailbox and iPhone camera.

I left Dropbox for Google Drive because of Condoleeza Rice appointment and also because Google Drive has been much lovelier to use.

I was just going to look for something to backup my photos... I was thinking OneDrive but I'm not sure about its security...

Had thought for a while to upgrade to end to end encrypted cloud storage and Condoleezza news finally reminded me to get it done.

I left dropbox after they came out with the story about 2 files on different accounts that is only 1 time encrypted.

Switched to Wuala.

I used Dropbox heavily until I narrowed my hardware down to one laptop. Since then, it's been mostly useless.

I've drastically reduced my usage and today I use only to add files when I need to share them with someone.

I used Dropbox switched to G-Drive and haven't changed ever since. This doesn't change my situation.

I dropped Dropbox for slightly related reason(s) (pricing policy, terms of service, privacy etc.)

Switched to owncloud. Happy.

I dropped Dropbox for simple reason - russian mail.ru promoted 1 tb free for Cloud.mail.ru and I got it.

I dropped my paid account. I still unfortunately must keep a free account due to sharing with clients.

I am considering moving to ownCloud, but I'm in no hurry. It's just a few personal files.

I plan on using OwnCloud as soon as I can get a decent setup. My apartment does not allow servers.

I dropped dropbox after I found out anyone could access my files due to their half assed security

I personally started using rsync with my Digital Ocean box, but that's just my alternative.

I am dropped Dropbox.

1) I know how to VPN. 2) I know how to setup a NAS. 3) BitTorrent Sync exists.

It is as easy as 1,2,3! :-)

I've dropped dropbox because it seems pointless without some sort of document editor.

Even if I didn't need Dropbox for storage, a number of apps use it for syncing.

I dropped Dropbox because of better pricing elsewhere for a commodity service.

I left Dropbox for Copy solely because of the appointment of Condoleezza Rice.

Pluralism is dead.

Pluralism does not require that you continue to patronize a business whose conduct you disagree with.

What of Dropbox's conduct do you disagree with?

I still use them, but I disagree with their hiring of Ms. Rice, both on moral grounds, and practical privacy grounds.

I dropped Dropbox for Seafile, and I've never heard of Condoleezza Rice.

I used to use my own Dropbox account at work teaching kids computer-stuff, so they'd have an easy way to share files and a place to store their things without having to remember which particular PC they worked at last time (and messing about with USB sticks back and forth, it was chaos).

This was of course a bad idea, especially after I got a Galaxy S4 phone, which came with a 50GB Dropbox upgrade, and I started using my own account for personal stuff a lot more.

So I disconnected my Dropbox account from the work computers, and I'm now actively looking for a solution that is not Dropbox. The main reason is this Condoleezza Rice thing, and the fact that we need a bit more than the default 2GB storage (my old acct was already 4.5GB due to referrals), and getting a paid Dropbox account is really the last thing I want to do (before it was because their pricing scheme is kind of steep, but Condoleezza Rice gives me an extra reason).

Problem is what are the proper alternatives. I'm open to suggestions!

We're using Google Drive now for a bit, but it's soon going to be replaced. It's got sufficient space, but it's got some weird problems with making duplicates, duplicates(1) duplicates(2), and it seems it doesn't always sync up the latest version either, and you still have to try and remember which was the PC you worked on to get the file. This again causes chaos and mess, if you have many different children all working in their own little folder on 7 different computers. Additionally, Google Drive seems noticeably a lot heavier load on the computers than the Dropbox client. And this is a big deal, because these are donated PCs, so they're not the fastest to start with.

Currently I'm looking into SyncThing, see how that performs. But I've only set it up on two computers yet (sharing the computer IDs for initial sync is quite cumbersome, they should add some simple feature to help with that or something). We wanted to try BitTorrent Sync, but it's not open source, and I figure as long as I'm trying to do the right thing, I might as well to it right and open source.

SyncThing doesn't upload to a "cloud" storage, but we don't really need that. We just need something that syncs up all the little folders and tidbits between all seven computers, so everything is available everywhere. Maybe we should instead just set up a shared network folder thing? (this is not at all my line of expertise, I'm a comp.sci/math/code guy that likes working with kids, if any of the people here have some solid advice to go with one solution or the other, greatly appreciated) (the computers are partly Win7 partly Linux Mint).

Finally, while finding alternatives for the above has my priority, if I happen to stumble upon something that'll allow me to easily drop my personal Dropbox account, I'll do it in a heartbleed. I'll probably have to, at some point or other, since the 50GB bonus only lasts a year or so.

Somebody explain me why this got downvoted? It was a sincere attempt to contribute to the discussion (if perhaps a tad long maybe?), and I didn't say anything really controversial, did I?

I mean, it might be a specific use-case, but I figured personal stories would be what this thread is about ... ?

Your post was directly on topic. It directly addressed your feelings about Dropbox and about Condi Rice. Beats me why it got downvoted.

Day I heard she was hired I cancelled by account. Damn the data I lost.

Yes, I did because of her.

It's pretty absurd that so many people are this willing to attack a woman just because of her political views. This kind of crap is what Fox News uses to claim all liberals are jack-booted fascists just waiting to setup USSR v2.0 here in America.

I agree with your sentiment. However, it wasn't her political views. It was her involvement with a fraudulent war.

ITT the lies justifying the war in Iraq are legitimate political views.

Calling it a "fraudulent war" is a political view, and quite the minority view at that.

If any other company, that deals with our personal data, were to appoint a board member well known for being pro warrantless wiretaps, I think people would consider moving as well.

The drop-dropbox.com has its arguments pretty well presented really.

You mean like all of the board members at both Apple and Google?

>It's pretty absurd that so many people are this willing to attack a woman just because of her political views.

And the deaths of tens of thousands of people.

Boycotting a service is pretty far from any kind of attack. Additionally it is a lot more than her political views. She played a central role in securing the legality of the torture program, authorized the warrant less wiretaps of UN council members, and was the National Security Advisor immediately before the Iraq war.

This is the free market at work.

1. I strongly disagree with the torture program, but I still don't think it's grounds for boycotting Dropbox, unless you are under the impression that she's pushing for a Torture Division at Dropbox.

2. Foreign diplomats are not subject to warrants and are exactly the sort of people that get spied upon. I guarantee you that every major country is spying on every foreign diplomat, limited only by their ability. While I don't think private citizens should be spied on, if you are in a diplomatic post you should just expect it.

3. I view the Iraq War as legitimate, as do most people, and she did a stellar job in her role as National Security Advisor.

1. Why not? Dropbox has decided to include a member of the torture program in their organization. It's an implicit admittance that she doesn't belong in prison.

2. Irrelevant, none of us are in a diplomatic post here but we're still all being spied on via any avenue by the NSA- dropbox being a confirmed avenue for this purpose.

3. I don't think you'll find too many people agreeing with you here. After all, it was the US and a few minor cronies (Poland, Georgia) going in alone, with the majority of our allies and all of the rest of the world saying we were making a huge mistake-- a mistake which has haunted us ever since, and caused many of our allies to turn away from us and seek more autonomy. "Doing a stellar job" at torturing people and knocking over governments is not a positive thing to say about someone.

Dropbox isn't the court system, nor should it be. It isn't their job to decide who should or shouldn't be in jail.

You cannot assert that most people view the invasion of Iraq as legitimate.

The polls show that it was.

Come on, really? Trying to portrait this as something sex related and partisan, really?

I am from nowhere near the U.S. and consider D/R pretty much the same and I immediatly switched from Dropbox and stopped recommending it to anyone. The appointment of mass surveliance advocate to a top position in a tech company that holds your data is a clear "we don't care about you, your rights and your opinon" message to privacy advocates.

I don't want to support a tech company that is strongly integrated with government/government departments/government executives.

Also the appointment of Rice could be a warrant canary, a hint to those paranoid, that Dropbox is not secure for other infrastructural reasons. But that's probably mine personal feel good fantasy:)

Not "political views" - she was one of the architects of the invasion of Iraq. It's less a disagreement than a visceral revulsion, you can't just cast that many people into the Inferno and call it politcs. Thousands and thousands have died now, it's still not really over.

Customers use Dropbox, it's difficult to move them off from it.

Using it. But started using MEGA for some privacy sensitive file.

I love Dropbox. It works better than anything else I have tried.

I dropped dropbox because Condoleezza Rice is a war criminal.

I continue to use Dropbox, with no opinion about the Board

I still using Dropbox but I'm migrating to Syncthing

Dropped because BitTorrent Sync is better for my needs.

Dropped it for Wuala

Google drive is cheaper and I trust them more.

I dropped Dropbox because I rolled my own

I'm a casual user and still use it.

Dropped dropbox, and stopped using Zulip

i had to use it once to after this to get a big repository of fonts. aside from that, fuck dropbox

Never used DropBox. Never will.

I dropped Dropbox for pCloud.

Copy is working well for me.

What about people dropping them for their odd pricing (free for 2GB or $10/month for 2000GB? Huh?)

I continue to use Dropbox.

I continue to use Dropbox

I don't use Dropbox

I'm using BTSync

oh gosh, i didn't know. let me close the account...

I still use dropbox

dropped it like its hot

I didn't drop it completely -- I have colleagues who use it so I still have it installed. But I won't be giving them any money, and I don't recommend it to new users. Instead if anyone ever asks I steer them toward other solutions like Google Docs, Box, Expandrive, etc.

So basically Dropbox lost me as a loyal or committed user.

The Dropbox thing really peeved me because I really liked that company. I liked what they did. I studied it. It was a great example of solving an old problem in a new way and unlocking a "sleeper market," something lots of MBA types don't get and dismiss from possibility. When someone you look up to appoints someone like Rice to their board, it's really kind of painful.

So why do I dislike Rice so much?

To me the Bush administration is in a category by itself -- a category that transcends any ordinary political loyalty or bias. I'm not a fan of Reagan's ideology or Bush Sr., but neither of them or their presidencies comes close. I'm not a fan of Clinton either, but again nothing he did comes close. There is no other presidential administration since maybe Nixon or Johnson that compares in terms of criminality or contempt for American democracy. There's also no administration in recent memory that has done more harm to America's standing in the world (or its economy).

What did they do? In short: they took shameless advantage of 9/11 to sell a whole host of other expensive, destructive, and deceptive policies, chief among these being the invasion of Iraq. They exploited an attack against America that resulted in the deaths of thousands of people to sell things that could not have been sold on their own merits because they were not in the best interests of the American people.

I consider that criminal, and treasonous. At least some subset of the Bush administration belongs in jail, including George Bush himself. To the extent that Rice was involved and put her professional imprimatur behind these things, she deserve at least some of the blame. Whether she belongs in prison or not, she at the very least should pay a professional penalty for willfully assisting in officially sanctioned con artistry against the American people.

The most insulting thing about Iraq is that I still don't understand why we did it. Apparently not only did they abuse 9/11 as a front to sell it, but they don't consider the American people -- who paid for Iraq and who pay their salaries -- worthy of knowing why it was done in the first place.

The only explanation we received was clear and transparent nonsense about Iraq being related to 9/11 (it wasn't) and Iraq having WMDs (they had little if anything and nothing operational). They were effectively contained, and events since then such as the rise if ISIS have shown that removing Saddam did nothing to improve the political reality of the region. In short everything the anti-Iraq war skeptics said about the Iraq war has been true, and everything the Bush administration claimed has been shown to be false.

We -- meaning the technology industry -- can do better than this. We do not need to kowtow or pay homage to scumbags from the worst presidential administration of the past 35 years. If Dropbox wanted someone to add super-high-level social proof and political connections to their board, they could have chosen among a wide array of accomplished executives and former political operatives who do not have blood and treason all over their hands.

Dropbox SUCKS.

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