Dropbox is in your Office
blog.dropbox.com
blog.dropbox.com
Are there any other real alternatives you could recommend to give them a try?.
Also, on my Macs Google Drive regularly crashes and is not able to upload some files (usually retrying works). With Dropbox I never had such problems.
Dropbox's copyright clause was much more tightly drawn and not incompatible with my business model.
"Some of our Services allow you to upload, submit, store, send or receive content. You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours."
which is suddenly followed up by:
"When you upload, submit, store, send or receive content to or through our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content. The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. This license continues even if you stop using our Services (for example, for a business listing you have added to Google Maps)."
So while you own your intellectual property, Google does take a copy of all rights pertinent to the work. It's hard for me to say why Google would do this; alienating what I'd imagine to be a significant userbase of content generators.
A limited copy, only for use in "operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones."
In other words, you agree to let everything you upload to Google be used for testing.
Anyone who's alienated by this shouldn't be putting content on non-owned servers in the first place. "The Cloud" isn't for your secret documents, it's for your family photos.
Suppose I use Google Drive to store my current project, a big-ass novel that's going to see simultaneous publication by major publishers in a number of markets around the world. Google could in principle give it away for free to new sign-ups for their service as a promotional goodie.
Or "develop new ones" ... well, we already have Google Books: I am not sanguine about the prospect of a not-yet-published book of mine suddenly showing up in Google Books, or a next-generation incarnation of Google Books, without my say-so (or an agreement to pay royalties, because that's what I earn my living from).
These uses are certainly unlikely but they're not impossible, and that big-ass slab of lawyer-speak in the middle of the ToS is a show-stopper for me. Which is a shame, because if they'd just bothered to specify that the rights are for the limited purpose of [yadda] internal development of new services -- i.e. as test data -- I'd be fine with that.
Dropbox is a paid-for service that specifically supports business uses. It's ToS is acceptable. Google Drive is mostly used for free, and as the old saying puts it: if you aren't paying for the product, you are the product.
No they couldn't, because other parts of their ToS explicitly let you retain control over your copyright. You'd sue them, and win. Also, they'd lose all their customers and probably shut down the Google Drive program entirely.
Maybe we should just try and find a lawyer to interpret this impartially (something you should do anyway if you're trying to pick a ToS that's "compatible" with your needs -- you really don't want to get burned by a tricky ToS, do you?), but as far as I understand the whole point of this passage is to allow Google to use your data to test their products, e.g. facial recognition, translation, etc., in an automated fashion.
Exactly like Gmail, I am guessing the contents of individual user's drive accounts are probably scraped at regular intervals by machines for all sorts of purposes. This passage is a CYA for that activity. They're not looking for sneaky ways to get your book into their store.
I'm not saying "use Google Drive over Dropbox!", because I don't give a hoot. But the Drive ToS isn't why you shouldn't use Google Drive.
While I agree with your thesis on the whole, I am sad to say that this probably won't happen. People will just think, "Well, I'm not writing a novel so this doesn't affect me" and keep on using it.
My interpretation of what they are trying to say is that they may need to modify stuff by wrapping headers on it and so on to make it work with their systems, but they won't steal your ideas or give them away.
Or: we make tape backups of data and tapes a shipped to some storage and we cannot guarantee that your data is immediately erased from all our infrastructure (including types) the moment after you delete it.
Your data is (supposedly) encrypted with your private key. They can't guarantee that all copies are deleted, but they can (at least in theory) delete the key to make the data inaccessible. Whether you believe them or not is a different story...
Of course they could, because you gave them a license to do so.
Facebook and Google do this explicitly already: they use your images and written content, which you presumably have the original copyright on, to sell their products and services (customized ads and the like). They haven't done it with Stross' novel yet, but the legal issues are the same.
No you didn't. Like I said, they explicitly say you retain copyright control. That trumps any implied loss of copyright control.
That sounds like it should be limiting but a new service can be "giving away copies of stuff we found in peoples gdrives". Would everyone hate Google for that, yes; would that break their ToS, no.
You retain copyright control, means they can't sell [other] licenses and such like actions - but you already gave them and their associates free use [wrt copyright] of your works stored on their systems. They don't need more rights to publish, modify, reproduce, etc., etc..
Indeed they can even effective sub-license by selling the right to be one of "those we work with", then the license you agree to also applies to that other company.
Such ToS enable evil to be done.
It is difficult to construct a ToS that allows the company to do everything it needs to without enabling this sort of thing. They don't want to leave the option you can sue them for copyright infringement if, for example, they share your copyright avatar image with a company that's using an embedded comment system or such like activities.
One can of course encrypt data before sending it to a cloud storage company.
> You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours.
Whatever anything else says in the ToS, this wins. Explicit statements always trump implications in contracts. You take that to court, show the judge, and you're on your way to dinner with your winnings later that very same day.
This ToS is not capable of Evil in the way you say. Period.
Or is it a license you can revoke at any time?
Which is why putting your business documents on Dropbox may not be a good idea.
Also, it's kind of slow. Somebody at TechShop accidentally put a Dropbox folder in an Autodesk Inventor search list and slowed down launch of the program by several minutes.
also to:
>reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content
So not even family photos because you lose the right to keep them private.
Well that's terrifying given that my phone uploads every picture I take to Google's services.
If anyone thinks that Google, multi billion company would take your photo and publish it to make money out of it - you are creating issues to yourself.
Its Google, they are all about your data, statistics, behaviours and keywords. Not about stealing things and using your photos/artwork for marketing purposes.
Cloud = trust. No matter if its Dropbox or Skydrive or Box. On the end of the day you either trust company or not. No matter what's in TOS.
Google Drive has a very unofficial yet supposedly usable 3rd party client at http://www.lbreda.com/grive/
https://github.com/Grive/grive
There is also a FUSE client written in OCaml:
Not free but its pretty cheap
Trying out Zocalo now with better results but was curious if anyone else encountered this issue with OneDrive or if my experience was unique.
Will look into Zocalo to see what they offer.
I use svn because TortoiseSVN tooling allows diff/merge of documents, it is centralised so there is a single source of truth and it works over WevDAV/http so i can access it on my mobile device if need be (I avoid this where possible and just use it as a tether).
OneDrive for business is built on top of SharePoint and is well known to have a multitude of limitations and issues and I would never recommend anyone use it.
Onedrive personal I hear is much more reliable but I've not had any personal experience with it.
I use Google drive and have found it to be very reliable, when i have the odd sync issue (fails to sync 1-5 files out of 3000 files/150gb) i just click retry and successfully uploads them.
Maybe someone can comment if they've used them in anger.
It's standard OpenStack storage and it's possible to mount FUSE drive, so no terrible client. I use it and have no complaints, just don't expect 1 ms read times as a mounted drive, etc.
[1] http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/05/14/whos-... (ctrl+f ovh)
We should be using Tarsnap. If only they had a windows client (which I use as a hypervisor, as it has better power and driver support on laptops).
btsync makes more sense to me
Copy is ran by Barracuda. My only current grief is the lack of 2 factor authentication, but they have stated that is on the near roadmap.
I also seem to remember that if you click on a google doc file it opens a browser window rather than launching an app on your machine.
So I stopped trying to use it on my laptop. This system may have changed, or there may have been a way to avoid this.
I do use google docs/drive but only as a way to use docs that others have created and shared with me. I have noticed on iOS that opening docs shows a different set of files than opening the google drive app, which also does not reassure me.
It would be interesting to me if it were a true DB replacement. Of course since I now have to use Office 365 I just got unlimited Onedrive capacity so I may switch to that.
That said, in my experience, Google Drive and Dropbox still differ on the handling of corner cases (e.g. symlinks, permissions and extended attributes, etc.). At the time I tested, Google Drive was lagging in most of these cases, but that may have improved by now.
At any rate: check that your use cases actually work before moving all your data!
I know my own solution would be the best and so an actual question. Would it make sense to use private servers (think AWS) to run something custom made or would that just be exactly the same (they would still be able to read my stuff)?
For a somewhat less platform-independent definition of better. Neither of those has Linux-clients, which for some people is a no-go.
Which means I'll stick to Dropbox for a good while more.
Even saying that I'm still occasionally let down by how much of a power drain it is. Even wrote a utility to manage it (shameless plug) https://github.com/joaomsa/powermonius
As to your question about alternatives, I am starting to use Apple's iCloud Drive. Pretty cool so far.
I admittedly use Google products, but I am under no illusion that anything Google has, is likely fair game for the government.
Being involved in the gov't that started the terror scare and almost dragging my country in a disastrous war is quite something different than trying to nudge me into signing up for Google+. Torture, honorable, seriously??!
archived storage on physical media you own
it's science
That's the end of my half-troll/half-serious response.
Dropbox is more modular, IMO. I've seen some cool tricks to run websites, backup Instagram photos, etc, all from Dropbox.
Dropbox has a native linux client which can not be said for either OneDrive or Google Drive.
I use a mix of Dropbox and BTSync right now
I'm really tired of having multiple cloud accounts for different types of media. Getting files between the different versions requires me stopping at a desktop to move to the desktop and then back up.
At least this gets rid of one of those steps. Now I just wish there were a way to take xlsx's from dropbox on the iphone and send it to my work email without it coming as a shared link. I work in a locked down, regulated environment that can't open dropbox links. (finance)
While it was new at the time of it's release, Dropbox has fallen behind in usability and has sorely needed to effectively break into being a more collaborative platform. While I don't know the numbers, I can imagine SkyDrive hasn't exactly picked up with users.
All around this benefits both companies.
And I'm not talking about the plugin development hell (never had to work with it, but that seemed, erm, "difficult"). Feel free to reach out to me if you have questions, or just read the docs yourself (http://dev.office.com/).
The office team moving away from the old plugin model and opening up the gates for JS apps and REST APIs made life dramatically easier for a lot of folks. So I assume that samples were written with the most popular choices in mind. Internally, C++ is king [0], of course.
It's also worth pointing out that we always accept code samples from the community :)
[0]: https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/office/site/search?f%5B0%5D.... [1]: http://cppcon.org/bonus-talk-cxx-in-ms-office-2014/
That's why some people are pleasantly surprised by this.
Box and Dropbox support office formats which makes sense why they'd partner with them to perpetuate this usage.
Just a short while ago, anything that could be done to make their products more integrated, and increase lock-in would be done. It didn't really matter if the benefited product made money or not. (For a very visible blow, look at the Windows Phone and Windows 8.)
It's great to see that changing.
Or as it was previously known, "Embrace".
Embrace. Integrate Office with it. Extend. Buy DropBox. Extinguish. Merge DropBox with OneDrive.
Wow didn't expect this comment to bring on the downvotes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish
> The strategy's three phases are:[11]
> Embrace: Development of software substantially compatible with a competing product, or implementing a public standard.
> Extend: Addition and promotion of features not supported by the competing product or part of the standard, creating interoperability problems for customers who try to use the 'simple' standard.
> Extinguish: When extensions become a de facto standard because of their dominant market share, they marginalize competitors that do not or cannot support the new extensions.
It makes you look like a child. An idiot child.
For example, Box is also working with Microsoft: http://content.box.com/box-for-office-365 -- I would expect integrations with other platforms in the future as well. If the consumer experience is driven around Office apps rather than around the Dropbox app, then at one point the cloud storage solutions truly become interchangeable.
I remember one famous Steve saying to Drew Houston that Dropbox was a feature rather than a product. I'd say the need for such a thing as Dropbox made "Dropbox as a standalone product" possible, but in a world where every service starts having its own integrated "cloud" backup service, storage and sync do start looking like a feature.
I'm also glad to see integration across cloud services. I think this will improve the consumer experience.
It will create some competition for OneDrive. But Office 365 subscribers now get unlimited OneDrive space as part of the subscription.
My bet is Dropbox integration might get some Dropbox users to buy Office 365. When they realize they get unlimited OneDrive space they might switch to OneDrive.
Seems like a good move to be honest.
Not a day too early for the Windows Phone official app and another tick off the list of missing apps for Microsoft's mobile platform.
We know that much of the world relies on a combination of
Dropbox and Microsoft Office to get work done. In fact,
Dropbox is home to over 35 billion Office documents,
spreadsheets, and presentations.
I originally thought Microsoft as its a great reason to keep Word relevant by teaming up with such a used storage platform and not succumbing to Google docs, but is that offset by dropbox being able to enter the enterprise world?
The whole thing about Dropbox is that just works. Files are files, folders are folders, if I move them about they move, etc. The only problem with Dropbox and Office is how Office locks the files so they're only synced after I close the Office program, not after every Ctrl+S. Fix that, and it's integrated.
The whole "save in the cloud" nonsense that desktop Office programs have these days feels like a mistake. I can understand how with iOS's "no files" design, this is the only way forward, but on desktop? Please let it stop.
Apparently mobile is the future and the desktop experience must be crippled to unify it with the mobile experience.
Personally, I don't understand how anyone gets real work done on tablets and phones. Sure there are some pretty silos, but trying to move data between silos is usually a nightmare.
Windows crippled their desktop experience for Windows 8 and 8.1 and are reversing it in Windows 10. No other operating system crippled their system in this way. So must is an unwarranted intensifier. Mistakes were made, things were learned, what you're saying isn't true.
I don't think anyone actually reviews, comments on or edits large documents on a tablet. That would be a nightmare. The most I've found bearable when reviewing papers on a tablet is highlighting. On a laptop you have the power of a full keyboard, which I can use to comfortably compose this comment, yet my laptop has almost no internal storage and all my documents are stored on the cloud.
This move is important for maintaining relevant, but I do think the insistence on tablets and phones is missing the whole of point of us making the data mobile.
I think very few people do, aside from simple tasks like sending emails.
Useless?
Across my phone, tablet, laptop, and desktop, I would hardly call cloud file syncing useless.
> The whole "save in the cloud" nonsense that desktop Office programs have these days feels like a mistake.
I feel exactly the opposite way. As a student, I have all of my schoolwork stored on OneDrive and I don't know how I would live without it anymore. I can access all of my documents from any computer via onedrive.com (very helpful when printing for free in a computer lab) and I can check and edit OneNote notebooks from my mobile device. I don't understand what you mean by desktop Office going for a "no files" design because it seems to be the opposite in my view.
> The only problem with Dropbox and Office is how Office locks the files so they're only synced after I close the Office program, not after every Ctrl+S. Fix that, and it's integrated.
OneDrive can sync files that are being edited with an Office program. With this news, I'm sure Dropbox will have the same functionality soon.
A little bit precient, my company developed a free Outlook add-on to send dropbox files as attachments [2] in 2012.
- [1] http://www.wireover.com/
- [2] http://blog.nektra.com/main/2012/05/23/integrating-dropbox-w...
Sorry, Dropbox.
(Yeah, alternatives are a problem: Wuala is dying and Spideroak isn't much better easier. Tresorit might be a future alternative but in spite of having their current version published as 2.x, they have still some way to go …)
That feature is more important to me than just the file storage. Google Drive will become a lot more useful once developers start picking it up.
When that happens the only way Box or Dropbox makes money is from businesses because MS and Google will want you in their eco-system.
I was at least one order of magnitude out.
- Visio
- Bungie Software (Halo)
- Groove
etc...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisition...
Skype, Halo, Minecraft? I think not.
Plenty of FoxPro stuff ended up in SQL Server. Client cursor engine is the first thing that comes to mind (RDO, too, IIRC). The product itself was allowed to languish, but the good parts went into other things.
But for the most part I'd say you're spot on. I can't think of anything else that ultimately went on better things under Microsoft's flag, or benefited other products with the acquired product's technology.
Edit: here's the documentation: https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/FileMa...
So they're reading the files in Dropbox and its contents to know they're Office documents?
How do you think they generate thumbnails and such?.
Most of people don't have time/knowledge to setup any shared file storage.
Rice probably doesn't care about software in any way. She's a name which helps DB sell product. She's a net positive for their brand.
It's sad to see things like this being touted as "new".
2. It makes their own OneDrive service seem even more competitive. Why pay for Dropbox when you can buy Office365 for about the same price and get unlimited storage?
MS is giving office 365 customer free unlimited cloud storage.
Now M$ can tell their office (probably soon to be office 365 ) customers: "Good News, we have dropbox support for you, but BTW checkout out our unlimited cloud storage for free too."
For me, it is a bit like MS in 90 said we have strong competitor call Netscape while pre install IE for free to kill Netscape. It is assimilation strategy from the old play book.
Dropbox has little choose on this as Box are doing it and their enterprise customers might also demand it. They have to the poison pill.
Dropbox has its own merits over OneDrive. OneDrive is not as friendly and feature-complete as Dropbox is. And Dropbox has far better APIs when it comes to integrating with other services.
And as far as Microsoft is concerned, the partnership improves people's productivity.
Dropbox has moved from "no interoperability with Office" to "interoperability with Office". How can that be a bad thing?
don't you mean M$ there :P No offense meant, but you know, it's a bit difficult to take people serious when they use terms like that.
... and I have to ask: do they have any choice? Can you say no to the national security state? If I were in charge of a company with employees who have families and fiscal responsibilities, I can't say that I could. I'm sure any request from those quarters comes with an implied "we wouldn't want anything bad to happen to your company, now would we?"
The only way I can imagine a company saying no is if it were privately held and the largest investors were on board, and most of these companies are public. Being public makes you subject to all kinds of "soft power."