Why we are leaving Dropbox | Hacker News Reader

Why we are leaving Dropbox

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136 pointsRalfR134 comments

I use Dropbox because they don't try to innovate on the UI side. I use it mainly to sync certain directories (like fonts, desktop backgrounds, themes, dotfiles, certain /etc files, code workspaces, and other configuration files) across my Linux machines.

It's also a billion times more easy to use Dropbox with people from China than Google Drive because you can set up an EC2 server in Japan, install the command line version of Dropbox, and have it serve a synced directory over HTTPS from a non-blocked IP address. Can't do that easily with Google Drive or anything that tries to be too much.

Same. Innovation is not what I want out of Dropbox. I want stability, speed, and continued bug fixes.

The one point I agree with him on though is that the web interface could use some work.

This is what happened with Google. The innovated on the UI front multiple times, and I'm really starting to dislike their new design changes on Drive, GMail (by way of Inbox), etc.

I haven't been happy with GMails UI in a very long time. I've moved onto fastmail in part because of how much I started to dislike their UI.

I've been on fastmail for 11 months now and couldn't be happier.

But a big blue + button in the bottom-right corner totally makes sense as "file -> new" on a desktop interface! What's not to like?!

Google drive is almost unusable to me now. Always takes like 5 minutes to figure out where my stuff is.

The reason I am not committing to Dropbox Pro is because I need to use such a service when I'm in China (and with people in China). Setting up an EC2 server, configuring apache or nginx, setting up some access control, etc., goes completely against the whole idea of Dropbox being simple. Also, it's one way, unless you go to extra lengths to setup some upload system. Of course if this is something you use several times each day then it's worth setting up, but for occasional use it's really an overkill. By the way, no, I haven't found any good substitute for Dropbox that works in China.

ownCloud will work in china because you run it off your own server.

Yeah, I said that mainly for my somewhat niche case of having a team that works together on stuff in the US but needs to on occasion share files to partners in China or team members who need to access files while in China. Agreed that it isn't the most convenient but once you set it up it just takes care of itself for the most part. Dropbox is just syncing files so there isn't much that can break.

I've moved away from Dropbox purely because the desktop (OS X) app has gotten so terrible. Besides the lack of responsiveness mentioned in the article, Dropbox routinely takes up > 90% of my CPU resources while running. If I'm working at a coffee shop without power, having Dropbox running literally halves my battery life. This is new as of the last six months, and happens consistently across multiple Macs. I've asked Dropbox employees about this, and they've just shrugged.

I don't care if they innovate or not. I care that the experience of using Dropbox is measurably worse than it was a year ago.

That happens to me too, it's also getting a bit silly that you still can't exclude directories easily, and the "share" menu only seems to work in the root dropbox folder these days.

In my experience, Dropbox responds to all file system I/O, even those outside of the Dropbox folders, strangely.

If I'm running, say, npm install or bundle install or installing Xcode (or doing anything else I/O heavy), Dropbox starts using a bunch of CPU, proportional to the amount of I/O going on at the time. Note that none of these operations are inside my Dropbox folder.

I do believe the FSEvents infrastructure allows you to just watch an individual folder [1], so it shouldn't have to be this way...

[1]: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin...

Same. I'll run npm install on my desktop and suddenly dropbox is at 110% CPU doing nothing. I end up having to force quit it and forget to restart it. It's VERY frustrating.

Oh yes, I wrote to their support and forums many times but it was futile.

I'm using Mac Mini with HDD and Dropbox takes 90% of disk I/O when there are more than 20-30 files updating.

I used to keep my projects in Dropbox folder before but now it literally slows my work.

Exactly the same situation; projects folder in Dropbox, had to move it out because it would use 100% of one core very frequently.

On my MacBook, the OS X client has said "Syncing (29 files remaining)" for as long as I can remember.

As far as I can tell, there's no way to tell which of my 18,394 files are stuck.

One problem we have witnessed with Dropbox is that low-tech users tends to delete files they don't personally need. Often times this causes deletion of the files for the entire company. Resultingly admins are afraid to share file access with users, and users are afraid to cause problems, so they ask admins to email the files instead, which sort of puts you back at the square one.

We might be approaching a point where different different kinds of users and maybe different verticals will be able to justify separate file sharing apps. Or even all other apps, for that matter.

It used to be a big pile of something-or-other, but the newest iteration of SharePoint is really quite a solid product, particularly for some of the trickier tasks around document management and distribution. And with the Office 365 versions, smaller businesses don't need to worry about building out the physical resources (or hiring the admin personnel) to run an instance.

It might be something to ask your IT folks if they've considered recently.

That's a good point. Sharepoint might have solved some of these problems, but I have made my bet in the opposite direction - my startup is making and selling a vertically-tailored content distribution system; it distributes the structured data via vertical-specific "apps", and the (as of yet) unstructured data as generic "documents" - a simplified,'locked down "dropbox" functionality . So, while Sharepoint is good for everyone, our system is great for the select few it's aimed at.

There are two large trends making it possible:

1) It gets cheaper to make software.

2) Technology becomes cheaper and more prevalent in the hands of the end users, especially mobile tech, thus increasing the addressable market size.

Resultingly, it becomes viable to create distinct software for separate user groups. This is a trend reversal from the previous 20 years, when different groups of users were trying to use the same piece of software. As the "universal" software gets more complex, it requires more customization, so its the usability is eroding (see: dropbox file deletion problem). A tailored solution is inherently more user-friendly. At least that's my story and I'm sticking to it! :)

Well, using a dropbox like a content management system is the issue in the case in your OP, really... it's a file synchronization and storage tool :)

I'd like to talk about what you're building, but I honestly couldn't understand what you said in that first paragraph, and I shill market-speak to corporate clients for (part of) a living. Could you give that another shot?

Our clients are small and medium size manufacturers (e.g. furniture). They need to distribute data to their salesforce - catalogs, pricelists, pictures, credit application forms, assembly instructions, etc. 50 years ago they used paper for everything, 15 years ago they switched some document distribution to FTP - the documents which you don't need to close the sale, but those that must follow after (credit applications, assembly instructions). Then Dropbox came along, and half of them jumped to replace FTP with that. FTP has its own problems, DB has its own. You're right in that it's a wrong tool for the job, but that's what they use for the (perceived) lack of better alternatives. My point is that Dropbox is often times used where it doesn't fit, so there is plenty of room for competition in the "file-sharing" space, which is counterintuitive - one would think that Dropbox owns the space by now.

Going back to my first paragraph... What is the minimally viable content management and distribution system (CM/DS) for such business? It's a Dropbox that doesn't let "subscriber" users delete files (and is otherwise friendly to low-tech "subscriber" users). The sales manager will load it with PDFs and JPGs and Excels, and the sales reps will then get the files and use them. That's MVP. What is the ideal system? Rather than distributing the product catalog as a pile of JPG and Excel files you would want to distribute a native catalog application where the list of clients is well-organized, history of the past orders is right there next to each client, all products are neatly categorized, and it's easy to build a new order with all the math done for you. In other words, rather that treating content as opaque files, this CM/DS is keenly aware of the inner structure of the data and about the workflow surrounding use of that data. This awareness begets usability and accuracy. That's the vertical-specific CM/DS I am talking about.

Does this make more sense now?

Yeah, I think it was the liberal use of "vertical" in your elevator pitch that made it confusing.

You're building a one-way file sharing app.

The other things you're talking about, is your goal to build a point-of-sale or sales management system? What's your goal for differentiating yours against a relatively broad market? A cheap, low-feature alternative to the biggers CRMs and Sales systems could certainly provide a service.

For example, how does your vision compare with the customer management, inventory, product development, etc. from Square: https://squareup.com/ ?

We're primarily wholesale, not retail, so it's not POS and not competing with Square on any level. Not yet, anyway.

A better comparison is SAP - the data management that we provide can be done in SAP for a few million dollars, but if you happen to be in the vertical we're targeting, like furniture, and have modest needs, you can go wih us for two orders of magnitude less, and it takes only hours to set up because it's tailored to the vertical. That is the differentiator - vertical tailoring makes it quick and cheap to install.

I've been in it so deep for so long, it's surprisingly difficult to explain...

Dropbox need to do a lot better job on space usage. It is trivial for Dropbox accounts to end up with more usage than many common devices have (cough MacBook Air cough). We had managers deleting content to free up space, not realising that deleted it for everyone. I guess their mental model is seeing the Dropbox folders as more of a cache than synced files affecting everyone.

Yes, there is selective sync. Now use it to reduce consumption by 10GB. It requires lots of non-Dropbox tools to try to achieve that. They do need an alternate way similar to hierarchical storage that brings in files as you need/reference them, rather than everything.

This is entirely my problem with dropbox. I can't even use the desktop client on my Macbook Air because of the terribly limited space, and my Macbook Air is where I want to be able to use cloud storage the most. What is the point in cloud-based storage if I have to have copies of all of the files on all my computers!?

This is a confusing case even for non "low-tech" users. I had a shared dropbox folder with a friend. I was done with my copy of the files, so I deleted them because I was close to my dropbox space limit. He freaked out because dropbox then deleted them from his drive too. In retrospect, I guess it makes sense, but the idea that a delete would propagate was certainly not the expected behavior.

If Dropbox synchronizes folders, including edits made to files, why wouldn't it synchronize a delete? If the expected behavior would be that it propagates anything but a deletion, that would be truly bizarre and confusing wouldn't it?

Sure. It makes absolute sense, but it wasn't the behavior either of us expected. You could easily, and rightfully, say that our expectations were wrong and inconsistent. I deal with frustratingly inconsistent customer expectations all the time, so I sympathize when I'm on the other side of the table. Just an anecdote point.

Edit: To be more clear, I expected the behavior that SVN gives me, which is that a change is pending to commit by default, but an add or delete isn't. I have no good explanation for why I expected dropbox to behavior like SVN.

Unlike high-tech users, low-tech users end up permanently scarred. They are also afraid of looking dumb, which compounds the problem. Dropbox has incurred significant, if hidden, usability debt.

6. No client-side encryption

7. Deceptive advertising. Telling their customers that they encrypt data enroute and at rest without telling them that they use a single common password for every customer.

8. Condoleezza Rice on the board.

9. Mailbox app has server-side access to your email (Gmail or iCloud). This is totally unnecessary for a mail client. They claim they need it to support Snooze functionality, but that is not true. It can be implemented entirely in the client, storing snooze meta-data (with a reference to, not a copy of, the email) only on their servers for cross-device sync purposes.

I like that this new thing where we declare our political enemies anathema and refuse to do business with anything they're affiliated with. I think we need to escalate a little, though, and start boycotting every business that uses Dropbox, too. Also, Stanford.

It's the only way to effect justice in this crazy messed-up world.

It's not about political enemies. It's about what choosing her says to me and many other people about Dropbox, their ethics and their priorities. Iraq war aside, the attitude of a board member about government power and the NSA's ability to snoop on any and all your data, in secret, protected by gag orders, is extremely relevant for a cloud service and for anyone who thinks what the NSA is doing is wrong.

Are you saying that it is wrong for people such as I to not trust or feel morally off using a business based upon the ethics or philosophy of its leadership?

No, I'm saying I'm cynical about everyone's motives in this space, and suspect that there's a reason you lead with naming a bogeyman instead of just accusing the company of being NSA stooges.

I have an Obama "Yes We Scan" image as the banner of my Facebook page. And yes, I see the irony of me having a Facebook page. I use it minimally, and to post social criticism rather than baby and cat pix. Fighting fire with fire.

I am cynical about human apathy and selfishness. Which makes me cynical of your cynicism, which is directed at people's taking a stand :(

> Which makes me cynical of your cynicism, which is directed at people's taking a stand :(

I'll cop to that.

Once upon a time "taking a stand" meant something: risking your life when our imperial British overlords marched into town; risking imprisonment to help slaves escape the antebellum South; risking social alienation, unemployment, or arrest to undermine segregation laws -- or even just expending hours of inconvenience and exhaustion walking to work instead of taking the Montgomery public transit system.

Today, when people "take a stand" on an issue, it generally looks more like GamerGate: piling on to the Internet's latest episode of the Two Minutes' Hate, doxxing some poor pizza-baking morons in Indiana, and issuing them death threats. For this the mob encounters no risk to life, limb, or prosperity, little inconvenience save the time they choose to invest, and are often lauded in their own communities for their "bravery", or cited as paradigms of what a push for social justice looks like today: impassioned young people TAKING A STAND. In other news, up is down, freedom is slavery, and the White House goes around trying to "speak truth to power".

There are a few good exceptions, sure, but even Ferguson was marred by looting.

Dude, I'm totally with you (I think the U.S.'s use of a volunteer army and more so drone warfare is very bad, and I lament our Facebook Like- and Twitter Retweet-based "viral protests" and fashionable ice-bucket challenges, and superficial hipster counter-culture), except...

> Once upon a time "taking a stand" meant something: risking your life when our imperial British overlords marched into town; risking imprisonment to help slaves escape the antebellum South; risking social alienation, unemployment, or arrest to undermine segregation laws -- or even just expending hours of inconvenience and exhaustion walking to work instead of taking the Montgomery public transit system.

...is a kind of straw man. You're basically saying that the only fights worth fighting are the epic ones with the costs you describe. (btw, most recently I took part in shutting down the Brooklyn Bridge to protest the racist police departments and the killing of Micheal Brown, Eric Garner and many others).

And there actually is a significant cost to being principled about the software and services you use. Most people don't actually have anything to hide from the NSA, so denying oneself the convenience and zero out-of-pocket cost of Dropbox or Gmail and choosing often fringe alternatives, is usually all sacrifice, no personal gain. The only gain is the promise of the greater good if your protest ultimately prevails. This is analogous to the "inconvenience and exhaustion walking to work instead of taking the Montgomery public transit system."

By the way, what is your current protest (this thread) costing you?

I don't know man, boycotting companies you don't agree with seems a bit extreme. What's next, protesting against unfair laws? Lets not fly off the handle. We have an economy to run...

> If you have to execute bulk operations, your only option is to first sync everything to a local machine, then move stuff around there (or delete it) and wait for the low performance desktop client to shovel everything back up upstream.

> It’s such a flawed design.

> One major advantage of cloud storage and selective sync is that I conveniently want to be able to re-organise files and folders through my Browser, without actually being forced to download everything first.

Hmm. The way I see it the Web UI is a bonus and a fall back when you are not near the computer where it's much easier to move files and folders around. Dropbox was sold and still sell as `files on your devices synced everywhere´ not `central mainline repo that downloads to your devices´.

I am old school, I still think that file management in the browser doesn't work well.

But I agree the desktop client (win and mac) got slower and slower (UI wise). My debian installation runs a previous version that is much faster.

I am glad they aren't packing it with new features that would disturb the dropbox mental model every layman has.

What I've really always wanted, and still never seen, is "Hierarchical Storage Management with the canonical copies of everything in the cloud, and a bounded-size MRU cache on all my local devices, but where updates to the cached files are taken as updates to the canonical version."

This way, you'd be able to have petabytes of stuff seemingly "synced" to your local disk; stuff would just be (much) slower to access the first time, or if you hadn't used it in a while. (Sort of like Apple's "fusion drives", but with the spinning disk very, very far away.)

It's almost like a FUSE-mounted WebDAV share or somesuch, but where you interact with it through its local cache on your real filesystem, rather than by your OS making its read/write requests to the server itself.

I've been using copy.com for a while and I'm quite happy with it. The main reason I chose it (at the time) was 20GB for free accounts, fair storage in shared folders and pricing (I have the 250GB account).

(Disclaimer: this is a referral link that will give us 5gb https://copy.com?r=b2yUAQ ;-))

I too have been using Copy for years.

Let's not forget they have a working Linux client. Maybe things have changed since I last looked, but they were one of the few supporting Linux (both cli and gui).

I just recently found it moved over from Dropbox, too. - Quick and competent support - Linux sync client - Apps with Photo sync (Since yesterday also for iOS)

I can even use the photo sync from multiple devices because it creates folders per phone

I can't figure out whether they have client-side encryption with a user-specific encryption key that they do not have access to.

Doesn't look like it. They have an API you could throw encrypted blobs at with a bit of work at least.

I use both and one thing that really bothers me about both services is that they don't work well with proxies and laptops.

My company forces me to use a proxy so I must manually configure Dropbox and Copy with that proxy info even though I've already configured OS X to use the proxy. Why can't they obtain the system-wide OS X proxy info that all other (non command line) apps use?

When I'm not at work the proxy isn't available and neither Dropbox nor Copy will recognize that fact and bypass it. Instead they just hang, even though all other GUI apps are fine. I have to manually turn proxying off in each app in order to get syncing to work. It's not only a pain to do this but it's also easy to forget, and then you wind up with files you need that haven't been synced.

Note that Copy.com is owned by Barracuda. If you're considering leaving Dropbox for privacy or political reasons, be aware there may be similar concerns with Barracuda.

There is no visual indication of progress. No clue about any ETA. No system logs. No detailed activity window.

Not returning any meaningful information when problems arise is the most annoying aspect of modern apps, especially on phones. Even Windows cryptic error numbers were better than this.

Three of these issues are minor UI/UX gripes. What's the better alternative? What more "innovation" do you expect from a file syncing app that already works really well? Have you even reported the file list bug you are experiencing to Dropbox so they can fix it?

It may be time to explain the "So What?" test of writing again.

You should ask yourself that question any time you write an article. (Or give a talk, teach a lesson...) If you gave enough information, that should sound like a stupid question. But if it sounds like something that might reasonably be asked, you forgot to communicate something important. In this case, the big missing piece of data is what they will be using instead of dropbox.

Because without that critical piece of data, this entire article can be summed up as "Dropbox sucks."

The title of the article was "4 reasons why we are leaving Dropbox" and not "10 alternatives to Dropbox", which would be an interesting, but totally different article on it's own. It is good to read about these issues, as these days many people think about moving from A to B in cloud storage.

Personally i moved all my storage, contacts and calendars over to a self-hosted owncloud instance, which i did not regret so far. But i'm not going to write an article about it ...

It's important to voice concerns with wildly popular software but not very thought-provoking. You don't get the call-to-action feel without a discussion of solutions.

"Dropbox sucks", with specific reasons why, is informative to me as a potential user.

Not sure "so what?" is a reasonable test anyway. If you're snarky enough, couldn't you ask that about any article at all?

It doesn't matter how snarky you are. You're not asking whether it matters to you, but whether it matters to your audience. Unless you're writing to an audience of nihilists, the test is still a helpful judge of newsworthiness.

I don't know for them, but for me I have moved to self hosting with good sync by BitTorrent sync. Then at least I do not send my data to somewhere else. It's time people start to understand they are responsible for their own stuff, and third parties will never be.

I was taught the marketing angle: "So what?", followed by "Prove it!"

So what?

I'm using dropbox + google drive (due to google docs) both home and for work and I get all of your claims. But what's the alternative? Besides google drive that has it's own issues all other solutions are less than dropbox or same with something missing (proper mobile app etc)...

So what are you switching to?

> But what's the alternative?

Sounds like an opportunity.

I don't think there's a great opportunity there. Cloud storage is at this point a commodity product, so a new business would be differentiating entirely based on user experience and would be at a competitive disadvantage in storage costs compared to the big hitters.

Personally I think BitTorrent Sync has something I really like. I am in the middle of evaluating SyncThing (Open Source project that is similar)

I really like BTSync for th following:

1) Like git the copies are on local machines

2) I control the servers and I control the folders that are shared

3) Super fast in a local network

4) You can use whatever encryption you want and it works perfectly

5) You can selectively sync individual folders and files

6) Easy to share things that are Read Only or Read/Write

Have you already upgraded to the "PRO" version? I've been using it on Linux for about a year and just recently a "7 days left" appeared on the Web UI.

That is the reason why I am thinking of syncthing for myself. I need to look at syncthing's mobile apps. https://syncthing.net

I believe you can downgrade to a btsync 1.X and keep it forever.

> But what's the alternative?

https://github.com/pjc50/pjc50.github.io/blob/master/secure-... : my own notes on sync/cloud storage services. I have my own prejudices as to what I want, but that may align well with the prejudices of HN.

There are several different options to roll your own. like: http://tshannon.bitbucket.org/freehold/

This should be 5 reasons, and #1 should be their lackluster history with security.

Spideroak FTW! If you keep an eye open for promos and stuff, it's not hard to rival a free Dropbox account.

(For things I don't care about or need to use in collaborative settings, I still use Google Drive and OneDrive)

I expected to read the alternative solution you plan to use. Did i miss something?

Last 2 lines made it sound like google drive?

I see only 3 alternatives anyway:

1/ Google Drive

2/ Box

3/ USB keys

4/ OneDrive?

5/ OneDrive for Business? (which not the same as OneDrive)

6/ Amazon Cloud

7/ Younited (use this if you care about security)

www.copy.com gives you 20gb on free account. Has clients for windows, linux and mac. With this refferal [1] you get another 5gb.

https://copy.com?r=WV7J4N

I changed to Hubic and I am happy, Created account, run referral links and I’m at 55GB as I speak. You can sign up to get extra space beyond the space offered on their website https://hubic.com/nl/offers?referral=CYHNPO

OK, 55GB that’s way more than most of storage services offer. Plus - here is the deal - Hubic offers true folder syncing (not like Dropbox or Onedrive, just one folder), plus they offer backup option only. The mobile device apps are pretty good. One thing I like about Hubic is it give expiry dates on shared links.

SugarSync doesn’t provide free space. Cubby has limited storage and you have to do a lot of work to get some space. Copy is not interesting anymore since they cut the referral program. Dropbox sucks because you have to do 30 referrals to get just a few Gig space. I find HubiC is pretty good and it now pretty fast, I am averaging 2-3 GB upload per hour which is pretty decent. Here is a sign up link to get you extra 5GB in addition to 25GB plus you can get 25 GB additional space for a total of 55GB of space easily on HubiC: https://hubic.com/nl/offers?referral=CYHNPO .....

Just sign up with this link and you get the bonus space instead of the regular 25GB if you go directly through Hubic website. And you can have peace of mind HubiC is owned by OVH, they are pretty big internet hosting company, hosting is in Europe.

Right now they have 500,000 accounts, which is pretty impressive for a service that just started a couple of months ago.

If you decide to subscribe to their service, it’s starts at 80 cents per month, pretty good price, so no need to prepay chunk of money and you can cancel anytime.

Here is the link again: https://hubic.com/nl/offers?referral=CYHNPO

Cheers.

Am I the only one who expected 5. Condoleezza Rice?

The Google Drive sync client had a major problem in that it used all your bandwidth when doing large syncs, they finally fixed that problem by introducing bandwidth settings. It is much more reliable now. https://www.synergyse.com/blog/prevent-google-drive-for-mac-...

Ok, well. Where are you going and why? That would be more interesting to me :)

Maybe its because I'm not a Dropbox user (or a cloud storage user for that matter) that what I found most interesting was that Google tried calling someone up for a support ticket on Google Drive.

Google doing actual customer support? I thought the internet said that never happened.

Their actual reason is probably related to the arguments presented at http://www.drop-dropbox.com/

Unsure why "they" would not come out and say that.

What makes you assume that?

I know no one likes me doing this, but...

I use bittorrent sync (stay with 1.3.109 until they stop messing it up or syncthing gets a bit more mature). I've never paid for it, it Just Works (no install, just binary, takes literally 30 seconds to get two machines syncing, I've used it to send files to my mum because it's easier than teaching her to use mediafire), it's not storage limited, it end-to-end encrypts and because it's peer to peer, it is way faster because it doesn't upload to a server first.

Remind me again why you lot insist on using third party providers for this stuff?

What are you now/planning on using instead of Dropbox? Google Drive?

I'm surprised there are not more people on HN who don't use Dropbox due to NSA/privacy concerns. Do you really want to worry about all your files, which are probably your most valuable ones, being out in the open to any Dropbox, NSA, or other law enforcement employee? Do you really trust Dropbox to not have a repeat of accidentally allowing your files to be publicly viewable by anyone? When there are encrypted alternatives that are as easy to use, there is seemingly no point of using Dropbox.

I love Dropbox. Use it all the time without any problems.

What are you using it for? Are you part of a company that shares everything on Dropbox, and how often do you use it?

I'm also a "happy" Dropbox customer -- but I'm part of a 3-person startup and we only share relatively small files and folders. This post (and numerous others) make me think it's time to move on when we grow the team.

I always wondered, why do small companies use Dropbox at all?

A 1 TB NAS in RAID-1 by Synology or QNAP will cost you about 400 EUR (including VAT). That's about 9% of what the author of the article paid for some 700 GB in Dropbox. It will do everything that Dropbox does, except you can use standard protocols (SMB, AFS, WebDAV, whatever) and the data will not leave your company.

> and the data will not leave your company.

That is a two-edged sword. The data is also inaccessible outside of your company. There are ways to make it accessible outside the company (VPN, WebDAV over https), but they tend to be complex, fragile, and sometimes unworkable (see next).

> standard protocols (SMB, AFS, WebDAV, whatever)

Support for the standard file sharing protocols (SMB, NFS, I presume AFS, and WebDAV) sucks or doesn't exist on mobile devices.

Well, every single NAS box offers VPN solution that can be enabled by few clicks (usually OpenVPN).

Also, most NAS vendors provide mobile applications, so you can access the data. They realize, that the standard protocols on mobile devices are lacking.

Anyway, to pay someone to get you such a NAS and configure everything for you is still a fraction of cost, that you would pay for cloud providers.

But then you have to worry about keeping that VPN access secure. There's been cases where that's been a problem, like the ransomware attacks on Synology NAS boxes (see http://www.anandtech.com/show/8337/synology-advises-users-of...).

> to pay someone to get you such a NAS and configure everything for you is still a fraction of cost, that you would pay for cloud providers.

Dropbox for Business costs what, $75/month for 5 users? That's less than you'd pay for an hour of a competent person's time.

I'm not a huge fan of Dropbox for several of the reasons that have already been mentioned above (I use SpiderOak myself), but on these specific points they definitely beat the roll-your-own approach.

That ransomware attacks were on Synology boxes that had their web console exposed to the web. Nothing to worry about when using VPN.

>> Nothing to worry about when using VPN.

If you are a services/consulting company and do client work on-site, you often have to sign an agreement from the IT department that prevents you from using a VPN on the client's network. In those cases, your remote workers need web access to files.

Well, that didn't happen to us.

We have access either to completely separated guest network, where we have to use VPN to both our network and customer network, or access via Citrix or Remote Desktop, where to exchange the files we have to use the built-in file share facility.

Synology offers mobile apps to access the shares.

It will do everything that Dropbox does

Only after a whole lot of hacking and you'll probably end up having to slap a real server in front of your NAS.

What would the real server run?

I haven't found anything, that Dropbox does that the NAS doesn't. Maybe there is some marginal function, I don't know. But is that hypothetical marginal function worth the 900% price premium (per year) plus reduced privacy?

How do you do offline syncing and sharing of folders with people outside of your network? Having to manage a bunch of VPN accounts for outside users seems like a major pain and getting them all set up with OpenVPN seems like an even bigger pain.

We are using IPSEC VPN for external access. It works with standard clients in Windows, OSX, Linux, Android, iOS, whatever.

It allows not only access to files on NAS, but also to webapps on another box and remote desktop on yet another box.

Though I'm thinking about how to configure haproxy to allow Remote Desktop Gateway and https on the single IP, that we have.

Having to manage VPN accounts for everybody I want to share a folder with sounds like a huge pain. Especially if I have to go ask the VPN admin each time. And I'm still curious how you do offline access and syncing to local disk.

There is no offline access or syncing.

The data is available over gigabit link. It is local, after all. No need to sync to hide the latency.

And after all, there is more data on NAS, that the drive on my notebook can handle. No need to have it all locally.

So you're not actually doing everything (or even most things) that Dropbox does. I mean we also have a file server with a several TB of disk and gigabit links and VPN and all that jazz at the office, but that is in no way a replacement for what Dropbox offers.

So I guess we have different needs.

For us it is important to work on the same files. To make them available to our co-workers, to have the same versions, etc.

Syncing is a mechanism. If it would help us to achieve our goals, we could use it. If some other mechanism achieves our goals more efficiently, we would use it instead. Syncing in itself does not have value to us.

Dropbox and a NAS or file server fulfill different needs with not that much overlap. Sure you can probably hack your NAS to be a bit like Dropbox and perhaps you can hack Dropbox to work a bit like a NAS, but a the end of the day they're complements not competitors. If you don't need what Dropbox offers that's cool, but that's not the same as saying that Dropbox doesn't have anything to offer over a NAS. Personally I use both and would never want to trade one for the other.

On windows, one can use this:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/working-with-netw...

A NAS box is going to get hacked (X), have backups neglected/misconfigured/misdelegated and then have data accidentally deleted or experience disk crashes, etc. You can improve your chances by investing time and energy on taking good care of it, but even then you can still get bitten.

(X) devices from both vendors you mentioned are pretty frequent victims

Only devices with services exposed to Internet were hacked. Devices inside LAN, with external access provided by VPN, were not hacked.

This applies to any service or device that you run. NAS is no exception. Your printer could be hacked, if you exposed it to the Net.

Data can be accidentaly deleted anywhere, cloud providers or your own storage. You must make backups anyway.

No, that's 90s thinking. Current methods don't require the boxes/services to be directly internet-addressable.

An exception is when you have a completely isolated LAN that's not serving internet-connected computers. But that's pretty spartan.

The infections needed to have access to web console (in Synology case, that's port 5000).

Unless you are targeted, that's very difficult to achieve even in slightly secured networks (i.e. every possible toggle in settings is not ON).

When you are targeted, it does not matter, whether you use Synology or Dropbox, the approach is tailored to your situation.

For just one technique, read up on DNS rebinding attacks vs home "routers". Same works against NAS devices.

These devices are so common that it is cost effective to do against a bunch of device+vuln combos in a mass drive-by fashion (served by compromised or shady ad networks or any of the other 100 methods that get you to follow a bad link).

Or there's going to be another taiwanese device or PC compromised on your LAN and it'll automatically portscan & metasploit all your network in 5 minutes.

Also don't think getting "targeted" means you have to be James Bond-special. It can mean someone found a prominent blog they'd like to inject their rogue ads on. Or you pissed someone off online and they got some script kiddies to spend 10 minutes to ruin your day and get their laughs (or $20 in bitcoin).

Dropbox's security guys will detect these after they get used a few times (before they get to you), unlike your taiwanese NAS vendor who will only do something half-assed 2 weeks after it hits the news. Or nothing when it doesn't hit the news, as often happens.

All in all the mindset that you have "LAN" or "intranet" that's a significant security perimeter is outdated even if you're nobody. Don't make a network that's "hard and crunchy on the outside, soft and chewy on the inside".

Well, it the rebind attacks depends on multiple weak points. Our DNS cache does not allow for external DNS servers to return IP addresses from our internal range. But I guess not everyone's router does that.

But your point is valid.

>> I always wondered, why do small companies use Dropbox at all?

For smaller companies who don't want to manage infrastructure, the short answer is time.

* Setting up the NAS.

* Servicing the NAS when a drive fails.

* Setting up a backup for the NAS.

* Supporting people for connections to NAS

Complaint #1 - They aren't releasing new features, and are spending too much time on bug fixing and performance.

Complaint #2 - It's buggy.

Oooooooooooooooook.

He's saying that the _core_ part isn't adding any new features and that the _desktop_ is too buggy.

We use Google Drive internally - but I've been thinking about trying out Box. Integrated file editing makes a big difference.

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I instinctively shied away from using Dropbox and have instead found a cheap alternative.

I have a dedicated Linux server from Kimsufi which runs any testing I need to do for my work and also has a BitTorrent Sync client installed. I have Sync installed on my phone, laptop and work computer, so anything I need to share I can, easily and quickly.

Interesting opinions. I just reinvested myself in Dropbox now that CloudApp has hampered their free usage and raised their first tier pricing.

http://getcloudapp.com/plans/

Dropbox's screenshot sharing is working really well and perfect replacement.

Take a look at https://minbox.com/. I use it as a replacement for cloudapp.

I like Cubby.com because I can sync arbitrary folders. That said, development does seem to have slowed there too. This seems to be a pattern with other services I’ve used (Copy, Wuala, Dropbox) – hook you with a good free tier and one or two differentiating features, and then stop innovating...

I agree that on Mac it can be pretty frustrating to use. On Windows, not so much.

A good evaluation of current cloud storage options would actually be useful. "Why we're switching from Dropbox to X" wouldn't waste our time.

I'm leaving Dropbox, because I don't want to pay for 1TB of data when I only use 50gb. Other services offer smaller increments of payment plans.

I'll file this one under "cool story bro"

I use Dropbox for notes and documents using terminal, VIM and markdown format. Beats Google docs every day if you don't need live collaboration.

I use google docs to share works in progress with coworkers for their review and comments. I am considering mark down with git for revision control and then i can use pandoc to publish in latex.

How does Dropbox make this better than google docs or different from the network drive we all access on the company server by VPN?

Seems a bit anecdotal. I've had none of these issues. What if you just need to restart your computer?

The worst thing for me is not being able to sync only 1 folder instead of the whole thing. When you are syncing a mobile phone, you don't want to be downloading GBs of stuff, maybe only 1 folder with your resized pictures...

The mobile app has never downloaded everything.

The desktop app allows you to select a subset of folders to sync: https://www.dropbox.com/en/help/175

The most frustrating thing for me, while watching a new generation of users grow up on Dropbox and similar functionality, is that this sort of thing should really be in the Operating System by now, as a standard feature.

But it seems the OS vendors have lost their way and are chasing shiny colors and new hardware, as usual.

Wasn't so long ago you kind of expected a new filesharing technology to be built-in to the operating system. But it does seem like those days are over - the line keeps getting redrawn, which defines what an "OS" is, to most people. At this point, at least in the case of Dropbox, the Web seems to have driven us all mad.

Store your stuff outside your house, on someone elses hardware? Really?

Can't say I'm surprised considering every single major OS has its own cloud service. Why would Apple, MS, Google help people not use iCloud, OneDrive, and Google Drive?

Or, more likely... monopoly concerns. You are seeing the fall out of the MS anti-trust case. The kinds of innovation you talk about pretty much stopped after that. You will soon see the fall out of the Google anti-trust case.

>You are seeing the fall out of the MS anti-trust case.

Good point, and actually I'll start to accommodate this in my considerations of the topic in the future.

What exactly does Dropbox do that WebDAV can't do?

Be so easy to install and use that my mother can use it on her own. That's the big advantage that Dropbox had and still has over something like WebDAV.

How is something being easy to install an advantage over something that works without an install?

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