VCs drop cash on DropBox, bestow $10bn valuation

Ten billion greenbacks. That’s what venture capital firms (and Dropbox’s board and execs) think the file sync'n'share pioneer is worth. Dropbox started offering its sync'n'share services to consumers using a freemium business model, and has latterly moved into offering business syncing and sharing services. It’s competing …

[Bgfreeman]

The thing with Dropbox is, to coin a phrase, it just works. Install it, stick something in the Public folder. right-click it and you can share the public link. the recipient doesn't need a Dropbox account.

With Google drive you can share something to Google Plus, and that's about it without involving sending email and other shenanigans.

Haven't tried Box but once.. wasn't impressed with the speed of sync.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

re: it just works

But it's vulnerable to Google/Apple blocking it on their mobile devices in favour of their home grown solutions

[Anonymous Coward]

I use Dropbox and it's good - but you get little 'free' space and it's relatively expensive for extra space - especially when Google, Microsoft and Amazon all give you more space for free. I believe it runs on top of Amazon S3 - so seems unlikely they could undercut Amazon's pricing? Also seems quite a commodity service - so 10bn seems a generous valuation.

[Charlie Clark]

Storage is commodity. What Dropbox offers is convenience and incredible flexibility. I was in early because they made an offer at PyCon (lots of Python used internally) and have not looked back and gained a few GB here and since including > 40 GB from Samsung. Strong encryption is missing but, because you can mount file systems locally, you can add that yourself. Photo-synching is very convenient but not very granular - no albums and public but obscured by default. I miss more intelligent synching on Android but DropSync fills the gap pretty nicely. It's chuffing great for backing up private repositories.

The key for businesses is the lack of lock-in to any eco-system. Setting up an (encrypted) file-server is invitingly simple and allows companies to continue working as they always have done but scale down their own hardware assets.

[Anonymous Coward]

use it and love it. paid the 99$ upgrade for 100GB. All the output for my photo shoots are uploaded to drop box and link set to the client - beast sending out DVDs.

Next step is to have lightroom library stored on dropbox so can share between two machines. not easy though, more effort is needed by applications to work with once central configuration etc working across multiple machines without the applications being in the cloud.

[Anonymous Coward]

I use it to sync across 3 computers (and a iPads/Phones) - way easier and less problematic than trying to run a home server of any kind PLUS the added benefit of having files with you when on a laptop, fast opening from a local drive AND off site resilience. It's never missed a beat. No lost files, no clashes.

Google Drive doesn't like losing it's network connection (crashes) and has problems running on my Macs (shuts down fairly often). Box (which work is trying to roll out) just isn't as easy or convenient as Dropbox.

[Free Maps?]

I use it, but It's the upgrade costs from free (up to £16Gb) to $120 per year for 100Gb that put me off becoming too dependent on it.

It would be nice if they had a cheaper middle/cheaper option.

[Adam 1]

The problem I have with dropbox and similar services is that your don't get a say where your data is held and you rely on them to have appropriate security arrangements. I use btsync myself because there is no third party holding your data. The main downside is you can't just send a file by URL and that the syncing will only occur while your computer is on.

[Charlie Clark]

you rely on them to have appropriate security arrangements…

You don't, you can create your own on a folder-by-folder basis and just them to store the encrypted data.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you failed to understand the difference between security and security

[Sheep!]

I use Dropbox and by jumping through the hoops they ask when you buy a Samsung phone I've managed to get 50Gb out of them free, started using it about 2 months ago and damned glad that I did as my external HD caddy burned out the drive 2 weeks ago and that was my only backup! I managed to get Genie Timeline free from Giveaway of the day and had been running regular backups of essential data (with 2048 bit encryption) and syncing it into my Dropbox folder. I did originally try with Google Drive but it seemed a pain in the arse to use in comparison with Dropbox (that and the fact it only has half the level of free storage).

[Steve78]

I am a longtime Dropbox premium user. I migrated all my data away from Dropbox onto SkyDrive for about 4 months as I purchased a 100GB SkyDrive account when I upgraded my (then) main PC to Windows 8.1 from 8.0. SkyDrive is forced down your throat and it does actually make sense to adopt it above offerings from rivals such as Google Drive & Dropbox due to the integration with all your Microsoft products - until you realise it doesn't fucking work properly! SkyDrive is so unintelligent when it comes to managing your data!

I own quite a few machines (Windows & Mac) and run various VM's (Windows/Linux) and Dropbox just worked beautifully. So lets talk about my SkyDrive woes. If I powered on a machine that hadn't been online for a while (lets say for more than 4 or 5 weeks), it would recognise data that I had deleted on other machines as "new" and instead of deleting it from the machine that had not been online for a while it would actually pull the 'old' data into my SkyDrive account and sync old deleted data across all my machines. This was infuriating and I took to Twitter to have a whinge (as you do). The Official SkyDrive Twitter account quickly followed me on Twitter and attempted to help me with my problems. I was then in touch with SkyDrive support and to cut a long story short, they couldn't resolve the problem. SkyDrive is too fucking dumb to recognise what is old and what is new which surely defeats the purpose of having it!

So I moved back to Dropbox and everything just works. Dropbox also has LAN sync which Google and Microsoft still fail to include with their services.

Sure, Dropbox may cost a bit more but it works and that's all I care about.

[Anonymous Coward]

OwnCloud

I opted to leave Dropbox services last year in search of more storage at a cheaper price, and found Owncloud to be an adequate replacement.

I self host Owncloud on a Debian server, my storage limitations are seemingly endless. I have all the features Dropbox offered including Desktop application, mobile phone app and web access. I can also recover deleted files and create multiple accounts.

Dropbox was a good service, but Owncloud is open source and more suited to my needs. Admittedly it's hosted by myself and should something happen at home I could lose my data (I do backup regularly), it's a risk I'm willing to take for almost zero cost.