Dropbox CEO: I will make your worklife a calmer experience Feeling overwhelmed by the number of unread emails in your inbox? Frustrated that you had to trawl through 1,000 Slack messages before finding the one you were looking for? Unable to find the latest version of the presentation your team has to give tomorrow? Well, worry no more because Dropbox is going to do all that sifting …
"sometimes"?
Get real. Many times now, I simply send the email and then walk 2 floors to go find the person and stand next to them to get stuff done.
The irony is that email is making business worse by making comms like a sludge pit of ignored requests but the second email is not available the entire workfoce in a company loses its marbles, several dozen techs spring into action to get the service back up and running in nanoseconds so we can all get back to ignoring each other.
This looks to my like a cynical attempt on the part of Dropbox to get users to give Dropbox permission to access all their other online accounts so that the data from those accounts can be collected together.
While it might be nice to have one login through which I could access all my online activity, I certainly don't want that login to by under the control of some third party entity (like Dropbox). If what was being talked about here was a server component I could run on MY server, under MY control -- and if I could be quite certain that it didn't "phone home" with MY data -- I might be interested.
As it is? Nah.
I really love how effective their file syncing is and have been paying for it for years but I'm just not interested in all this bloated crap.
It's a real shame they don't seem prepared to offer a lower priced subscription to just the file syncing service and let the people who want fancy search and pay for it on their own without being subsidised. I suppose that's life though.
Onedrive is really good now, but it does mean committing to Windows 10 which probably won't go down well! Files are always visible in Explorer and just download when needed. Recent update cleans up space from unused files too.
Other than that, if you want on-prem there are alternatives like Nextcloud
I've been permanently put off onedrive after experiencing the steaming pile that was onedrive for business. That and these days I need something that's properly cross platform without having to resort to 3rd party clients (google drive is also a non starter for this reason).
I'm giving spideroak another go but wasn't too impressed with that either when I tried it a few years ago.
I'll probably also have another look at syncthing and nextcloud.
If you have a lot of patience you can use rsync. It is a protocol rather than a product with a polished UI but it does work. Most NAS boxes support it but it can be a royal pain to set up and is missing a lot of features that Dropbox etc offers unless you can script some awesomeness on top.
I really love how effective their file syncing is
+1. I happily pay £100 a year to use Dropbox for two reasons - syncing across devices, and backup for when (not if, when) I mistype rm -rf ~/*. Web login is also an occasionally life-saving feature. Everything else can go hang.
"tech workers (in social-economic terms, wealthy, young white men with computer science degrees)?" - forgetting all the tech workers in India, China, Vietnam, Kenya etc. Trying to show white guilt and accidentally showing bias.
Anonymous 'cos any statement in this area is risky.
There's siloed thinking right there; some people have very many direct reports, even more indirect ones and need to be aware of email going to large groups, if only to weed out the crap from the good stuff. It's not all potential spam, just some mail is potentially less important than others at any one time and that can change depending on context (a failing project for instance); even if AI was 99% accurate, that missing 1% could be the most vital 1%...
I recently needed access to my dropbox account, and then it dawned on me: I haven't accessed it in years.
Well, that is what that 16 character long emergency backup code is for, right?
Wrong. The emergency backup code is now 8 digits. AFAICT they replaced their old emergency backup scheme.
And at one point I trusted 2FA so much that I removed my phone number as a backup device (I had the emergency backup code, right?). Oh, and I have replaced all my devices since then too.
A little googling reveals similar stories. One gentleman was also repeatedly told that there was nothing dropbox support could do. But after a lot of complaining they eventually helped him anyway. I tried that route, but entering the first 8 characters, as suggested, in lieu of the 8-digits, did not help either. Their support is just a waste of time.
Oh wait, they wanted me to use their service for work-related stuff? Yeah... When pigs fly....
It may be great for routine emails you get about subjects that were already common in your email inbox (social media notifications, various ads and offers, etc.), but it is not going to work well for non-routine stuff that may be very important. (You get a message from a seldom-heard relative about an important illness in the family. You get something about a legal action or situtation that may impact you. You get a recruiter contacting you about a potential job opportunity.)
“If you open the same file every Wednesday then we will be open to put that at the top when you log in.”
If thats the best they can get out of machine learning they should just give up now. I could produce the same functionality with a dozen or so ines of procedural code and a list of document opening dates and times.
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