Meet the new Dropbox: It's like the old Dropbox, but more expensive, and not everyone's thrilled Dropbox has announced new features and partnerships with Atlassian, Slack and Zoom – but it comes after a price rise that has some users feeling hot under the collar. The cloudy storage outfit is keen to move beyond mere cloud storage to become "a single workspace designed to bring files, fragmented work tools, and teams …
I just don't understand all those people who are only too happy to store all their private personal files (and often including the contact details for all of their friends, without consent), unencrypted, with some random company.
It gets even worse when you realise that some businesses use these disservices as well (and even if not officially permitted, there often seem to be many rogue employees who will do it anyway). <sigh>
Of course you are right Anonymous! Tens of millions of people are doing it because they're imbeciles! It's not because it's incredibly convenient, easier to use and way more resilient than putting stuff on spinning rust at home -- what dopes! And who are they to trust one of the oldest, most well-known, best-operated and profitable (AKA won't disappear when funding runs out or corporate masters get tired/bored) of the cloud storage vendors -- fools! And that AES encryption Dropbox applies is of course known to be completely ineffective and just the same as no encryption at all! Idiots!
This happens all too often...last time Dropbox did it was a year ago when an employee (NOT A HACKER) simply gave "personally identifiable information on hundreds of thousands of customers" for the sake of research. No safeguard or checks, just "here you go" - https://www.wired.com/story/dropbox-sharing-data-study-ethics/
Steve Jobs was right: Dropbox is a feature, not a product
You would have to be a sucker to buy this overpriced feature when you can get native storage and features from Google or Microsoft at a lower cost.
If you share content with non Dropbox users, they get screen spammed to install the app rather than instant access to the shared content. Just not worth it.
So, nothing special for iOS, Android, Chrome OS, GNU/Linux or any other of us not-just-a-corporate-desktop users.
It was bad enough that there was never an intermediate, low-cost option between f*** all space for free and decent storage for loadsamoney - now even more loads. I shall probably be moving to pCloud, failing that iDrive.
Still, discarding your original open business ethos in pursuit of global corporate buyout is hardly something new.
I've got a bit more than "fuck all space" because I got in early. But I've recently noticed how stuff is being scanned – I mainly use Dropbox to sync music and books between devices – and am not looking forward to preemptive DMCA notices on my stuff. Basically I feel I'm being told: if you don't encrypt it, you're inviting us to look at it. That's bad enough for private stuff, but totally unacceptable for anything business like. And the Yanks are trying to tell us we should worry about the Chinese?
NextCloud / OwnCloud looks like it could be sufficient for my needs. And NordVPN has started trailing its own encrypted storage. I guess we all need to face up to paying for service if we expect to be around next year. And the year after that.
Have you bumped up against the 3 client limit on the free tier yet? That was the killer for me, I don't keep a lot of stuff in dropbox and so the free 5GB i have is more than sufficient, but I use(d) it to sync to lots of devices.
Moved to NextCloud on a box at home pointing at a few TB's of general storage, sadly it doesn't offer quite the same features as I was using in dropbox was but as always; improvise, adapt, overcome.
Have you bumped up against the 3 client limit on the free tier yet?
Not really, no. If necessary I'd create additional accounts and share with them. But the general thrust of this announcement seems to be to sending the wrong signals. Even if I don't t listen to it very often, I don't want "The Wombles Album" to disappear from my devices because some algorithm thinks I don't need it any more!
"Have you bumped up against the 3 client limit on the free tier yet?"
Yep - it's a real PITA - don't need much more that the 7GB I have, but not being able to sync between all my machines is a big issue, and I cannot justify spending £100pa just to have that ability.
I need to find something that will let me have all devices accessing the same data - and preferably keep that data on my own network.
Just started looking at NextCloud - as I can probably have that up and running this weekend and get rid of Dropbox entirely.
FWIW I moved to using Nextcloud a little while back, and haven't looked back.
There are some minor niggles/annoyances depending what you're storing. In particular, the way it generates thumbnails for images is dumb and frustrating when you're trying to flick through a folder of images that you haven't viewed in the Nextcloud app before (there are ways around that though).
I use it to sync some documents, my password locker DBs and for automated upload of photos taken on my phone (so that they're backed up without having to gift them all to Google).
Granted I don't need some of the features Dropbox is offering anyway, but I wouldn't touch them with a bargepole nowadays.
I run a home server but I think a cloud service still comes out cheaper for most people. A minimal pool of IPv4 addresses cost $240 a year, DNS about $20 a year, upgrading to a non-garbage Internet last mile costs $150 to $3000 a year, and figure $200/year for power+server+disks+NAS backup+UPS batteries. That's a starting price of $610/year. You need that setup to be doing a lot more work than occasional file sharing.
You don't need any static IPv4, dynDNS is free/$55 if you need more than 3 domains.
A pair of 4TB RAID1 NAS is about $400-500 to buy outright, and should last at least five years. Powering them is around 500-1000kWh, or $60-$120.
So $500 + 5×(55+120+150) = $2125 for five years, or $425/year, $35/month for 4TB.
After 5 years you'll probably only swap hard disks.
I haven't taken cost of capital into account, which may change the napkin sums.
None of the above include the labour costs.
Someone has to install, configure, maintain, secure, patch, upgrade, administrate your home server. This only costs nothing if you value your time as worthless. And it's only worth something if you have the skills to competently do it all. If this isn't your usual job, you could be doing it badly and leaving your data wide open.
Personally I'd rather save my time for more interesting things, and leave most aspects to professionals who handle this on a daily basis.
"leave most aspects to professionals who handle this on a daily basis."
Your sentiment is well-taken, and probably right most of the time.
But there've been plenty of breaches, "oops forgot to set the perms and ACLs on that bucket", unhashed password lists, etc. Enough that having blind faith in the professionals is unwarranted too.
So yes, use the service (self, cloud, whatever) that suits you. But never believe that someone else cares about your data as much as you do -- you are customer, or product, to them. Your $$ is what matters, not your personal files and data and such.
I use https://github.com/gogs/gogs on an rasberry pie with an apache proxy and lets encrypt. 7w with usb 1TB ssd drive. totally silent. It is only for wiki, code and documents. but it works on any device. My only complain is that searching when you get a lot of repos is almost non existant in gogs. But it is easy to rsync and replicate elsewhere on anything that runs linux in a few minutes.
I used Dropbox as a convenient way to get photos off of my phone (via DropSync; the Dropbox client for Android was never very good), and to synchronise my KeePass database between devices.
Then they broke the Linux client. I now use Google Photos for the former and BitWarden has built-in sync.
Everything else I need is either in OneDrive, Google Drive or GitHub.
Then they started sending me "thanks for signing up emails" a month or two back, even though I've had the account for several years.
I'm out. I'll be exporting my stuff and deleting my account this afternoon.
... they are not very useful if an element would need to show more than one overlay to show its real status. If you rely only on the overlay shown, you may miss other important state information.
While with larger icons there would be more space to show more than one overlay, with small ones and lists there is not much space. It could be more sensible to change the icon itself.
"a single workspace designed to bring files, fragmented work tools, and teams together".
And a place where phisers put their bent PDF files.
People then follow the link cause "Oh its dropbox so must be legit" sign in and then follow the bent links in the bent PDF stored on dropbox.
Its amusing to see this exploit happen as I learnt that day I was asked to check if it was legit or not. That you can put comments next to the file which I wasn't aware of. Over 20 people from different companies had fallen for it leaving such comments as
"Hi Jane. I wasn't expecting this file from you. And it doesn't appear to be working".
To simply
"Hi Jane. File doesn't work"
So you weren't expecting the file but you logged in and tried to access it anyway?
"Fucking 'ell John."
But if there weren't people like that, I'd have no job.
When I hear those words, my mind immediately translates to "deep fucking of your data".
I am a free user. I only need Dropbox to share a few small files between friends. Those files have absolutely no importance to anyone but us, and anyone who wishes to take a look can have a copy, I don't care.
But if Dropbox starts fucking with me, I'll find another platform in a heartbeat.
I want an app which, you know, lets me share a bunch of filespace between a bunch of devices transparently, syncing things between them as needed. Like Dropbox used to do quite well. And I don't want it to start thinking it should run my life and integrate with all sorts of tools I have no use for at all. I am willing to pay for it (I pay, currently, for Dropbox). It needs to work on MacOS and iOS, and it would be nice if it worked on Linux. Encrypted storage would be good.
What are the options?
Apple's own iCloud almost fits those criteria — though you'd have to use the web interface under Linux. On the Mac it's pretty much just a daemon that offloads and downloads files on demand, right there in the normal Finder. No DropBox-style homegrown Finder/Explorer replacement garbage.
The free tier is worse than useless though if you intend to use any of the optional other features such as automatic photo synchronisation or device backup.
The web client is also fairly bare bones, so it depends on your tolerance for downloading and uploading manually from the Linux box.
Don't you lot have remote ("off campus") personal file servers? telnet's been around for over half a century, FTP over a third of a century ... there are more secure options today. Why trust other people for remote data storage when you can park an old Pentium-class box running BSD or Linux on your Great Aunt's DSL line in Duluth (I'm certain she doesn't use all four of those 100Meg Ethernet ports). Then simply add an arbitrary amount of storage, encryption to suit yourself, and Bob's your Auntie.
Honestly, my mind boggles ... I thought this was a tech site.
Don't you lot have remote ("off campus") personal file servers? telnet's been around for over half a century, FTP over a third of a century ... there are more secure options today.
We have those things. But that's not what Dropbox does. What it does is to provide a directory (~/Dropbox on OS X, I don't know what on Windows) under which everything is synced. So if I copy anything in there, it gets synced off to DB, and hence appears on any other machine which shares my DB account (and is accessible on the web, and via phones &c &c). And it does this while dealing with the machine being only sometimes on the net &c &c. The interesting part of these tools isn't the remote storage, which is trivial, it's the daemon which deals with syncing stuff automagically.
Now, perhaps there are open-source versions of what the Dropbox daemon does which talk to, for instance, an scftp backend, dealing with all the network intermittency and sync issues (perhaps dat?). That would be interesting. But the backend protocol and the remote storage are not what DB is about.
(Neither should it be about integrating everything with slack or something, which is why I think they've just jumped the shark.)
Article: This may give users attracted by the new collaboration features pause for thought. If you adopt these features then Dropbox becomes harder to leave; you easily shunt files around but comments and discussions are more difficult to preserve.
Of course, this is exactly how the MS Office365 with its various integrated tools and collaboration features works. I get the impression Dropbox is trying to get into a similar racket. After you have properly hooked your customer, you can hike prices quite a bit. A very nice business.
I bet the application is bloody Electron, just like Teams and Slack and...
I don't want all my applications to be javascript web pages running inside their own fecking browsers, none of which get properly patched.
I want those CPU cycles, RAM and disk space for my useful work, not to mention the security concerns of having a hundred different fully-featured browsers hitting random parts of the Internet while I'm not looking.
Yes, this is an important point. Disk space is like memory (because it is memory, really): if you're not using it it has no value to you, and it's costing you money. The difference is that you can almost always use all the memory you have. I keep a year's worth of (GPG encrypted!) monthly backups of my home directory on Dropbox, and all my photographs (not encrypted, I don't care enough). I'm using 6.8% of my 2TB: until a few weeks ago I was using 13.6% of my 1TB. I could keep more backups, but I don't actually need to: I have many other backup mechanisms, and I don't want to use DB for archives, which is what anything older than a year would be. I could take more digital pictures, or buy a camera with more megapixels, I suppose. But, actually, I don't want to.
So what Dropbox have done, in fact, is offered me something of no value to me, and charged me money for it.
I looked quite hard at Sync, which is clearly the answer to this. And of course it turns out, as Dropbox probably know, that like many people I have a bunch of apps on my phone which rely on Dropbox syncing and won't talk to Sync. So I'm trapped unless I want to redo various workflows. Yes, this is my fault.
I use the free version of Dropbox for misc stuff but I keep real files on my own FTP service that came with my hosting account. I don't store things in the "cloud". That's just asking for problems. I put stuff up that I want to transfer to other people of have accessible when I travel and a device might go missing. I take that stuff down when it doesn't need to be there. The last thing I need is another redundant service bleeding my cash every month.
I was very pleased with Dropbox's announcement, complete with "new improved price" warning. I've been itching for Smart Sync on my Plus account ever since Google Drive started doing this, since it works wonders for my laptop storage. Until this 20% price increase, my only option was to upscale my Dropbox account to Business in order to get Smart Sync, which more than doubles the cost. Instead, they've doubled the storage, given my laptop a new lease of life, and charged me less than an extra £2 per month. Suits me just fine.
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