Dropbox is a Total Mess (om.co) 96
Veteran journalist Om Malik, writing on his blog: I was reading Nikita Prokopov's blog this morning and came across his very visual damnation of what is wrong with Dropbox. Like me, he too had thought that "in the beginning, Dropbox was great, but in the last few years, they started to bloat up." He visually shows that as an existing customer, you need to jump through a dozen hoops to get Dropbox going on a new machine. And if you are just signing up, add another five steps. His sentiments reflect my feelings about Dropbox, as well. When I fell in love with Dropbox, it had not even launched. It was simple and elegant. It was nothing like anything I had experienced before. And I wasn't alone. The company was one of the fastest-growing companies in Silicon Valley, because of customers appreciated their simplicity and ease of use. Their revenues and userbase grew at an astonishing speed. For nearly a decade, I stayed loyal to the service, but like Prokopov, I too felt the bloat was getting too much. [...] I don't blame Dropbox going the way they have -- they are less about the individual customers and more focused on teams and corporations. That's where the money is -- and when you go public, you are all about the "quarterly goals." You don't go public without knowing that Wall Street owns you.
They do have to make money at some point (Score:5, Insightful)
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Since I started running my own Nextcloud instance I have no use for Dropbox, which as noted, has been getting worse for years.
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That's a hell of a thing. Imagine a friend Bob invites you to move to an island and to bring all your stuff. Another of your friends, Jim, tells you of his own island under construction but tells you that you will have to pay. But you want to save money, so you move to Bob's island with all your stuff. However, after the first week Bob suddenly tells you that he's are going to charge you rent. By the way you've already quit your job, and Jim's is bankrupt -- he could not even get his business off the groun
Re: They do have to make money at some point (Score:2)
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Yeah it does. It wasnt that long ago that dropbox suddenly decided I had to start paying rent or I'd have to unlink most of my machines.
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That's when I personally switched to self-hosted NextCloud. Never looked back.
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What about Alice?
Re: They do have to make money at some point (Score:3)
Ran away with Carol.
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They were/are making money (Score:4, Informative)
We've all been benefiting from 'free' stuff funded by investors for the last 20 years.
Yes but this was not one of those cases.
DropBox has a very reasonable fee for increased storage, and they worked well enough for sync there was a great reason to want a larger bucket to keep things in.
I've been paying for DropBox for years, so have many others... it is the paying customers that are complaining about changes.
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I've paid for years, and my experience has gotten significantly worse. Almost every feature that I used has either been deprecated or reduced to mobile only. I'll eventually take my business elsewhere, but I haven't invested the time yet to look for a reasonable replacement.
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I spun up NextCloud in a Docker container on my own servers and have been happy as a clam. Sure, it's limited just to my own servers but it's also mostly just used by me and my family. I then back it up daily to S3 in the event of a failure and it works just fine.
NextCloud has an excellent mobile client which includes automatic backup for things like photos and videos (Instant Upload). It also has nice integration with OnlyOffice for an Office365-like experience. You can get pretty deep in the weeds but as
Re: They were/are making money (Score:1)
Re:They do have to make money at some point (Score:4, Insightful)
No. That isn’t their problem.
They are trying to de-commoditize a commodity. I pay Apple, Microsoft, and Google for cloud storage already (along with a few lesser-known names). The service they offer has some value... but it is also a mess and at least marginally better solved by one of my other providers for different use-cases.
Re:They do have to make money at some point (Score:5, Insightful)
We've all been benefiting from 'free' stuff funded by investors for the last 20 years. I suppose it can go on for as long as the investors keep piling in.
I am paying for the service.
My problem is not that they charge, but that the service is consistently getting worse. I liked having a small unintrusive storage module, but that is no longer offered. Instead I get all kinds of "look at how much I can help you" crap when I don't want it. I don't want to click off a "DropBox can help you save word documents" every time I open Word. I don't want a non-integrated DropBox explorer window whenever I access my files that I have to click through. I don't need stars, personalization, predicted usage, extra window panes with notifications and changes. All I want is a place to store files that I can access from all my devices without hassle + a backup, which incidentally is what DropBox used to offer before they went rogue on the features list.
90% of DropBox has become a bag on the side. It is the Clippy of cloud storage.
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Amen to this! When they introduced their own explorer window I thought "uh-oh". I'm still looking for the perfect replacement, if such a thing exists.
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Paid user for over a decade. Cancelled my account about 6 months ago.
Dropbox went from being a lightweight sync tool with no competition to being just another company doing a Slackesque workplace collaboration tool.
Have you tried OneDrive? (Score:2)
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Have I tried?! I've tried to remove it from my PC once! ... It needs a small admin team to get rid of this thing.
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Yes, because clicking "uninstall" in "add or remove programs" is so complicated and unintuitive. The part of the OS that is entirely dedicated to uninstalling software has a one-click uninstaller for OneDrive.
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No, I'm afraid it's not that simple. Microsoft doesn't allow you to remove it with some versions of Windows. If you got yours through an OEM channel chances are they've been forced to make it uninstallable, but not everyone is this lucky.
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From what I remember, there's a magical PowerShell incantation that makes it go away until the next biannual upgrade hits. (Same with the "Get Office 365" app and a few other bundled advertising apps.)
Maybe that's changed in the last couple versions, though.
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Uhh. It is not uninstallable easily on any Consumer/Subsidized/Free version of Windows. It is entirely uninstallable on any Professional/Enterprise version of Windows.
Notice how the free stuff comes with riders ? Yeah. If you case about such things, you care enough to get the correct version of Windows in the first place.
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You looked more competent without the bullshit. Throwing money at Microsoft for a problem they've created doesn't mean you care for it. It means you fell for it. What you do is you get the version you believe serves you best and then work it out from there. That's how people have learned how to remove it despite Microsoft's efforts to stop you from removing it.
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It seems like Microsoft has at least 2 add/remove program interfaces in the new version of Windows 10 that I got with my new laptop this month. That's not including the Microsoft Store, which seems like it might work in conjunction with that, or maybe in parallel... hard to say just looking at it real quick.
There are definitely UI issues with this aspect of Windows 10. It doesn't help that it seemingly changes every time Windows Update runs. So there is a consistency issue as well, the "same" OS should fun
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When I tried OneDrive on my work Mac - admittedly several years ago - I found it had problems with certain file extensions. I don't recall what they were; but the experience wasn't frictionless and it needed to be.
Problem is, I don't trust Dropbox. They seemed to keep asking for permissions they really didn't need.
I've used Sync, which overall I like. It doesn't let me edit files on a mobile device, though - just view them. So that's also not ideal.
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When I tried OneDrive on my work Mac - admittedly several years ago - I found it had problems with certain file extensions.
Using it now. It's awful. Slow, buggy, resource hog, but since I'm already paying for 365 to get domain email and doc editing it's free and I'm on a tight budget.
Re:Have you tried OneDrive? (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe that should be DropBox line... "We're a bloated mess, but still not an unintuitive atrocity!"
Honestly only have it for file sharing (Score:4, Interesting)
At this point, really the only reason I use DropBox is because I can share links to large files over the web.
If iCloud started offering that, I would remove Dropbox.
It's a shame because I think DropBox did, and still kind of does, a really great job in terms of core syncing ability. But they are going in directions I do not care to go.
Maybe if they wise up soon enough, they'll offer aDropBox light which is just core sync services?
Re:Honestly only have it for file sharing (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree, I think Dropbox is just orphaned with no where to go. When it launched it was novel and showed people how easy and useful cloud syncing could be but they don't have any opportunity to tie it into a larger suite of services like the larger players can and people don't generally like too many services that don't talk to eachother.
Google can offer Drive directly with Docs and Sheets and it's built into the core of your Android phone now. If you are a business you get Drive space with your Google Business accounts so it's a fairly friction-less process to use it.
Same thing with Microsoft. Do you pay for Office365, either personally or for your business? Then it's an easy sell to just use OneDrive.
Have an iPhone? iCloud makes perfect sense as it's built right in and will tie all your photos videos and files into one easy service. You already have an Apple account to use the phone.
Even for large mass file sharing does Dropbox offer something better than a service like Sendspace, which has a direct focus on that core feature?
Unfortunately I think Dropbox is a case of where the innovator of an idea is unable to make a business case for it and the harder they try to they veer from the core idea and drive many users away.
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You could buy some storage from AWS for pennies a month and just drop the file into an S3 bucket.
Or for a little more control you can buy a shell account from a web hosting company and have your own virtual web host you can ftp files up to. The one I use is about $100/yr and has no hard data cap as long as you don't abuse it.
Apple Tried Acquiring Them (Score:5, Interesting)
iCloud was Apple's response.
Re:Apple Tried Acquiring Them (Score:5, Insightful)
I had a paying account for years (Score:5, Insightful)
Not even because I needed it, at first anyway, but I paid because Dropbox was worth it. Transparent sync, cross platform, almost zero effort.
After seversl years, some bright idiot decided to EOL the support for common Linux file systems. Even though there was no obvious reason to do so, since it had worked for years and was utterly stable. Probably a bright MBA type with no actual clue.
I moved to Owncloud, which makes me feel better about security anyway. Aside from the initial set up effort, it works as easily as Dropbox ever did.
I saw a tshirt I like: "There is no 'cloud'. There is only someone else's computer".
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I am suprised not to see more Nextcloud/owncloud post here.
Like you, I switched to Nextcloud, they have a very nice snap package that updates automatically. Works prefectly for me.
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Re:I had a paying account for years (Score:4, Interesting)
since it had worked for years and was utterly stable
That's not a valid reason to keep supporting something. That's a valid reason for becoming an Amish farmer. Dropbox nixed support for filesystems that didn't support attributes for their new syncing mechanisms which greatly improved the response of syncing in real-time. The workarounds to get it working on old filesystems which "proved" that Dropbox did it for no reason massively dropped performance compared to the updated requirements, for obvious reasons.
Now frankly I don't like Dropbox, but I will defend their desire to not limit themselves based on a small user base. After the initial drop for everything other than ext4 you'll notice they included support for a lot of other modern filesystems, ones that actually allowed them to do what they were doing on ext4 as well.
Mind you I'm fully beside you about hosting your own system. I tried Owncloud and ran it happily for years until I accidentally broke something during an OS upgrade, that gave me a brief opportunity to look around and I settled on Seafile which was a bit more lightweight and suited the crappy underpowered hardware I had at the time.
I Have Corrupted Dropbox (Score:2)
DroppedBox (Score:1)
That's not an excuse (Score:5, Informative)
Teams and corporations does not necessarily mean insanely complex interface that's impossible to use. Everyone is jumping on the team work and commercial bandwagon, yet somehow Dropbox these days have the most bloated software and the most confusing interface.
You can't tell me that this is all for the good of the Team when I get an email saying a shared folder is updated (I don't use Dropbox much) so I log in and proceed to spend over 5 minutes trying to figure out where the damn shared folders are.
I don't like to post without checking to see what I say is true, so let's try:
1. www.dropbox.com
2. Click login
3. Enter my details.
4. Enter my details again, apparently I need to solve a CAPTCHA which didn't pop up the first time.
5. Advertisement page. Apparently the Dropbox I never use is "out of space". I can upgrade, I can learn about Dropbox Pro, or Dropbox Plus, Or I can choose my plan.
6. Click the carefully chosen white on white with light grey border to go back to my account.
7. Close the popup message to try Dropbox for Business.
8. I'm at my account settings page now and I see a big upgrade button in the middle of my screen. FUCK THE FUCK OFF!
9. Click Home
10. And now what? How do I find shared folders?
11. Click files
12. Click the shared folder.
13. Yes there's a 13, because apparently the default sort when sharing files is to give the oldest file for some 15 years ago at the very top. So change the sorting to date descending.
Oh and as to my Dropbox being full, apparently I'm using 10GB out of my 8GB allowance. What is actually making up those 10GB? Who knows, Dropbox doesn't show file or folder sizes.
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For your method to work he would have to sync the folders to his computer. Just like google drive, the is no way to tell from online interface.
Re:That's not an excuse (Score:5, Interesting)
Well that's it isn't it. I need a fucking nerd card to figure out how to see folder sizes on my Dropbox account. Clearly it's still in beta and not ready for end users yet if they need to be a certified nerd to do something so basic.
Let me try and see if I can figure out how to visualise folder sizes on my seafile account.
1. http://www.redacted.com/seafil... [redacted.com]
2. Enter my details, I'm already at the login screen, no sign up needed.
That was easy, a complete list of all my folders including a column called "size" which isn't shown on the Dropbox page that took 11 steps to get to.
Re:That's not an excuse (Score:5, Informative)
Dropbox double-counts quotas (actually N-counts). Files that other people have shared with you count toward your quota as well as theirs.
I had to upgrade to a paid account just because someone else shared a large folder with me, using up all of my quota.
Here's that policy:
https://help.dropbox.com/accounts-billing/space-storage/storage-space
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Wow, that's fucked. I honestly thought I may at some point have had 20GB and they reduced it to 8GB and I ignored their emails or something. I just thought they were sleazy like that.
But holy shit I had no idea just how damn sleazy!
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This is my big beef with Dropbox, the double-dipping on quotas. If one team shares a big folder with 3 other teams, that big folder counts against ALL teams' quotas. There is no technical reason for this. It is simply a way to force you out of the free tier and into a paid one.
As the article says, Dropbox moved on from satisfying users to satisfying their financiers and shareholders.
Dropbox reader sucks (Score:2)
Once they started using their own reader instead of just opening the file with the real app, I started not using them. Boy that's fucking annoying.
I was a paying customer for years. (Score:5, Interesting)
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FTP (Score:2, Interesting)
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Grandpa here. I, too, got burned too many times by this sort of thing and just use FTP. Wouldn't scale, but for just me it's fine.
I too got burnt, but realise there's no need to give up on the benefits of modern technology just because you don't want to rely on some company.
Checkout Seafile, or Owncloud as two great self hosted cloud services that you can use to decommission your 80s era museum pieces.
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I know there are cases where it is still fit for purpose, but as long as FTP servers still exist foolish people will put things on FTP that do not belong there.
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Why shouldn't I use FTP?
Unless I'm mistaken, credentials for FTP are sent in the clear. SFTP is kinda the fix for that.
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He probably is concerned because FTP is plain text, even the password is sent in clear. On the other hand (except for over public wifi) most people who can read your password can also perform a MITM.
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Crazy isn't the word. There are plenty of other words I could use but instead I just have to ask why? Why would have something so old-fashioned without any support for modern working methods? No syncing, realtime history management, ... you didn't write an FTP client to automatically update your camera phone photos* to your FTP server did you?
There are many open source self hosted options available. Owncloud, Seafile (a basic but lightweight system), and Nextcloud just to name a few that let you enjoy a mod
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Misleading article (Score:2)
I don't personally use Dropbox (though I still have an account I think), but I will defend them anyway. As I look at Propokov's complaints, many are about security notices and other warnings that we know all too well are there to prevent malware infections and boneheaded user mistakes.
Propokov admires Syncthing, which is seems to be a distributed rsync. It's a program you run with admin privileges from the command line. That's great, but leaves out a lot of very good use cases for the more complete serv
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If you need rails on everything you do, maybe slashdot isnt the place for you.
Well, thank god there is slashdot, and some company that only markets to 10 users and 600 trolls left here.
Oh wait, most companies market to normal people, not us ubernerds with no other tech oriented social site to go to.
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You can sync as many folders as you want. You can sync any folder, no matter where itâ(TM)s located. You can sync with anyone in the world. In fact, you can sync any folder with any number of people.
Share your donkey pr0n with your mom! Share your company technical data with Ivan from Volgograd! Share your banking details with Ibilola in Lagos! Syncthing makes it easy!
It's nice enough, but you have to invest a massive amount of time into configuring it to not over-share. And then hope that next week's update d
Dropbox a mess (Score:1)
If you don't like it, (Score:1)
Dropbox was great, until... (Score:5, Interesting)
Then one day, they changed their TOS to prohibit storing encrypted files. Fuck that.
I did not even bother closing my account with them, let them keep the little shit I put there...
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You know, the Chinese didn't have the CPU to crack everyone's stuff.
Always wondered if uploading it to dropbox was like uploading it to china.
Good luck with that (Score:5, Informative)
"in the beginning, Dropbox was great, but in the last few years, they started to bloat up." He visually shows that as an existing customer, you need to jump through a dozen hoops to get Dropbox going on a new machine.
In the 1970s, someone wrote a famous book, "Why Nothing Works". The poster child was a case study of Xexox, showing how what was once a quick, fast-moving new industry shaper had become a bloated, bogged down bureaucratic corporation that needed something like 57 manager and vp signatures to make a small feature change to a copier.
People not only don't learn from history before making the same mistakes, they don't even learn from history that they should learn from history!
Here's another book to help out: The Inmates Are Running The Asylum [amazon.com], or why programmers, who think product design is throwing wrappers around system APIs, should be kept well away from product design, among other problems.
Noticed the slowdown too (Score:3)
I reported it a while back and they said they would look into it. They never did it seems. Or couldn't revert the regression.
Dropbox is born out of Windows's inferiority (Score:5, Insightful)
On Unix-like OSes (Linux, macOS, Android, BSD, ...), you can just use FUSE to mount some remote storage to some sub-directory. A basic Apache server that lists the files in that directory, for other people you want to share them with, or only allows access, and you're done. Access control lists come standard with file systems nowadays, and allow as fine-grained permissions as you like. There are simple web interfaces for it. Any computer-savy buddy of your can whip up a better Dropbox in a single evening. I know because I did. Twice. (As it was easier to make a new one, than to migrate the old one. Not because the latter was hard.)
It is an entire non-issue. Just like 85% of the system tool apps for Windows or mobile OSes out there.
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I'm all for rolling my own solution but there are some cases where it's just easier to use a dedicated, well-maintained solution to the problem.
Re: Dropbox is born out of Windows's inferiority (Score:2)
Well, in that case, IT "fashion" has mentally devolved into the officially mentally disabled zone.
Does that crap even allow file system integration? I bet you NEED to use your browser to do it. Or a special app. Obviously completely unscriptable and with complex XML/JSON based protocols that require reading a 1000 pages of specifications that will have changed too much to still be up-to-date by the time you are done, err I mean, are a "living standard".
And based on PHP or NodeJS server scripts with hair-rai
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On Unix-like OSes (Linux, macOS, Android, BSD, ...), you can just use FUSE to mount some remote storage to some sub-directory. A basic Apache server that lists the files in that directory, for other people you want to share them with, or only allows access, and you're done. Access control lists come standard with file systems nowadays, and allow as fine-grained permissions as you like. There are simple web interfaces for it.
Seriously? No. I like GNU/Linux, and use it as my primary OS, both at work and at home, but both network filesystems and ACLs are something that Windows does way better than any other OS I've seen so far.
ACLs: POSIX ACLs are way more limited than the ACLs Windows provides in their filesystems, both local and on networks. The main missing feature in POSIX ACLs is the ability to delegate stuff: on Windows you can easily say "user X who doesn't have global admin rights has the ability to be effectively an admi
Re: Dropbox is born out of Windows's inferiority (Score:3)
And yet, you missed the three main points:
1. Dropbox emerged because people on Windows needed an app to do what is a regular OS functionality on other systems!
No Linux user (and I don't mean those who see it as "the other Windows", like e.g. Steam developers do) would ever be interested it installing a GUI "app" to do something that generic and basic. "Everything is a file" and VFS already solve the damn thing.
2. On Linux & Co, it will be just plain directories, indistinguishable from any others to any
If it isn't growing, it isn't profitable (Score:4, Interesting)
Being in sales for a while now, it's never enough to just maintain what you got. Every C-level wants to make more money and the shareholders want returns. It didn't take much for me to move on from Dropbox and go to the trouble of running my own Nextcloud.
Terrible User Experience (Score:1)
If you want to kill off your business (Score:1)
"Dropbox was great, but in the last few years, they started to bloat up." He visually shows that as an existing customer, you need to jump through a dozen hoops to get Dropbox going on a new machine"
Awesome way to get rid of all of those pesky customers and have them run to your competition. I thought they would have been wiser than this. :\
Just look at the state of their API... (Score:2)
Success breeds bloat (Score:2)
CEOs want more and more money all the time but true long-term success comes from dancing with those who brung ya.
That was Google's big ins
Messy - but not a total mess (Score:1)
Greed. It's only human. (Score:2)