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A comment on Dropbox Is in Talks with Advisers for Possible 2017 IPO. Parent comment

Re:Dropbox Is in Talks with Advisers for Possible 2017 IPO by bad_user on Tuesday August 16, 2016 @01:29PM (#12299014)
I'm a Dropbox paying user and have used Google Drive in the past, gave OneDrive a trial and interact with Box.com from time to time.

I'm still on Dropbox because:

    - Dropbox has a Linux client; meaning they actually give
      a shit about me as their customer; yes, you can find 
      either half-baked / broken projects for Google Drive 
      or have to trust yet another third party with all your data 
      (e.g. Insync), but none of that works for me. Of course,
      Dropbox might choose to stop supporting Linux, but 
      that day will be the day when I'm dropping them.
      

    - Dropbox has a 1 year versioning add-on, that works 
      for all your files. My data is very important to me
      and Google Drive only does 1 month, whereas OneDrive
      only does versioning for Office documents. Basically
      OneDrive is completely useless as a backup solution -
      get a ransom virus on your computer and watch in horror
      how your data is gone

    - the desktop client is probably the best and has nice 
      touches to it. It can sync from your local LAN and on
      OS X at least it offers to import your photos and it 
      automatically saves your screenshots and generates
      links ready to copy/paste. I mean, the clients of
      of both Google Drive and Onedrive are slow, 
      featureless and unreliable. Not sure what you mean
      by "uninspiring" there     

    - in general it has better integration with third-parties
      than the others, because Dropbox is considered the
      "neutral" solution. MS Office has integration
      with Dropbox for example ;-)

    - the web UI could need improvement, they keep nagging 
      me to try their Business plan, but I'm really not
      using the web UI much, I really don't have much need 
      for it
The price is fair IMHO, because that's all of my data. Sure, I'm not paying $5/month for a password manager or other unjustifiable crap, but 13 EUR/month (includes VAT and the versioning add-on) keeps my 100 GB of family photos and my books and my work documents safe and available everywhere.

Also, Google killed Google Talk, Google Reader, Picasa (partially) and Wave. And in the case of Microsoft, OneDrive is just a useless freebie they toss along with that expensive Office 365 subscription in order to justify its value.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Dropbox Is in Talks with Advisers for Possible 2017 IPO by brandon272 on Tuesday August 16, 2016 @02:00PM (#12299243)
For such a simple service (i.e. "It's just syncing!") their competitors sure seem to have had a hell of a time replicating the product despite having had nearly a decade to do so.

I have recently tried Google Drive, OneDrive and Amazon Cloud Drive and none of them compared to Dropbox at all. Syncing was slower or more inconsistent. Dropbox syncing is not always perfect but seems to be a lot better than everything else.

The UI, both in terms of desktop client and website were slower and clunkier with GD/OD/ACD. All seem to make sharing more difficult than Dropbox does. Versioning is questionable.

I haven't tried iCloud Drive in earnest but at first glance I don't see any way to check the status of syncing, nor do I see any indication that files are versioned. So that's really a no go right there. Will it one day be better than Dropbox? Maybe. But it isn't today.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Dropbox Is in Talks with Advisers for Possible 2017 IPO by laurentdc on Tuesday August 16, 2016 @02:52PM (#12299682)
Just adding that you should make backups anyway, possibly on some sort of media that is offline and in a different location. No cloud service is really safe. I'm not saying Dropbox or OneDrive could disappear tomorrow, but yeah, they technically could, or they could lose part of your data. Even Gmail lost some user emails a few years ago. How many people do you know who backup their mailbox these days? :-)

There's also silent corruption and bit rotting that may happen locally and which you wouldn't notice on any of those services. Particularly if you use old filesystems such as HFS+: there are quite a few stories of people losing pictures or finding artifacts in jpg/raw files years later.

I'm sure you're not, but if by any chance you're relying on Dropbox versioning or whatever similar "backup solution" please consider alternatives.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Dropbox Is in Talks with Advisers for Possible 2017 IPO by Asparagirl on Tuesday August 16, 2016 @03:32PM (#12299966)
Or for added peace of mind, you could just sign up for a cheapo Mover.io account, and auto-sync your Dropbox once a week to an S3 bucket.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Dropbox Is in Talks with Advisers for Possible 2017 IPO by codazoda on Tuesday August 16, 2016 @03:48PM (#12300103)
I use Dropbox on 2 machines which means I have 3 copies of everything. I use Github for source code (in Dropbox and Github) and I use Google Photo's for my pictures (free and also in both places). I would feel pretty good with just Dropbox but with the combination I'm pretty well covered with the stuff I care about.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Dropbox Is in Talks with Advisers for Possible 2017 IPO by nxc18 on Tuesday August 16, 2016 @05:48PM (#12300897)
Dropbox should hire you for their marketing. Versioning is important to me (mostly for Office which is why OneDrive has been fine) so a robust solution is appealing. Screenshot linking is nice. Thanks for the info! :)
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Dropbox Is in Talks with Advisers for Possible 2017 IPO by softawre on Tuesday August 16, 2016 @02:06PM (#12299301)
13 EUR/month for 100GB? Is that a typo?

I pay something like 10$/month for 1TB with Drive.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Dropbox Is in Talks with Advisers for Possible 2017 IPO by rpearl on Tuesday August 16, 2016 @02:32PM (#12299506)
Dropbox is also $9.99/mo for 1TB as per https://www.dropbox.com/plans

So either a typo or maybe they're saying they have 100GB of stuff in a 1TB plan

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Dropbox Is in Talks with Advisers for Possible 2017 IPO by bad_user on Tuesday August 16, 2016 @03:47PM (#12300096)
100 GB is just the size of my family photos archive.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Dropbox Is in Talks with Advisers for Possible 2017 IPO by chmars on Tuesday August 16, 2016 @04:29PM (#12300395)
It's the local EUR price including VAT for the 1 TB subscription I guess.
[ Parent | on HN ]