How two strangers set up Dropbox and made billions

Re:How two strangers set up Dropbox and made billions by _bxg1 on Monday July 16, 2018 @07:07PM (#17545941)

Google Drive is like "I guess you can use the desktop client instead of the web one". One Drive is like "I guess you can use a Mac". iCloud is like "I guess you can have non-Apple devices". Dropbox just syncs your files from and to anything you have, equally well. I'm pretty sure none of the others even have a Linux client at all, but Dropbox does.

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Re:How two strangers set up Dropbox and made billions by opnitro on Monday July 16, 2018 @10:07PM (#17546766)

Yeah, this is really it. Dropbox just let's you use it they way you want, because they have no larger agenda than letting you share your files with yourself.

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Re:How two strangers set up Dropbox and made billions by IronBacon on Tuesday July 17, 2018 @12:40AM (#17547383)

For Google Drive, even if not an official client I find that Gnome's Nautilus integration works extremely well and without friction (it's treated like an external storage) for the random file I could need to share with another device...

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Re:How two strangers set up Dropbox and made billions by tbrock on Tuesday July 17, 2018 @08:06AM (#17549081)

Except smart sync only works on mac and windows. Linux is a second class citizen.

I’d sign up for Dropbox if they had feature parity on Linux.

Also a plan in the $5 range would be greatly preferred. My threshold for moderately helpful services is usually $5/Mo.

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Re:How two strangers set up Dropbox and made billions by Sohcahtoa82 on Tuesday July 17, 2018 @05:08PM (#17553404)

> Also a plan in the $5 range would be greatly preferred. My threshold for moderately helpful services is usually $5/Mo.

Very much this. I was using Dropbox, and the 2 gig free plan wasn't enough, but I sure as hell didn't need a whopping 1 TB, so I switched to Google Drive. The 15 gig free plan is enough for me, and I can rest easy knowing that if I end up needing only a little more, I can get 100 gig for $2.

That said, I definitely preferred Dropbox's client more. Google Drive for some reason is frequently showing an X on it's sync folder indicating it isn't syncing even though it's working fine. Google Drive's client also seems to be really slow to start.

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Re:How two strangers set up Dropbox and made billions by _bxg1 on Tuesday July 17, 2018 @09:59AM (#17549767)

I'm not sure what you mean by "smart sync", but selective sync does work on Linux last I checked (a few months ago)

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Re:How two strangers set up Dropbox and made billions by tbrock on Tuesday July 17, 2018 @03:43PM (#17552586)

https://www.dropbox.com/smartsync

No, it’s not the same thing and no, it does not work on Linux.

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Re:How two strangers set up Dropbox and made billions by _bxg1 on Tuesday July 17, 2018 @09:58AM (#17549759)

I believe Linux also has a headless/command-line-only client, which is pretty freakin sweet

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Re:How two strangers set up Dropbox and made billions by NegativeLatency on Monday July 16, 2018 @09:00PM (#17546488)

Along with that, there seem to be more useful integrations with dropbox, than with other services.

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Re:How two strangers set up Dropbox and made billions by trfflhntr on Monday July 16, 2018 @09:10PM (#17546538)

Well said.

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