The new Dropbox - <AUTHOR> https://blog.dropbox.com/topics/product-tips/new-dropbox <comment><USER3> I've been a Dropbox user for many years but I'm looking for a replacement. What drives me nuts and hasn't gotten better over the years is their truly awful Python-based macOS client software.

It is constantly burning a ton of CPU/battery. It's always at or near the top of Activity Monitor's list in the Energy tab. It seems like their app constantly reacts to any file system activity, even if that activity is outside the Dropbox directory. My file system is busy all day long from building in Xcode and other things.

What I need is for Dropbox to improve that by making an efficient, battery- saving, native macOS client. What I don't need is what is announced in this post.

The two other things that I hate are the fact that they don't support symlinks and that they use a kernel extension. All of these things together made me start the search for a replacement.

Does anybody know how the CPU/power impact of Microsoft's and Google's offerings are on the Mac?

<comment><USER4> After receiving an email like: > This is all for just $20.88 more a year

1\. I never asked for anything more 2. you still charge me for more at a higher price

I just bought 2TB data on iCloud, moving everything there. Now I will have good photo application with face recognition which is awesome. Do not expect any move from Dropbox to make your personal life better, they won't. They are going towards enterprise customers.

Use iCloud that's it if you're in the apple word.

<comment><USER5> I self-hosted a Nextcloud installation and used 2x 4TB drives. The first is full dedicated to the Nextcloud use while the second is rsync-ed to the first every night. Then I deleted my 8 years old Dropbox account. Currently my only cloud provider is iCloud just for the photos, contacts, iwhatever backup.

<comment><USER6> Assuming the second drive is always connected to the machine & on, why are you opting for that nightly sync vs. mirroring the two disks in raid1?

<comment><USER5> It's been a stupid decision at the time of the setup. Now its already there, and any attempt to change it will have to erase the drives, and this is a huge pain in the arse.

<comment><USER7> You can "convert" a single HDD drive into a RAID1 (mirror) online, without data loss or backup/restore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I strongly feel this is a bad direction for Dropbox. Many companies have tried to integrate tools together. It's always half-baked simply because those tools aren't designed to be integrated. I find it kind of odd Dropbox would be bragging about a dropdown menu to create a Google doc. Surely if that's important to me I get Google drive - the integration will be better because the same company makes the different tools and you can actually stay within the eco-system. If Dropbox are planning to compete with this it's very difficult to see how they win over Google.

The integration with Google makes sense because they already own the tools that you're moving between. It seems really funky to have Dropbox crash that party. If you're trying to integrate with tools outside of the Google eco- system maybe dropbox atleast tries to allow it, I just can't see how it'd be anything other than clunky though.

Personally what I value is just basic cloud storage with a decent automatic sync. Obviously storage has turned into a commodity and dropbox are trying to compete on a new level, it just seems boggling to me that this is the direction they've taken.

<comment><USER9> > Personally what I value is just basic cloud storage with a decent automatic > sync.

That reminds me of a pretty famous Quora answer (here [https://www.quora.com/Dropbox-product/Why-is-Dropbox-more- po...](https://www.quora.com/Dropbox-product/Why-is-Dropbox-more-popular-than- other-programs-with-similar-functionality)) that described why Dropbox succeeded:

> Well, let's take a step back and think about the sync problem and what the > ideal solution for it would do:

There would be a folder. You'd put your stuff in it. It would sync.

They built that.

Why didn't anyone else build that? I have no idea.

"But," you may ask, "so much more you could do! What about task management, calendaring, customized dashboards, virtual white boarding. More than just folders and files!"

No, shut up. People don't use that crap. They just want a folder. A folder that syncs.

"But," you may say, "this is valuable data... certainly users will feel more comfortable tying their data to Windows Live, Apple's MobileMe, or a name they already know."

No, shut up. Not a single person on Earth wakes up in the morning worried about deriving more value from their Windows Live login. People already trust folders. And Dropbox looks just like a folder. One that syncs.

"But," you may say, "folders are so 1995. Why not leverage the full power of the web? With HTML5 you can drag and drop files, you can build intergalactic dashboards of statistics showing how much storage you are using, you can publish your files as RSS feeds and tweets, and you can add your company logo!"

No, shut up. Most of the world doesn't sit in front of their browser all day. If they do, it is Internet Explorer 6 at work that they are not allowed to upgrade. Browsers suck for these kinds of things. Their stuff is already in folders. They just want a folder. That syncs.

That is what it does.

<comment> Paul-ish That answer is 8 years old. Files seem to be disappearing from a large number of problem domains, in favor of webapps. That doesn't bode well for Dropbox if it is a trend that continues.

<comment><USER10> Hiding file systems is both en vogue and maddening for people who actually work with files. Which is everyone, even if they don't know it. The amount of assistance I've had to give even technically-competent users when it comes to even finding where the heck their data even _is_ has skyrocketed over the past couple of years.

<comment><USER11> !!! I have experienced this. It's primarily people with shiny new macbooks who can't figure out where any of their files actually are even though they are constantly editing them!

Eventually there's going to be some serious blowback. You can't expect people to efficiently use their computers if they can't even find their godamn files!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Looks like Zawinski's Law is still 100% true:

"Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can." Coined by Jamie Zawinski (who called it the "Law of Software Envelopment") to express his belief that all truly useful programs experience pressure to evolve into toolkits and application platforms (the mailer thing, he says, is just a side effect of that). It is commonly cited, though with widely varying degrees of accuracy.

[http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis- Law.html](http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis-Law.html)

<comment><USER13> So why are there no really good email clients?

<comment><USER14> Because email clients can only be as good as email itself, which isn't really good. ;)

<comment><USER13> I know you're being facetious but email clients fail to satisfy me primarily when it comes to search and organization, remaining performant when dealing with large archives of mail, good UI/UX and robustness / reliability. None of these are really problems inherent to email, though they are perhaps inherent to software.

<comment><USER15> I think the same problems appear in other domains with large libraries. Music players have also been historically terrible with bad UI, slow searching and many of the same issues you mentioned.

<comment><USER16> surprisingly I have found rhytmbox by the gnome devs to be pretty good. It does what is supposed to very well and it works which is all I want out of a digital music player.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Whatever happened to the philosophy of "do one thing and do it well"?

I use Slack and Zoom often, but I have never once thought — gee I really wish I could just open up this presentation in Dropbox directly into my Zoom meeting. I just don't see the integration working in that direction.

Sure, Dropbox should make sure that it's available as a provider to save/open files for other programs — that make sense. The integration with MS Office makes sense — where Office is aware when you're working on files that are stored in Dropbox.

This just seems like they are trying to do too much. I can't see the strategy...

<comment><USER18> They were losing ~$500m a year (and growing) doing one thing and doing it well.

<comment><USER19> Maybe it's because they were expanding too much and hiring too many people

<comment><USER20> Who provides dropboxes actual storage? That provider could just keep squeezing dropbox until the provider creates a copy of dropbox or has them bent over just to the point of them switching to another provider. Maybe dropbox should have been building their own data centers in the mean time, cutting their overhead. That idea of restraining growth in favor of long term stability probably wouldn't sit so well with the shareholders who want their pie tomorrow.

<comment><USER21> I believe they have migrated most (if not all) of their storage off AWS to their own infrastructure [0].

[0] [https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/15/why-dropbox-decided-to- dro...](https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/15/why-dropbox-decided-to-drop-aws-and- build-its-own-infrastructure-and-network/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> SaaS needs to chill out for like two seconds.

What we're seeing here is a strategic maneuver by Dropbox to move up the UX stack from a single file syncing tool to a meta/coordination layer between SaaS products. The goal is to own the user experience and integrate all the adjacent or overlapping SaaS tools in a user's workflow so you can control both the user and the suppliers.

We're going to see this more frequently and it'll look weird coming from different tools trying to level up and pull this off (i.e. what will email look like with this?).

One issue is as incumbents partner/buddy-up and competition heats up, we'll see a bunch of bundling, increasing consumer costs while locking out newcomers.

<comment><USER23> Agreed. The beauty of Dropbox used to be their utter invisibility. They just seamlessly synced my files in the background. If they're now going to insist on being "in my face," I'll take my business elsewhere. And whichever Dropbox vice president tried to make his bones with this project can pound sand.

<comment><USER24> Yeah. That was the attraction. It was invisible and got the job done. Recently, the notifications about their new products inside Dropbox is simply spammy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Me and my wife ended both ended our Dropbox Plus subscriptions last weekend (after being paying users for five years or so). As a side-effect, my mom also cancelled her subscription (since she was using it to share photos with us).

The primary reasons:

\- Constant nagging in the user interface to upgrade to Dropbox Pro or Dropbox Business. Don't want it, don't need it.

\- Accumulation of a lot of UI clutter over the years. When you used to log in, you just your files. Now you get suggestions, unread comments, or whatever.

\- Dropping support for file systems outside ext4. One of my machines uses Linux on ZFS, now I need to LD_PRELOAD shims to make Dropbox work. No, I am not switching back to ext4 for you, Dropbox.

\- The camel that broke the straw's back: raising the prices from 10 to 12 Euro per month. It is not like we can't afford it. But storage and bandwidth gets cheaper, but Dropbox gets more expensive. We do not need the new features: why would I need 2TB if I am only using 200-300GB of space? And no, I don't want Smart Sync, which puts itself in ring-0 through a kernel module.

If Dropbox had just stuck to its nice, clean, and simple interface, focusing on syncing across machines with various OSes or file systems, we would still be happy, paying users. They wouldn't have to add anything (though the File Requests feature was nice). Just don't bother me with nonsense and let me do my work and share with family + friends.

<comment><USER23> I'm getting tired of their constantly dropping support for older versions of MacOS (I don't upgrade MacOS often because every new version is a net productivity hit for me), and their upgrader daemon that

A. Cannot be shut off, and

B. Upgrades my Dropbox client whether I want it to or not. Even with Google's very determined auto-upgrader, I finally figured out how to shut it off. Not Dropbox.

Here we go again. Every constant-growth oriented company with happy customers eventually decides to go to war with said customers as a last-ditch effort to extract more revenue, and thus forces them to its competition.

<comment><USER26> If you refuse to update your software you deserve to have a hard time.

<comment><USER27> That's a bit harsh. While I understand not wanting to perform a new OS update (at least not immediately) or not being able to (they deprecate old hardware too) I do understand that it's a matter of resources and that most people are going to be on a handful of your most recent releases, so it makes sense to spend your time on those.

At the same time (most) people don't actively seek to disable updates for things until something goes wrong. If your app is working on my current OS and filesystem it's incumbent upon you to recognize that and not automatically push out an update that breaks that.

For something as relatively simple as Dropbox's original functionality (all files from folder x are synced to their server and every other machine on your account) it also seems like a relatively reasonable ask for them to version things and continue to support that functionality for quite a long time.

<comment><USER28> > it also seems like a relatively reasonable ask for them to version things > and continue to support that functionality for quite a long time.

Or... just don't force an upgrade. Notify me at some point that it might not be 'supported' after a certain date, and subject to data loss, etc. We understand with many other pieces of software that after a certain date, they may still 'work' but we won't get support.

There's certainly some security risks to deal with there, and perhaps reminders closer to cutoff dates would help?

But, yes, basically agreed.

relatedly, I've had dropbox on and off, but felt pushed in to paying for it, and resented that push (and ultimately never did). Had multiple client years ago all 'love' dropbox and wanted to work that way. They all loved that it was 'free', but... when I had to work with 5 of them, each sharing up to their 'free' limit with me, it put me over the free limit in to 'pay up' territory. Not a 'break the bank' amount, of course, but it bugged me that _I_ needed to fork out.

<comment><USER27> > Or... just don't force an upgrade. Notify me at some point that it might not > be 'supported' after a certain date, and subject to data loss, etc. We > understand with many other pieces of software that after a certain date, > they may still 'work' but we won't get support.

> There's certainly some security risks to deal with there, and perhaps > reminders closer to cutoff dates would help?

That was actually my whole point. If you have security updates to push, then push them. An automatic push should not break my existing functionality under normal circumstances. There will always be extraordinary situations where it's required, and at some point you do have to make the tough call that the hundred people still using something will just have to deal with it... but it shouldn't be the norm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Contrast with: [https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Dropbox-more-popular-than- other...](https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Dropbox-more-popular-than-other- programs-with-similar-functionality/answer/Michael-Wolfe)

<comment><USER30> I was thinking the same thing. As I read the page, all I could think was, "No, shut up." :-)

<comment><USER31> I think the situation has changed with mobile devices and mobile OS becoming just as important as desktop. For consumers, they want whatever is easiest, results in better battery life, and secure. Presumably, Apple will be better able to integrate folder syncing due to their ownership of iOS, and so Dropbox is wise to be concerned that they can lose their edge there, since switching vendors is a matter of dragging a folder from one window to another for the consumer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> What a disaster. The entire initial premise of Dropbox was to sync files reliably. Then I can use real, native apps to edit them. The new Dropbox approach on the other hand inherently requires everything to be in the cloud-- I already hate that, but even if I didn't, others already do this and do it better.

I feel like Microsoft actually has the balance right. OneDrive still behaves just like a normal sync client. But to do certain kinds of real-time collaboration you can just point native, desktop Office apps to the cloud version of the file. But when you're offline you still have the same kinds of access you need.

Who ever asked for Dropbox OS?

<comment><USER33> The problem is, files are dying. 99% of the documents shared with me nowadays exist only in some cloud product. No one sends files anymore, it's all Google Docs links and such.

The only real place where files still live are with developers and designers. And even then, the move is away from locally-hosted content and stuff that only exists on someone else's server. VS Code remoting, Sketch Cloud, etc etc.

Dropbox is just fighting against the tide of the entire Internet. I don't disagree that it's disastrous, but what are they going to do? Their core product is going away. It's like being an oil company nowadays.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> The blog has a loading icon? It took 10-15 seconds to render for me.

Anyone else think this client-side app trend has gotten in the way of recognizing a great case for a server-side render (or even a cached page)?

<comment><USER23> 99% of client-side rendered pages would provide a superior user experience with server-side render. SSR is what the web was designed for after all. CSR is merely fashionable, not better.

<comment><USER35> _99% of client-side rendered pages would provide a superior user experience with server-side render._

If you're loading a single page and then unloading it that's right. If you're interacting with a page it's often _a lot_ faster to make a small request to fetch new data and just update the part of the DOM that needs to change rather than unloading everything, fetching the new page and all the associated resources that aren't cached, parsing the new page, and repainting everything.

 _SSR is what the web was designed for after all._

That's plain wrong. Using a browser to launch an application was one the use cases in Tim Berners-Lee's original memo about the web in 1989 - "If one sacrifices portability, it is possible so make following a link fire up a special application, so that diagnostic programs, for example, could be linked directly into the maintenance guide." ([https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html](https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html)). There's no suggestion that the user would have to leave their browser when they clicked such a link.

Fast forward 10 years from Tim's proposal and Microsoft added XMLHttpRequest (via ActiveX) for fetching fragments of data to IE5 in 1999. We've had 20 years, which is 2/3 of the time the web has existed, of client-side applications. You may well have a preference for server-side rendering but you don't get to claim the web was designed for server-side as a fact. It's not true.

<comment><USER23> Two things: Ajax is a good idea and I have no problem with it. CSR _for updates_ is not an issue. My problem is with using it for _whole pages_ that cannot render at all until a huge JS program has been run. When you're building a SPA, this is fine. But most web pages (like the original blog post here) shouldn't be SPAs.

Second, I didn't remember that clause from TBR's memo, so thanks for the reminder.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I do a lot of UI/UX design as a part of what I focus on, both at work and for fun. This page is a juxtaposition of well thought out elements and things that make me go `???`.

Like:

      - Good product marketing messaging
      - Well done images and GIFs that get to the point
      - News-site like past first article scrolling, I bet it drives more engagement. I even like how the UI elements change color when you go to another article.

What?:

      - Huge spinning circular thing at the top
      - Content not taking the whole size of the page but strangely   taking the right 2/3rds~
      - Non-retina images

Would love to see metrics on:

      - Tweet highlight integration. Does it drive valuable KPIs?
      - Font: They are using https://sharptype.co/case-studies/dropbox/ . The case study from the foundry that made that font has a section with color `rgb(181, 208, 230);` font on a `linear-gradient( #d20b28 , #d20b28 );` background. That's light blue on somewhere between scarlet, crimson, vermillion or venetian red color space. My brain slightly breaks reading it. Does having your own font drive engagement? What do the KPIs on that look like?

<comment><USER37> This entire launch feels like what you've described. Things like these tool tips are absolutely killing me: [https://cl.ly/365a42db2db9](https://cl.ly/365a42db2db9)

It feels rough on the edges.

<comment><USER38> Oh wow, thanks for sharing that! Heavy animations are always tricky for productivity apps, as the increase in latency is bad for the day to day usage. This animation doesn't even look good and is just annoying after the third sight. For a productivity app, even a simple fade is sometimes too much. Really wonder how this could get approved.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Story of a disruptive product

      1. make something simple and useful
      2. grow big
      3. add more features
      4. repeat steps 2-3 several times
      5. congratulations your product is now bloatware

</comment><comment><USER40> Whenever I see moves like this, I think to myself how little of a real positive impact SharePoint had in the Enterprise world. And that was linking Office products, in large organizations that already used the products, and already collaborated for their jobs, while including the ability to write code against it all.

Trying to build the same functional goals, for people who not under a single organization's umbrella, to link together products that are not coming from a single vendor, and not designed to work together... feels like a stretch.

<comment><USER41> over a decade later, Google still has nothing comparable to Sharepoint. Everything is slow and bloated web apps preventing users from finding / reading / editing documents that should be synced locally.

<comment><USER42> Except not? Google Docs is simple for finding / reading / editing documents that are synced via the cloud. Why did you pretend to agree with the parent commenter if you were gonna contradict them?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> My office uses Dropbox Business extensively, and I'm not excited by any kind of "new" Dropbox. Businesses need to trust in the stability of their tools, and this signals to me the exact opposite of stability. I haven't got any clue how this could interfere with the workflows we've already established. Major product changes like this give me anxiety.

</comment><comment><USER44> I really love Dropbox Paper, so I get part of the collaboration story.

What I don't like is that it's so hard to share a file, or to send an image in a chat -- all paths lead to dropbox links instead. When I get a Dropbox link on mobile chat now, I know it's going to take nearly a minute to see the content. Why?

<comment><USER45> They probably think of it in terms of control. One of their big upsells is controlling access to shares. They don't see it as a problem that you have to save it to the device then share from that because it's not _for_ you from their perspective. It's for people sending project assets to collaborators.

<comment><USER46> I think it makes a lot sense for the dropbox link to be the default, especially on mobile.

I almost never want to download the file over LTE to my smartphone and re- upload it to a different web service and waste (2 * filesize) of my limited mobile bandwidth to share a file.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I like Dropbox again lately.

They added smart sync and 1TB extra to "plus" accounts, which is nice after their pathetic use of Finder integration + OS notifications to nag users to upgrade to the next paid tier (on a paid account!). It's what they should have done in the first place.

<comment><USER48> They also increased the price right? What I want is lower space and lower price.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> It looks like Dropbox is completely focused on the business market and not improving the consumer experience anymore. I've stuck with them for years because of the linux support, but am probably going to jump ship soon. My main complaint is the lack of a way to build a shared photo library with my spouse. Both Google and Apple support this.

<comment><USER50> But switch to where? All.the alternatives don't have the features and/or are even more unreliable (Google).

If only Fastmail would build a product like this, them I would trust...

<comment><USER49> Switch to Google Drive and Google Photos, most likely.

I'd have local backups, so I don't think I'd trust it any less with my data than I trust Dropbox.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> This is awful.

I'm a Dropbox Pro user, using it to store documents that have to be accessible from all my devices, as well as to share galleries with my clients.

None of these integrations with Slack and Zoom make sense. I don't need them, and now that a product I used to trust for its simplicity and reliability has become a horribly bloated beast, I don't trust it any more.

This is bad, Dropbox. Maybe sell this as a totally different product, but for people, including corporate users, that only want reliable file syncing, this is a big turn off.

</comment><comment><USER52> Dropbox is the worst offender of feature creep I know. Why would I possibly want to create new files in Dropbox?

<comment><USER53> It has some tough competition, e.g. RealPlayer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> At least the interface is still the same colors, instead of the gross palette of the blog and their rebrand.

<comment><USER55> The blog looks like one giant acid trip.

<comment><USER56> Totally agree. The first thing I found myself doing was staring at the silly animation on the top left for a minute, what a waste of time.

EDIT: Oh god the front page is just as much of an acid trip now.

<comment><USER57> That gif on the blog made me physically ill.

<comment><USER56> The "tall letters" on the post title kind of did me in there. I don't know what they were thinking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.

;)

</comment><comment><USER59> Not what we need!

When they dropped support for XFS, I was locked out and happily went looking for a replacement.

Syncthing ( [https://syncthing.net/](https://syncthing.net/) ) does everything I need. Instead of some nameless cloud company hosting my stuff, my 'cloud copy' is a big USB hard drive on a Raspberry Pi.

I still have to keep Dropbox because of a couple of multi-org projects I'm involved with use it. I'm done putting my personal stuff on it, though.

<comment><USER32> I'd be interested in something like Syncthing, but it would have to have an iOS client that worked correctly as a file provider. Both Dropbox and Google Drive have half-implemented Files support (Dropbox doesn't work offline via Files even when Files are saved offline in the app, Google Drive doesn't allow you to create new files via the Files APIs, and both are pretty buggy all around).

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Sorry for been negative, but I liked the simplicity of the old Dropbox: You create a magical folder in a machine, a magical folder in another machine, and they are automatically synchronized using pixie dust or something. I don't want a new social media network.

</comment><comment><USER61> And the new desktop app is Windows and Mac only. Of course.

My primary reason for using Dropbox initially when it first came out was because it was fully cross platform. The longer they go, the farther we get from that.

The only Linux updates I've seen from them have been deprecating support for things.

<comment><USER62> And I wonder how long that'll last... I chose Dropbox _because_ of the Linux support, as I actually use all 3 of the major platforms (Windows/Mac/Linux) regularly.

If I have to leave Dropbox, I honestly don't know what I'd replace it with. It works well enough on all 3 of the platforms I use it on, that I really don't want to switch to some janky duct-taped alternative.

Meanwhile, it seems like every other hot startup product has this somewhere in their FAQ:

Q: Will you support Linux?

A: Here at Foocorp, we all love Linux! Seriously, we're huge fans! However, we've decided that we can best serve our customers by focusing on our Windows (and maybe Mac) products and giving the middle finger to you annoying Linux users.

<comment><USER61> Maybe it's time for ownCloud?

<comment><USER63> Nextcloud is the proper fork to use these days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> Heads up, downloads 20MB and might take a long time to load (for some reason it took over a minute on my laptop)

</comment><comment><USER65> Oh yay, a new interface to learn. Just what every body asked for, not. Companies do this all the time to justify higher prices. Some times, a well- done piece of software can just go into maintenance mode for a while.

But do you know what I hate about dropbox? Dropping support for most linux filesystems. Seriously, why? That was the one deciding factor for me. I had looked at other options, but that did it. Owncloud does a fine job, and most people at my company like it fine.

</comment><comment><USER66> I remember the feeling I had when I first used Dropbox - I was excited. The app itself was so unobtrusive and managed to sync my files fast and reliably. It seemed crazy _not_ to use it because there was so little compromise involved.

Fast forward to today, years later, where I don't have _any_ syncing solution enabled on my computer. And not because I don't want or need syncing - <USER2> because all of the current offerings, including Dropbox, are either bloated or have performance issues or lack reliability.

Dropbox chose a path and it is what it is. Maybe this strategy is working for them in with respect to revenue growth, and that's great for them, but when I'm here without a syncing solution that I would gladly pay for, it seems like an opportunity is being missed somewhere.

</comment><comment><USER67> Jesus, what is this mess? I just want to be able to sync files without any hassle. In fact, I'm willing to pay for that luxury.

Why does Dropbox need video conferencing now?

</comment><comment><USER68> The single reason why I prefer Dropbox over the other file storage / sync products is that their sync client works so much better on Mac. It eats fewer resources, is quicker to start and sync once started, doesn't need to 'restart its sync engine', and has the most flexible selective sync. The addition of 'smart sync' to personal accounts is a nice recent addition.

I don't care for all this new functionality targeted at collaboration / corporate use, and I hope Dropbox will start offering a barebones 'I only need to sync files between devices' plan. I've been happily paying $120/y for that for years and hope they let me continue to do just that, or at least stay out of my way they way they have in the past.

<comment><USER20> I think you should explore some of the alternatives every once in a while, or just maintain a free plan and like 1 folder. Just checked activity monitor and onedrive only uses ~60mb of more ram on idle at least, although (and I believe it's since been pached) it had a memory leak bug at one point and would start eagerly consuming my 16gb of ram if left unchecked. The fix for that was just restarting one drive after startup, no big deal. Even on big syncs (I did ~250gb one time) it syncs about as fast as my upload speeds go and didn't seem to bog down my computer at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> My first reaction: this feels like it's adding a lot of noise and clutter to the interface, but also a lot of powerful collaboration tools. Personally, I've been using Dropbox to sync files between my devices, so this redesign is clearly not targeted toward me. But if it works, it might help Dropbox make inroads in the business/enterprise market that Box seems to be dominating so far.

</comment><comment><USER70> So they created a SPA which takes 6MB to 7MB and 220+ requests to list files in a directory?! That's a whole lot of engineering. In fact, they seem to have recreated Google Drive. SharePoint online is also the same - very long time to load.

As a user, I just want to view files in directories. The landing page should show me the last documents I worked on. That's pretty much all I need.

</comment><comment><USER71> I really don't like the $20/year price increase. I am used to costs for infrastructure decreasing.

I pay for Dropbox, SpiderOak, Google Drive, iCloud, and OneDrive. Now that I have mostly retired, I question needing so much redundancy. I feel like I have to purchase OneDrive because it is so inexpensive for the whole family and also getting Office apps thrown into the deal.

I like supporting SpiderOak even though I use it very lightly. I like supporting privacy oriented companies so I am sticking with them. Also, iCloud is very convenient and inexpensive - another keeper.

DropBox should offer more plans. Few people need two terabytes of data and it gives them an excuse to charge more.

</comment><comment><USER72> Dropbox is constantly getting worse for personal usage. They recently bumped up the prices about $10+ a year.

As a photo storage, it fails heavily as well. They turned down the Carousel app which made it super easy to browse photos over time. Google Photos easily dominates this space with the search features. Right now the Photos experience on Dropbox lacks the most basic features and I'm planning to stop renewing my personal Dropbox subscription this year, primarily because of poor photo storage support.

For everything else, I'm planning to just go with S3/GCS and just rsync my files in there periodically.

<comment><USER73> And what are you planning to do with photos? Are you aware of any mobile app of Google Photos caliber that can just point to a S3 bucket?

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> I am pretty sure, its not going to be well received by HN, for the simple reason that they are appealing to their corporate audiences rather than developers.

</comment><comment><USER75> I use Dropbox to sync my data between home and work computers, both running Ubuntu. I need this to be transparent, and for Dropbox UX to be invisible. So far this has been the case. If they change this, I'll stop using it. I'm not sure from this announcement if I can simply ignore all these new features and continue using it as always.

</comment><comment><USER76> I just want my files backed up and sync'd across device.

iCloud changes look promising. May be time to ditch Dropbox. If only Apple would have a good app on Linux and let me run Mac OS time machine into iCloud.

<comment><USER77> I've been happy with pCloud which has Win/Linux/Mac/Android/iOS clients.

<comment><USER78> I pay for both and pCloud is cheap but inferior (for me) in two ways:

1\. pCloud doesn't support file permissions or symlinks, thus you can't use it as a real filesystem (eg, building and testing software out of it).

2\. pCould is a "cloud fs" (the files aren't on a host filesystem), whereas Dropbox is syncing a host filesystem. The difference is very visible in performance.

If the first issue was fixed (I've asked them many times, to no avail), I could live with the second.

<comment><USER79> Number 2 pCloud way is to add sync folders, you do that from the Sync tab in the preferences dialog. Sadly the command line client doesn't let you add the sync folders. An alternative for the GUI is to edit the sqlite configuration file.

In my experience pCloud works fine for me having the Documents, Music and Pictures folders synced, and having many other folders as cloud only.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER80> All I want from Dropbox is a $5/mo plan. $12/mo for 2 TB, maybe 100mb of which I'll ever use, is just too much. $12/mo pays for a whole ec2 instances to host your own on

</comment><comment><USER81> I don't know what I was expecting but it was not this mess, dear god not a SINGLE feature on this "New Dropbox" is even slightly appealing to me. I just want reliable file-syncing. I enjoy smart sync on my MacBook since I have so many pictures and other large files and smart selection (or whatever it was called) wasn't really cutting it for me. Other than that there isn't anything Dropbox has added in the last 5 years that I have cared about.

I have to imagine there are a number of open-source alternatives now that just require a linux server in the cloud. Hell Backblaze B2 storage works out to about $70/yr for 1TB of space with with 100GB of churn (adding 100GB and deleting 100GB) and download each month (way more than I need), couple that with some syncing tool and I think you've got just about everything I need.

<comment><USER82> I recently stumbled on this project, seems promising: [https://syncthing.net/](https://syncthing.net/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> I'm surprised how few people here have talked about OneDrive. It used to be rubbish, but Microsoft has finally really figured it out. My company basically has everybody just do all of their work out of their OneDrive accounts, syncing hundreds of GB per user without fuss.

The integration with their web office apps is pretty flawless, and I've worked with groups of 20 or 30 people on large projects in sharepoint and whatnot without any major fuss.

The web versions of the office tools are fairly basic, but you can seamlessly open them in the desktop equivalents and it autosaves back to the one-drive copy. Even better you can email links around to people and they can view the one-drive copy without any problem or having to send attachments all over the place.

I haven't used the personal version yet, but it's a very compelling business offering.

<comment><USER84> They still have weird rules around file names that can break syncing and sharing entirely. Be nice if they could just handle that in the client.

</comment></comment><comment><USER85> For all the gnashing of teeth on this thread, I think the bigger point is being missed:

Most of the Dropbox post is pitching for collaboration. They have probably recognized that catering to teams has much better revenue growth than mere individual users.

</comment><comment><USER86> Dropbox continues to become bloated but it's still the only client that supports delta sync across platforms. I tried switching to onedrive and google drive but they all are lacking in sync capability.

</comment><comment><USER63> The new Dropbox for me:

\- the free plan completely gimped with only 3 devices allowed to link

\- the official Linux client effectively rendered useless as it no longer works on anything except ext4 filesystems (an artificial limitations added years after I've gone all in ZFS).

The new Dropbox clearly wants me to leave. Which is a shame.

I've always chosen Dropbox because it was _the_ universal solution which "just worked" everywhere, while all the competitors had a catch here or there.

Now Dropbox are intentionally adding limitations making it non-universal, and therefore losing its own unique selling point.

</comment><comment><USER87> You should not consider Dropbox a file storage and sync provider, anymore. Dropbox (and almost all other big established storage/sync providers) moved to a new territory (market) called Content Collaboration Platform. This contains applications which provide comprehensive capabilities that support use cases from productivity and collaboration to content protection and infrastructure modernization. As some of you already mentioned, there are several reasons for it:

1\. File storage and syncing is commodity. It is quite easy (compared to what was 5-10-15 years ago) to create a sharing & syncing capability software. Also, there are AWS/Azure as infrastructure so no one needs to handle this part of the business.

2\. These big providers move to small-medium business and enterprise sector from personal users. It easy to understand, an enterprise contract with 5000+ users a year is much more profitable than acquiring loads of personal users who do not want to pay at all most of the times.

3\. Lastly, big companies want to buy an integrated solution, which handles not just one thing well™, but contains extended functionality and support external providers. In Dropbox's case its file commenting, Zoom & Slack integration, etc.

Source: I work at an end-to-end Encrypted cloud storage and sync company as an analyst, reading market research and analyzing companies like Dropbox 9to5.

</comment><comment><USER88> It's interesting to contrast the comments here to the short stream on /r/dropbox: [https://www.reddit.com/r/dropbox/comments/bzfwxv/meet_the_ne...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dropbox/comments/bzfwxv/meet_the_new_dropbox_dropbox_blog/)

I'm guessing most folks here aren't actually the target market anymore for Dropbox ("teams that use Dropbox as the main workspace" as one commenter phrases it)

</comment><comment><USER89> I pay Dropbox $199/yr and it's frustrating. I want to share files, photos, videos, and other items with individuals and small audiences all the time –– both for business and personal purposes.

But Dropbox is so convinced that it needs to be a social network or a workplace platform that I can no longer reliably share things with others. Dropbox sometimes forces a sign-in or a sign-up before the anonymous end user can view my shared file. Am I crazy, or is that just unacceptable?

</comment><comment><USER90> Wow, that takes way too long to load. SPAs killed the internet.

</comment><comment><USER91> I used to be a Dropbox fan: it was the first program installed on a new machine, and I recommend it to friends and family.

However, I never converted to a paying user. That seems to be contradictory and maybe another data point of how hard could be growing a global user base.

I live in Argentina. Here any subscription in USD should be considered carefully. Each time that I evaluated to become a paying Dropbox customer, I decided that the cost/value equation didn't work for me:

\- Photos: Google Photos works very well on mobile, and they give you unlimited space (if you are willing to sacrifice picture quality).

\- Files: I end using iCloud or Drive for the occasional file sharing in the cloud. When I evaluated subscribing to Dropbox for my father -which is also an Office user- the Microsoft Office365 (that includes OneDrive) was much more convenient.

\- Backup: A huge chunk of my work files are in Drive (because of GSuite for companies), or in Github. The rest (like iPhone Backup) is by default upload to iCloud.

\- Mobile Apps: Before iCloud, many apps included the option to sync with Dropbox (and they created an API for that). But after the iCloud improvements, now that option is missing from most of the iOS apps.

\- Paper: it's a great idea, and for a moment I imagined that Dropbox was going to compete with design sharing tools (like InVision). But when I tried Paper, it wasn't enough to do the switch.

I hope that Dropbox is able to find a good product strategy because I used to love their product. This announcement and my personal experience make me think that they are facing a turning point.

</comment><comment><USER92> I wish Dropbox Paper would adopt some of the features for organization that we see in Notion or Slite. Our team has moved to using one of those services because our Dropbox Paper folders became a mess. At some point, you just stop remembering where you put things and finding documents becomes too much of a friction. The simple sidebar that you can see on Notion or Slite makes a huge difference in getting an overview of the organization.

</comment><comment><USER93> I seem to recall that Dropbox once tried to become a platform, and failed miserably.

Is this the second attempt?

I'd prefer it if they just made file syncing easier.

<comment><USER45> Paper is one of the best writing experiences I've ever had, and the export option is solid, but that's about it. It's trying to operate in the space already taken by OneNote. The web-based tools in Office already output to real files you can get at through OneDrive. Even Google's office suite doesn't do that.

That's probably where Dropbox sees itself headed: the corporate office suite space Microsoft currently dominates. I don't think Dropbox has much of a chance there. There was a time when Microsoft was in a shaky enough position for someone to knock them down, but then they got a new CEO and convinced people to take another look.

<comment><USER94> Paper is good at managing collaborative editing, but I find it _awful_ as a general editor: instead of working with what the browser provides, it tries to be clever and implement most things from scratch, and like almost everything that ever takes that approach, fails painfully, sitting firmly in the uncanny valley. (It definitely has various nice features that ameliorate this pain, but I still don't like it at all.) Over the last year or so I have reported I think five or six distinct bugs (in three messages, I think), mostly ones that are _really_ annoying for me, and I have not heard back from them, nor, to the best of my knowledge, have any of them been fixed. The one I hit the most regularly is selecting text at the start of a paragraph, and starting typing; for example if capitalising a list that someone else typed in lowercase. What you type goes onto a new line, rather than the same line. (I do not recall any of the other bugs I've reported off-hand; because I don't actually use Paper all that much.)

And ugh, hanging punctuation is just a bad novelty that is of dubious value in prose, and strongly negative value in other forms of content. I believe it has no place in something like Paper—it feels to me like one of the developers came across the concept and thought "that sounds cool, can I make it work in Paper?" (and did a decent, though not brilliant, job of it, I admit) without stopping and thinking whether they _should_ do it.

Oh, and Paper is _so slow_ to load, just like Dropbox is these days. I only open either when I _have_ to, they're so slow to load and resource-heavy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER95> Unrelated to this "new" thing, but what is it with corporate blogs: They almost never have a direct link back to the product website! Why is there not a link to [https://www.dropbox.com](https://www.dropbox.com) at the top of the page?!

</comment><comment><USER96> I have a few qualms with this app:

1\. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

2\. It doesn't actually replace a USB drive. Most people I know e-mail files to themselves or host them somewhere online to be able to perform presentations, but they still carry a USB drive in case there are connectivity problems. This does not solve the connectivity issue.

3\. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?

</comment><comment><USER23> There's a ridiculous amout of unnecessary dancing monkey Javascript on this page.

</comment><comment><USER97> I would be surprised if Dropbox still exists as an independent company in five years. Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive and Apple iCloud are good enough, cheap and integrate well with respective player's eco system that makes it incredibility difficult for competitors.

</comment><comment><USER98> Trying to remember the last time I have / wanted to use Dropbox.

\- backup/photo storage went to iCloud Drive (shared family space)

\- Notes sharing (Apple Notes or Google Drive)

\- File storage (iCloud/Google Drive)

\- Photo storage (Google Photos)

There were times when Dropbox was omnipresent. So interesting to see, but no, thank you.

</comment><comment><USER99> Dropbox's home and landing page design language is so completely different than their actual product -- it's like they're two different companies.

Compare their disjointed design to companies that do it well, like Stripe and Apple, and it's night and day.

</comment><comment><USER100> I used to run OpenSuse, when I installed it, I basically just went for the express install, which formatted my drive with xfs. I had dropbox setup, and one day a popup told me it was no longer supported. They decided my file system was not secure enough to store my own files. Their solution was I should repartition my drive using ext4. Then reinstall. That sounded like a bunch of work I didn't want to do, so I googled for competitors. Found one, and was able to import all my files in a few minutes. Haven't had a reason to switch back since.

Today I'm an Arch user, and my filesystem is EXT4... but I haven't found a reason to switch back. The new service is working just fine.

<comment><USER101> Out of curiosity, what do you use now?

I just went full Linux and I am looking for a good Cloud storage for my docs and pics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER102> This is the exact opposite of what I'm interested in -- the UI for cloud files should be the UI for files on my local machine. Pretty much every time I have to abandon the Windows file folder UI in OneNote, I feel like something has failed somewhere.

</comment><comment><USER103> Can they just remove Linux support already? It's been abandoned. I cancelled my Dropbox for this reason, and it gets worse every year.

I realize some will appreciate missing this update, but alas, what happened to Skype has made me realize it's never a good thing.

<comment><USER104> Agree. If you don't care about it, drop it. Then users will immediately get the message rather than be frustrated as support gets worse and worse. I'm glad I use the xfs filesystem on Arch Linux. I dumped Dropbox immediately. Pretty happy with insync for Drive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER105> Do Not Want.

(Seriously, I understand the need for companies to broaden product offerings, explore new markets, etc., but it often leads to the original product that made them successful getting neglected, discontinued, or made terrible in some fashion.)

</comment><comment><USER106> If I didn't need Dropbox for client work, I'd be dropping my Pro account today. They sent a nice flowery email [0] yesterday talking about some of the new features.

I decided this was a good reminder to go and check my Dropbox security settings and logged into the website -- which I rarely ever do. Only then did I see that my yearly price was increasing by nearly $21. [1] That should have been made very clear in the email.

[0] [https://imgur.com/S04UAtL](https://imgur.com/S04UAtL) [1] [https://imgur.com/Dq4tzW8](https://imgur.com/Dq4tzW8)

<comment><USER107> It seems you missed the original email, or something messed up and you weren't sent it. I got the [0] that you linked to today, but also got this email last Tuesday: [http://bluetide.pro/k9NN8v](http://bluetide.pro/k9NN8v) \- Which was the original email from them that was informing the change, and it was very clear. Today's email (your [0]) was just the marketing follow up email saying the plan features were now available.

<comment><USER106> You're right. I just searched again and that came in a week before yesterday's email.

So while I admit I forgot about or glossed over the original email, the flowery marketing email should have had a reminder about that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER108> What are the best alternatives to Dropbox?

Is google drive better?

<comment><USER77> pCloud works well for me (support for all major platforms). Google drive has no Linux support which is a deal killer for me.

<comment><USER109> pCloud looks pretty good - I happen to be shopping around for a Dropbox replacement too. But just a heads-up, when I checked around online I found these [1] [2] [3] comments. It sounds like they have a tool that runs internally to detect piracy and it sometimes picks up false positives, which might cause your account to be deleted?

[1] [https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/am2xbn/pcloud_allo...](https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/am2xbn/pcloud_allows_public_to_view_and_report_your/)

[2] [https://www.reddit.com/r/pcloud/comments/aedoeq/so_i_want_to...](https://www.reddit.com/r/pcloud/comments/aedoeq/so_i_want_to_get_lifetime_but_out_of_what_i_read/ej09og1/)

[3] [https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/6d9yyb/pcloud_allo...](https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/6d9yyb/pcloud_allowing_3rd_parties_to_scan_files/)

<comment><USER53> From their terms[1]: "pCloud will have the right to investigate and prosecute breaches of any of the above to the fullest extent of the law. pCloud may involve and cooperate with law enforcement authorities in prosecuting users who breach these Terms. You acknowledge that pCloud has no obligation to monitor your access to or use of the Site or Services or to review or edit any User Content, but has the right to do so for the purpose of operating the Site or Services, to ensure your compliance with these Terms, or to comply with the applicable law or the order or requirement of a court, administrative agency or other governmental body."

They also have the usual "we'll take down anything that Disney tells us to" DMCA arrangement. Are other clerd providers better?

[1]: [https://www.pcloud.com/terms_and_conditions.html](https://www.pcloud.com/terms_and_conditions.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER110> I see these new integrations and all I can think about is the privacy implications.

<comment><USER111> You don't have to enable integrations.

<comment><USER110> It's nice that they are optional, do you know if they are opt-in or opt-out?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER112> From their website: "It's pretty amazing how much technology helps us accomplish at work. Things that used to take days now take hours, and many small tasks—like updating a spreadsheet cell—are as easy as they should be."

Let me fix that for them...

It's pretty amazing how much constantly changing the UI and workflows slows us down from getting work done. Things that use to take seconds now take minutes, small tasks-like finding a file-take longer and require more cpu cycles because you need to use search (assuming you know the file name you're searching for) rather than using the previous, familiar directory structure UI which either a) no longer exists or b) takes several extra clicks and minutes to reveal again.

As I mentioned in another comment: I contacted support a few weeks ago because I couldn't find the file(s) I was looking for. They keep changing the UI. They told me to use the search feature. That feature is lacking and it doesn't help that I don't know the filename since it was an uploaded photo from my phone. I left them feedback that the UX sucks and that they need to stop changing things for changing sake. Things are/have gotten worse regarding their UX. I think their devs are thinking and selling themselves on their ideas of what improvements are rather than current customers. If they want to try new things, leave the existing product alone and a launch an entirely new(er) product like DHH and basecamp do without disrupting their own existing paying customers![1]. Don't upset happy customers and give them a reason to re- evaluate your offering and other options.

[1] [https://businessofsoftware.org/2015/10/david-heinemeier- hans...](https://businessofsoftware.org/2015/10/david-heinemeier-hans..).

</comment><comment><USER113> Already replaced Dropbox with Syncthing when they decided to only support ext4

</comment><comment><USER114> They lost me when they nuked xfs support (which was working beautifully). I can't rework my nas FS which has TBs of data just to get Dropbox. I'm just waiting for my yearly subscription to expire...

</comment><comment> pi-rat Aha, so that's why Dropbox now uses half a gb of ram and bundles chromium...

</comment><comment><USER115> I don't get why I would save a google doc in Dropbox. I just tried that, and the Dropbox's search can't search content on my google doc. The google doc also takes five more seconds to load compared to if I just create a google doc on google, and it's not available offline either. So what're the real benefits users get?

</comment><comment><USER116> This isn't just about Dropbox. Notice the enhanced collaboration with Slack and Atlassian (which is already an equity holder in Slack).

This alliance looks like an attempt to displace Microsoft in owning the "office runtime". You have Microsoft's Teams, Office 365, and Github vs. Slack, Dropbox, and Jira.

The interesting thing is that Google is actually in a much better position to do this by way of GSuite, but their own internal messaging answer to Slack hasn't gotten out of pre-launch.

</comment><comment><USER117> I was thinking about using Amazon Drive (100 GB for $12 a year is perfect) but for some reason their upload client changes the date properties of every single file (creation and last modified). So for example if you have a file from 2011.01.12 it will be changed to the current day today no matter what. Not sure why is it doing it but kinda breaks the deal for me otherwise I'd switch there...

</comment><comment><USER11> Wait. Do people actually routinely use the dropbox web interface? I only ever go there to manage deletion and recovery of files; and that's _maybe_ at most only been necessary a handful of times over the years.

I have used dropbox religiously, even on my phone, from the day it became available. It's a folder on my machine that I put things in to sync across devices.

</comment><comment><USER118> Unlimited version history is still listed on my account. I recall this was grandfathered indefinitely for all existing users. Does anyone know how this fits with the new announcement?

I have only ever used it outside of 30 days, and the "yay! look what we are forcing on you at a large price increase" email is not especially welcome anyway.

</comment><comment><USER119> They did a horrible redesign, killing amazing UX and UI in favor of a hypter design fantasy. This one still shows the hangover. I feel really sad and bad for the those amazing guys who made the Dropbox product I've used back then when i valued a good cloud storage, sync and a web screen to manage things when i had any trouble.

</comment><comment><USER120> Was going to use Dropbox pro as my photo handling solution but they don't support NFS!? I keep all of my photos on a NAS by my router. I'm sure there is some way around it but Flickr's auto uploader works fine with my NFS set up. This is related to the post I just made in the google photos post.

</comment><comment><USER121> For a moment I was like "oh wait, there STILL alive?"

They just got worse and worse in the last years while being somewhat aggressive... "No, shut up!" I don't need no Business Dropbex, who the hell you think I am?

Also prices went up – but I can have 10TB locally for 250 bucks meanwhile.

</comment><comment><USER122> Ugh. Do not want. Dropbox used to be a great little tool that did it's job well. Now they're trying to turn it into a Swiss army knife that will do several things with mediocrity.

I stopped loving Dropbox when they killed off Public Links, and it's gotten worse from there.

</comment><comment><USER123> Their strategy looks like an attempt in the direction of becoming a sort of third-party Google Wave.

</comment><comment><USER124> 1\. Implement rsync + ftp

2\. Take venture capital

3\. Gotta jump that shark

</comment><comment><USER125> And yet still no changes in pricing. For individuals it's either 2 GB free or 2 TB for 12 euro per month, nothing in between. I'd be fine with 100 GB. Dropbox has native linux client, but shit pricing, Google Drive has better pricing, but no linux client.

</comment><comment><USER126> I'm still waiting for Dropbox to support placeholder files for personal accounts.

I feel like there is more functionality to their (now old) core proposition that they could be working on instead of trying to be a better Google Drive for Google products.

</comment><comment><USER127> Dropbox doesn't care about individual customers. The real money for them is in the enterprise. There, different priorities are at play.

Unfortunately, I've been a Dropbox user for many years but I'm really tempted to switch away.

</comment><comment><USER128> Why would people still use Box, Dropbox, etc. when MS Office subscription provides so much more value, including huge storage, Office apps, and cross- platform integrations for less money. That's basically no brainer.

</comment><comment><USER129> Is there an alternative to Dropbox that properly handles resource forks? (macOS tags, file comments, custom icons, etc?) My heavy use of them is what has kept me on Dropbox rather than Google Drive for the time being.

</comment><comment><USER130> I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but the desktop app is basically an electron app by using QTWebengine (Chromium embedded).

</comment><comment><USER131> Is there a good alternative to Dropbox that also does block-level file syncing?

</comment><comment><USER132> You can pay a few bucks more, get cloud storage AND Office from Microsoft.

<comment><USER133> Less than that actually if it's personal (O365 Personal 1TB, Home up to 5 I think), or a little more for business and get OneDrive+SharePoint and hosted Exchange email. Works nicely on Windows 10, a little less so on older versions, and probably a lot less well on *nix which is relevant since a lot of folks on this thread are concerned about the loss of ZFS support. Not sure how it is on OS X but hopefully decent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER134> I always get scared when I read "meet the new xxxxx". Usually either the UI has been reshuffled or features have been dropped. It's really rare that things get better with such an announcement.

</comment><comment><USER135> The fact that Dropbox has access to your files is a nightmare waiting to happen. Yes, I know they currently don't use them for anything bad. No one ever does, until they do. I'm out.

</comment><comment><USER136> While we're at it, dropbox paper also refuses to allow users to remove entries from the "recently viewed" history, if the document is owned by someone else.

</comment><comment><USER137> This will fail. Drop.io (acquired by Facebook) was the model they should have pursued. I need an environment to share info with clients and this isn't that.

<comment><USER138> Drop.io domain is for sale? Did FB close it down when they purchased it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER139> Anyone else find the design of the page so distracting it was hard to focus on the content? All of the animation behavior, hiding and showing of elements, etc.

</comment><comment><USER140> I would have been excited if these were open integration points; instead it's just allowing you to connect your various walled gardens together :(

</comment><comment><USER141> 2019, UI showcase of a multi billion $ company is still done using multi mega- bytes GIF files. What was video compression technologies about already?

</comment><comment><USER142> Can someone summarise the changes in a couple of sentences? I haven't got a clue what the differences are after sepdning a couple of minutes on the site.

Thank you

<comment><USER143> "Enterprise" features including half baked slack integrations, and web shortcuts like it's 1999

</comment></comment><comment><USER144> So, it appears that Dropbox is letting feature creep turn a perfectly good product which I would have paid for forever, into one I need to leave. What is the best alternative? Just looking for automatic syncing and backup, and the historical versions available from the server is nice also. Suggestions? Simpler is better.

<comment><USER145> I switched to MEGA. The desktop client MEGAsync is actually quite decent. Very similar to classic dropbox

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Anyone running nextcloud on their server? Interested in building one now that a year of 2tb dropbox costs as much as a 1tb ssd and a raspberry pi.

</comment><comment><USER146> This website is near impossible to read on a large 4k screen. The huge headers and the low contrast makes is very shitty reading experience.

</comment><comment><USER24> > And don't worry—you can still organize all your work from the Dropbox folder > in Windows File Explorer and macOS Finder.

DON'T mess this up, Dropbox. Don't.

</comment><comment><USER147> Is there some open source version of something like rsync that is available to just sync between machines on a LAN? No cloud involved.

<comment><USER148> syncthing?

[https://syncthing.net/](https://syncthing.net/)

<comment><USER149> Does anyone use SyncThing on iOS? Last I heard the support was read only from a now defunct app called fsync. Thinking about migrating my family over, but this is a blocker for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER150> I hate the new website it's so slow. Even the blog took 10s to render, why does a blog need to be flashy, just show some text.

</comment><comment><USER151> Looks like they introduced a higher price, too.

</comment><comment><USER152> Great content for the Emoji Movie sequel :)

</comment><comment><USER153> Oh dear: "It's more than an app, though—it's a completely new experience."

How to tell when designers have taken over a company...

</comment><comment><USER154> Pay more, without my consent, for features I don't care... bye bye dropbox. Rsync will do.

</comment><comment><USER155> Storing a directory as a git repo (e.g. on GitHub) is a pretty good alternative to Dropbox.

</comment><comment><USER156> This reminds me of the early web when everyone was obsessed with making one- stop portals.

</comment><comment><USER157> The new Digg redux it seems. They don't seem to have tested the market before launch.

</comment><comment><USER158> Do they support file versioning ?

<comment><USER159> Yes: [https://help.dropbox.com/files-folders/restore- delete/recove...](https://help.dropbox.com/files-folders/restore- delete/recover-older-versions)

</comment></comment><comment><USER160> "We listened to you..." post in 3, 2..

</comment><comment><USER161> seems Dropbox is trying to clone an OS. Given that you can do a bunch of office related stuff inside dropbox

</comment><comment><USER162> I've created some much internal hate trying to use their paper and the search function there that I'm not trying dropbox ever again I think.

</comment><comment><USER163> The load time on that site is bananas.

</comment><comment><USER164> Thought it was April 1st for a second

</comment><comment><USER165> This looks way too much like Jira.

</comment><comment><USER166> WTF is going on at Dropbox? Are they losing so many users they now need to make this ridiculous integrations?

<comment><USER167> Gotta keep your oversized engineering team busy.

Same thing with airbnb, uber, &c. They constantly release side projects that are forgotten after a month and never used, even internally. Fonts, CSS frameworks, &c.

</comment></comment><comment><USER168> I have a few qualms with this app...

</comment><comment><USER169> That page took 15 seconds to load

</comment><comment><USER170> Does anyone else see "work in progress" at the top of the page?

<comment><USER171> that is the name of their company blog i think...

<comment><USER170> Is there some inside joke to the blog name? I really don't get it...</comment></comment></comment>


Transmissions lines resurrect hi-voltage DC - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609766/how-to-get-wyoming-wind-to-california-and-cut-80-of-us-carbon-emissions/ <comment><USER2> There's a few HVDC transmission lines around the world. There's one in my country[0] that goes between the 2 main islands. There have been some good advancements in ultra-high-voltage-direct-current (UHVDC) manufacturing, so hopefully it sees some inroads into industry soon.

[0]:[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HVDC_Inter- Island](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HVDC_Inter-Island)

</comment><comment><USER3> The article doesn't say anything about resurrecting hi-voltage DC in either the title or the body. So it isn't clear what the HN title means, seeing as how HVDC is a reasonably common technology.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's actually what the whole article is about: using hi-voltage DC to connect existing AC networks. For example:

"The Denver-based company behind the project hopes to erect a series of steel transmission towers that would stretch a high-voltage direct-current transmission line 730 miles across the American West. "

<comment><USER3> I just meant that you can't resurrect something that has never died. So I didn't understand the editorial comment in the title.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi-voltage DC lost out in the struggle with AC for power transmission. Now it is "getting a new lease of life" or being "resurrected". The title is an attempt to allude to this in a concise manner.

<comment><USER3> DC entirely won for long distance power transmission. You might be thinking of the situation in the early 20th century. There was no previous use of DC for power transmission over any but very short distances because it was not possible to increase the voltage without the use of transformers. Transformers only work with AC.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask YC: Startup school? - <AUTHOR>

Has YC sent out confirmations for startup school yet? I haven't received mine yet! <comment><USER2> For those who are attending, please consider adding to the wiki (<http://wiki.startupschool.org/doku.php?id=>).

Additionally, I've created two pages that I strongly encourage you to fill out for your own benefit: [http://wiki.startupschool.org/doku.php?id=list_of_startups_p...](http://wiki.startupschool.org/doku.php?id=list_of_startups_projects_of_attendees) and [http://wiki.startupschool.org/doku.php?id=list_of_people_att...](http://wiki.startupschool.org/doku.php?id=list_of_people_attending_startup_school)

Speaking from experience @ Startup School '07, we all know the speakers and their projects, but we don't know much about fellow attendees. Let's help change that.

<comment><USER3> Suggestion: Make a simple web app to support the "attendee directory" -- This way you can do sorting, etc. later when/if the list gets huge. There appear to be some sort of 15-minute or longer lock times for modifications on the doku wiki page for attendees. Message me if you'd like help building it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Will everyone please relax? It's still the 27th here in California. Trevor's finishing reading the applications. We'll send out responses tonight.

<comment><USER5> I'm curious about the number of applicants vs number accepted. Has the number of applicants gone up dramatically each year?

<comment><USER4> Actually it was slightly lower this year. 1108 vs around 1200 last year. We hate rejecting people, and since we always have more applicants than there are seats for, we deliberately made little effort to promote it. We didn't ask Techcrunch to write about it, and I even took the links off my site several days before the deadline.

Because there was so little marketing, the quality of the average applicant was extremely high. 90% were pretty solid hackers.

<comment><USER6> I'm assuming since Kresge only holds about 600 people, that's about how many attendees were accepted (give or take a little bit for cancelations).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> And, for those unlucky ones that, for reasons well beyond the scope of this comment, won't be able to attend, would it be possible to have the presentations and any other materials recorded and published TED-style?

<comment><USER8> Justin.tv will be streaming the whole event live (which means everything will also be archived).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> General Advice Needed: This will be my first startupschool and I am quite excited. I'm flying in the night before, but how long after the 5:30 event end do people hang out? I'm trying to figure out when I should book my return flight (what time that night or the next day). I don't want to miss out on any networking and meet-up opportunities.

From previous year's blog coverage, everyone brings their laptop, but is there anything else I should definitely bring/have/not have/etc...?

Any tips or info for first timers? Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm curious - has YC ever thought about doing startup school in other locations? I'd love to do startup school (just like I'd love to apply to YC), but a startup school here in Dallas would be more beneficial to me because it would attract others like me from my area. Maybe YC could incubate an incubator for DFW :-)

</comment><comment><USER11> FAIL!

I'd love to know the criteria or the background of most of the candidates who were chosen. I'm a little surprised I was rejected.

Someone from YCombinator want to relieve my frustration? I'll admit my application was thin, but no less talented than most.

Maybe looking for a ticket if it's allowed.

</comment><comment><USER12> No email OR plane ticket...

(remake of bad joke from <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=136953>)

</comment><comment><USER13> Is the news.yc meetup still on for that weekend? I've heard there was something planned for the friday night before Startup School.

<comment><USER14> I'm trying to put something together. I'll post details on the wiki.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It will be the first ever that I plan to attend. So, I hope I get an invite soon.

</comment><comment><USER16> My application got rejected. May be I shouldn't have said my company's name :).

</comment><comment><USER17> Got my invite, too. Very excited.

Thanks, Trevor for getting through those applications. I can only imagine what that must have been like. Thanks, pg and the rest of the people who are making this possible. I know you must get a lot of virtual "thank yous"; I want to add my explicit thank you. What you are doing is a wonderful thing. Imagine, being able to change the lives of other people in one day. I plan to be one of them. Can't wait!

</comment><comment><USER18> Just got the response (11:46pm PST). I'm in, woo hoo!

</comment><comment><USER19> I got the invite this morning!

</comment><comment><USER20> Anyone from Seattle going?

<comment><USER2> Yup! I'm debating flying/driving down there... you?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Bid starts at $500.

</comment><comment><USER22> Just got the ok!

<comment><USER23> I just booked my flight, looking for somewhere to stay Friday night.

<comment><USER24> I'm flying over from the UK, might be staying at the Green Tortoise in SF.

Anyone more knowledgeable think that's a bit far away from startup school?

<comment><USER25> SF is probably 45 mins (driving) from Palo Alto. You should look for hotels in Mountain View, Palo Alto, Sunnyvale.

I booked a -nice- 3 star hotel on Hotwire (Mountain View). $66 a night (for 15 nights). You might be able to get the same deal for just a few nights.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Nothing yet :-(</comment>


Are we the teachable species? - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2011/11/22/are-we-the-teachable-species/ <comment><USER2> Earlier submission:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3266392></comment>


The perception of programming - <AUTHOR> http://rfw.posterous.com/the-perception-of-programming

<comment><USER2> That's why context switches can be very helpful. Sometimes, when I'm stumped, the best thing I can do is go for a bike ride, chat with my wife, etc. When I return, I might notice something that had been hiding in plain sight.

</comment><comment><USER3> Brilliant observation.

The only difference is that music needs to always stand on its own, so in that case he is always making a mistake. In code, sometimes you are overcooking, but often times you are just reflecting a growing understanding of the big picture. In this case the code may end up quite smelly _for very good reason_ , only to be discovered when the next developer comes along to refactor and only realizes the ingenuity of the original code hours later.

</comment><comment><USER4> In the first two years I made (short pieces of) music, the things people liked best were those I threw together in an hour or two. It was almost uncannily reverse-proportional to time spent. Probably because it was songwriting, not composing.

Programs are like architecture ... each program is like a unique building. But in building, the architect designs and the workmen construct. Too often programs are constructed without design ... many times because you don't really understand the problem until you've worked at it. At which time, like musicians or writers, you have to be willing to throw away the first draft and start all over - this time with a solid architecture.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is very true but fortunately for us, programming is a little more scientific and objective than making music. When I find myself unsure which route to take I try to fall back on principles such as DRY and coding at the right level of abstraction. At least with programming, you can go back and say "this is a load of rubbish because of X", or "this is and awesome design because of Y".

In fact this is what I try to encourage in my fellow team mates. You shouldn't choose a particular design without knowing exactly why it is the better choice over any other.

</comment><comment><USER6> A very similar thing happens to me when I'm doing visual design.

I can work on something for hours and hours and love it. And then I come back an hour later and finally see all of the problems.

<comment><USER7> Unfortunately that's the nature of the creative process. When you're engaged in it time stops and you're totally absorbed in what you're doing. Once you're out of the zone it's easy to despise what you've created.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not as pessimistic. I believe that by understanding the process it is possible to make allowances for this. It's just one of many challenges one must face in the pursuit of real excellence</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to protect your dotfiles from being stolen by nefarious scripts? - <AUTHOR> For example, the recent eslint NPM virus had full access to the local user's dotfiles, and uploaded their .npmrc file to a remote server.  The virus could have accessed anything under the user's account, including ~/.aws/credentials, ~/.bashrc (often contains a lot of API keys and access tokens), ~/.ssh, etc.<p>What are some ways to protect yourself from illicit access by rogue installer scripts (npm, pip, gem, homebrew, etc.)? <comment><USER2> SELinux. With SELinux you can set the permissions on these files so that only specific programs have access to them.

</comment><comment><USER3> Don't run rogue installer scripts?

Certainly don't have passwordless sudo.

If you must run dodgy scripts, run them as a separate user. We moved away from running everything as root decades ago, but many of us failed to realise (or mittigate for) that most of our important files are owned by our own user. I have to admit I hadn't even considered things like bash_history as an issue before.

Your ssh key should have a strong passphrase.

<comment><USER4> Your advice boils down to "don't use Node for your application", which might not be feasible for OP.

<comment><USER3> Run it under an isolated user. You could even do it in a container and mount just the directories you want.

However if your platform has security flaws maybe you should reconsider.

<comment><USER4> This doesn't solve the eslint problem because npm needs to read .npmrc, and the malware was uploading that file to the attacker's server.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to learn to clearly express your thoughts - <AUTHOR> Some people are really good are using words (writing or just speaking) to explain theirs opinions/thoughts. I was wondering if anyone here had problem with this and somehow managed to get it to the "next level" and improved these skills. <comment><USER2> What has worked for me:

* Be aware of "signal-to-noise" ratio in your communication. If you want to say something - say it simply (as best you can) and then stop. Don't dilute your point with unnecessary prefacing or qualification like "but that's just my idea... oh I'm not really sure if I expressed it clearly". You will be very tempted to do this, but resist the temptation and let the silence sit a while, give people time to absorb your comment and to respond.

* Have faith in the approach of "practice makes perfect", or if that doesn't work for you - an "iterative approach", whereby each time you try to articulate your thoughts (and probably fail initially - that's OK), the _NEXT_ time you do so, you will be _just that little bit_ better. You don't need to focus so much on making it perfect each time - that just reduces your practice frequency and will feed your anxiety through analysis paralysis.

</comment><comment><USER3> I feel that I've been good at writing for a long time. But that's only because I'm old and started reading and writing a LONG time ago.

So...

Read, read, read, then read some more. Take notes on what you read. Since you want to work on your thoughts I'd recommend sticking to non-fiction essays and more specifically editorials. These are examples of people putting their thoughts together.

Put down that social media, put down those forums (esp HN), put down reddit and imgur and facebook. Stop watching TV and movies, edutainment and commercials in sheep clothing. They won't help you. I mean, you can't do this 24/7, but if you find yourself with some "free" time and can choose what you want to do, don't just be a couch potato.

Write, write, write, then write some more. Doesn't need to be a lot and all at once. But regular writing, even if it's only 50 words is necessary to get the skills.

If you're not good at it, it's going to be a lot of work. But you're driven so you'll be fine if you put in the time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I am reading a lot, but I am not writing enough... I was wondering if (and how) writing can improve your speaking skills.

<comment><USER3> IMHO there's no strong connection between writing and speaking skills. A little bit of overlap, but not much.

There's probably a local Toastmasters near you to try. But I've never done one. I have given a few lectures and taught a bit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> One specific thing to _level up_ your expression is to resist using the word "like".

Some people use "like" endlessly and I've found it's a sign that they're afraid nobody understands them, so everything they say is an analogy or metaphor to try to relate to the other person.

It could also be because the person is not taking any time to formulate what they want to say. Which leads to a ridiculous amount of redundancy in their story... which makes their story a bit lame..

 _" So like, I was walking down the street and like it was super hot, like really hot. Then I saw like this weird thing, it was like a big furry thing or something"_

A little less "like" a little less metaphor.

 _" It was pretty hot, I was walking down the street and was shocked to see a bear!"_

</comment><comment><USER5> I had similar problem, I had to leave two jobs due to this problem as i was not able to express my thoughts clearly. One of my friend, who was doing MBA from a well-known University in India, suggested me to write Blog posts. And also suggested to share them in the friend circle. So i did the same. Soon, my friends started to comment on the posts, this helped me to learn about how to convey my thoughts in simpler way to anybody. Also i learnt that, a simple sentence works best rather than complicating it with selecting a range of words to say a simple thing to someone.

<comment><USER6> I can add to this that some languages have an active and passive voice to express oneself. Clear thoughts are expressed and experienced by the listener/reader by using an active voice.

Example: I have written a comment on HN and I have been feeling good ever since. (passive) vs. I wrote a comment on HN and I feel good ever since. (active.)

The active sentence is both clean and concise.

Any English native speakers please chime in with better examples. (:

<comment><USER7> You're right that the second sentence is simpler, but both of the sentences are in the active voice. (The difference between the two is in _verb tense_ : the first sentence is in "present perfect" tense and the second sentence is in "simple present" tense. The first sentence places more emphasis on the writing as a completed action than the second sentence.)

A better example of the passive voice here is "A comment on HN was written by me".

Here's a guide to the difference between passive and active voice: [https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/passive- voice/](https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/passive-voice/)

...and a guide to verb tenses: [https://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/introduction-to- verb-t...](https://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/introduction-to-verb-tenses- everyday-grammar/3123576.html)

<comment><USER6> Thanks! I learned a lot from those links. (:

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. (4th edition) helped a lot. (Note: English is my second language.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks like a gem! I will definitely read it. Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Keep a journal where you write out any ideas you have (about anything). It allows you too audit yourself in real time and makes it harder to hand wave.

</comment><comment><USER10> In a nutshell...read Zinsser's _On Writing Well_! So much great advice in it.

Also keeping a diary for 25 years helped me, I think. And reading a lot of great (non-fiction prose) writers: e.g. GK Chesterton, Santayana, Bertrand Russell, RL Stevenson, William James, Emerson, Hazlitt, etc.

</comment><comment><USER11> Everybody here is focusing on the writing part of the equation but that is not the most important one.

Expressing a thought is just the last step of communication.

Only organized and correctly structured thoughts can be expressed in a clear way.

If you can't communicate well it is an indication that you are not thinking as well as you think you are, because if you were, you wouldn't be having problems.

It is fair to say that most people nowadays still don't know how to write or read. Illiteracy is still a huge problem in the whole world. They might know how to write a word but they can't explain what the word is supposed to mean.

I see that everyday. My boss will write that "X team member needs to perform at a higher level", but can't, for the love of God, provide a specific example or direction as to what that means.

I'm pretty sure she thinks she knows in her head what it means. The problems is she doesn't. If she knew she would be able to clearly communicate what her expectations are and how X member is not meeting them.

My recommendation is to stop thinking about how to improve the output of your thought process and focus on improving the content.

All great presenters will work months on prepping the message that they want to convey. Every word will be carefully selected because every word has a different specific meaning. That's why we think people are great at writing or speaking. They are great at that as well, but above all else they are great thinkers.

</comment><comment><USER12> I've learned a lot by watching keynote speakers, or TED talks. The delivery of some of the speakers is exceptional on how they tie an idea together.

</comment><comment><USER13> Read books of different authors on different topics. Try to be acknowledged in many themes.

</comment><comment><USER14> Study copywriting.

<comment><AUTHOR> How? Where?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I always try to give good advice.</comment>


A DIY self-tuning sonoluminescence generator - <AUTHOR> http://imgur.com/a/7P91o <comment><USER2> This is better than any physics paper I have ever read.

BTW- I did the vacuum in a mason jar thing, don't bother. Like you noticed, the lid will deflect and you will lose vacuum. My current approach is to use a diamond bit to drill a hole in the glass lid of a canning jar (the kind with the metal snap-tight lever).</comment>


Three New DDE Obfuscation Methods - <AUTHOR> https://blog.reversinglabs.com/blog/cvs-dde-exploits-and-obfuscation <comment><USER2> It sounds like spreadsheets are complex enough that sandboxing them by static analysis is a losing battle.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow, works in excel 2016 but i assume our GP/microsofts common sense flags a warning: "Remote data not accessible: To access this data Exel needs to start another application. Some legitimate applications on your computer could be used maliciously to spread viruses or damage your computer. Only click Yes if you trust the source of this workbook and you want to let the workbook start the application. Start application 'mspaint.exe'?"

At this point i am sure 50% of normal endusers would have stopped reading and just clicked Yes anyway. I also assume the command executed could have been a registry hack to disable this warning, allowing several more commands to be ran without popping this warning. Crazy stuff, but fun morning exercise.

</comment><comment><USER4> So if I'm getting this right, it's possible to inject filler null characters into the command to execute. This doesn't seem really obfuscated, from the hex dump–just ignore the null bytes?</comment>


Ask HN: What version control strategies do you use? - <AUTHOR>

Git, SVN, CVS; git-flow, scrumming for merges; what strategies do you use at work, and which do you use with your side projects? Do you differ between the two? <comment><USER2> Git with the basics of git-flow, master, develop, feature and release branches, both business and personal, although I don't tend to use release branches and rarely feature branches on my personal projects.</comment>