This. Recently came back to macOS after a decade on the other side, and one surprise was how terrible the official Dropbox client was. Installed Maestral instead and it just works -- just like Dropbox used to.
<begin rant>I see Dropbox as one of the biggest failures of the VC model. If only they had been bootstrapped, they would probably have stuck with their initial sync offering: A perfectly executed solution to a problem everybody has. And a small team could have made a good living here -- even with reasonably priced non-free options. Instead I imagine some VC partner convinced them to "grow their market" (or maybe "prepare for cloud"), and now they are descending into irrelevance. <end rant>
“On other platforms, you can install the Python package or a Docker image based on Alpine Linux” isn't going to fly for a lot of users, though maybe there is quite an overlap between people who know the details of why they might want to install it and people with the ability to.
Hey, thanks for this. I didn't know that it existed and it gets around the limits for the maximum number of devices with the official client without a paid plan. I had whatever the max number of sync'd devices + 1 before they limited the device count. It wasn't a big deal because the last device was infrequently used, but it was annoying that the terms changed.
I switched away from Dropbox to Syncthing https://syncthing.net/ a few years ago.
Running it on Windows, Mac and Linux (I don't use it on mobile) to keep all manner of files in sync across a bunch of machines. While it doesn't have all the shell integration and end-user friendliness of Dropbox, it also doesn't have the pitfalls like (non-optional) telemetry and constant up-sell.
Syncthing is so much better than Dropbox. There are no accounts, so it's much easier to set up syncing between multiple machines that may not belong to the same user, or to shared devices. I use it to sync family documents, work documents, for syncing Factorio save games, ...
I've also never had problems with CPU usage (Dropbox often caused high CPU usage in some cases)
The only downside is that background sync on iOS with Möbius Sync doesn't work reliably, but I think that is mainly because of how Apple cripples background processing. It does sync quickly if you manually start the app.
It's a bit challenging for new users (you need to understand machine keys, folder identifiers, ignore lists), but once it's set up it just works.
I did the same. Plus also I'm using on my Android phone. Replaces Dropbox completely unless I want to share something with other people. But for that case I usually use Sharing feature from Synology NAS.
Oh I also have shared folders with other people. We used to use it for sharing audio files between podcast presenters, which worked well enough. I have half a dozen folders in my $HOME, shared with different groups of people.
I also have Syncthing installed on my home server which gets backed up. So I have a copy of all my files backed up there, in the event a laptop goes missing or dies.
The only use case I haven't yet covered is an off-site backup of my Syncthing folder, which would be sensible. I just don't know who I can trust with it.
Syncthing saved my ass last month. My Framework laptop got stolen while I was traveling. I was able to pick up a second-hand MacBook Air, connect it to my introducer, and within a few hours I had all my files back.
I have a Pi with software RAID and two HDDs running Syncthing in my apartment. I rent a cheap Storage VPS from time4vps.com which is untrusted and set as an introducer--meaning, the data is encrypted before it reaches the VPS, and as an introducer it will announce devices to one another. My (former) laptop and an iMac where I do all my work are always in sync. If I need to add a new device, I only have to connect it to the VPS and suddenly all the other devices know of it.
I use Syncthing too, but only between my local machines. I don't use it for cloud backup because I've never found 2 TB of cloud storage as cheap as Dropbox. If anybody knows of such a vendor I'd love to hear about it.
Edit: I should further qualify that I'm not interested in solutions that would lock me into Apple's walled garden or anybody else's.
And I'm glad they didn't. The mere existence of such a feature would make me worry about unintentionally enabling it and exposing private data as a result.
Many times on HN, commenters have mocked those who questioned why someone would use Dropbox instead of a method controlled by the user. I guess becausse someone made lots of money from it or it became popular or something. I always found this perplexing because I look at solutions from the perspective of the user, namely, me, not from the perspective of a third party "tech" startup founder. It's insensitive to the people on HN who want to other tried and true solutions. "Other people are using Dropbox, so you should too." Who cares. Every user is different. If someone wants to use something else besides Dropbox, why harass them. I could care less what "99%" of users are doing. I care about what I'm doing.
I confess I have never used it. I still rely on USB sticks for a variety of tasks, more than simply transferring files. Anyway, for me, this telemetry nonsense would be one reason I would avoid Dropbox.
Maybe there will someday be telemetry in USB sticks. We'll see. Meanwhile...
Even as a techie, why would you put in the work to set up your own thing?
Though, I moved away from Dropbox long ago when they introduced device limits. One phone, one laptop and one triple booting desktop -> over the device limit already.
Dropbox became popular because, from the perspective of 99% of users, it provides an incredibly simple and effective UX for syncing files across devices and locations. And better UX is enough to be a billion-dollar company.
> I confess I have never used it. I still rely on USB sticks
Phew boy. You really should try dropbox or a competing service.*
Picture this:
1. Double click a file
2. Type some words
3. Save the file
That's it. There is no step 4. Your file is now synced to all your other computers and to any colleagues who also need that file.
Seriously you shouldn't be using USB sticks these days. Also - I'm guessing you haven't started the transition to USB-C yet? USB sticks are going to get really painful when you do.
(* I use a competing service - more than one actually, but I have used dropbox in the past and it worked well. I just didn't like the direction the company was taking it. This story is yet another example of that)
> Also - I'm guessing you haven't started the transition to USB-C yet?
Shit, not more painful than nearly everything else. You're gonna need a USB-A/C hub anyway, unless you only use very new equipment and you've gone out of your way (and, not infrequently, spent more money) to make sure you get C instead of A versions of everything—lots of A devices still being sold.
If not for current-generation console video game controllers, I'd still have almost nothing in my house that natively uses C, aside from Macbooks and one newish iPad.
(However, I am, like you, a tad scandalized at the notion of favoring flash drives over network sync of some sort—I'm a luddite in a lot of ways, but god do I not miss losing flash drives, having them mysteriously fail in 6-24 months of light use [even the good brands! If anything, that part's worse now than it used to be], the "whoops, forgot to copy the file", not being able to have any of the stuff unless you physically have it with you, "let me just print this from my phone—oh, right, I don't have an adapter to plug a USB stick into it", et c. A bunch of extra stress and fiddling, to gain... ???)
I have a Dropbox account, since eternity, but used it very rarely. Until I decided to remove my desktop computer from my life, and live with my Office PC and a laptop.
Suddenly I have ripped myself out of a lot of stationary storage space, and access to a lot of files in the process. Moreover, this change was also compounded by lifestyle changes, which reduced my computer time at evenings a lot.
Then, I realized that I used these files a lot, and I needed them where I am, regardless of the device I have with me. After that, I understood what Dropbox is about. I have all my files, everywhere I need, anytime I need.
Moreover, many of the bookstores and merchants deliver things I buy directly into my Dropbox. That's great. Even updates to these items arrive automatically.
I backup the whole thing weekly via rclone to a disk, and I'm happy.
I remember when Dropbox was new and it was possibly the only solution I could find to seamlessly sync files on multiple computers (or at least the only one I knew about).
There was this "Dropbox" folder in your home folder, and anything put in there would show up in the home folder on your other computer or operating system or eventually even your phone. I also knew about Apple File Sharing and it was basically that but much more intuitive and worked on separate networks and on Windows (maybe Dropbox was inspired by AFS and the write-only "Drop Box"). Drop Box just worked, and to less tech-savvy younger me that was the only thing that mattered.
Now we have 300+ other programs which can do the same thing, and I use Git/Github for syncing and woof/AirDrop for individual files, so no Dropbox for me. And probably not for most technical users either.
But the average non tech-savvy user still needs a cross-platform service which "just works". And I'm sure their are alternatives which also "just work", but Dropbox is popular, and they don't care about the telemetry.
Do you use it for images, too? Maybe using a large file extension. Dropbox syncs around 2TB of random files successfully, and it seems like that is not something git it very good at (judging by game developers using Perforce or others to share files).
I am always open for recommendations to replace Dropbox. Even Gdrive (one of the most obvious alternatives) choked on performing the initial sync (of 2TB) last time I tried.
Dropbox's specific popularity on HN may partially stem from its original backing by YC. It will have enjoyed additional exposure here thanks to that, and to be fair to Dropbox, it was a good product.
I say *was because I cannot speak for how it is now, I do not have any data to judge how it is now.
I stopped using it a long time ago – not because I disliked it, I just picked a different solution.
I’m still using it, but to me their service has become worse over time as more and more features were tacked on that I don’t want or need… and they are really not listening to their users who want a better experience instead of more junk. I’m also in the market for a better alternative, but haven’t found one so far that is as easy to use as Dropbox. I’d prefer to not have to manage my own servers.
Dropbox is in a rut because Microsoft used their monopoly power to move a lot of people to OneDrive. Which as a Microsoft product of course is all telemetry, no end to end encryption and a poor syncing experience. But the software comes with the OS and the subscription is included with Office 365.
Dropbox is popular because it's super-usable and works super-well. Approximately 0% of ordinary end users want to gaffer-tape something together by hand. (Happy Dropbox user here, but I've been tempted to do it by hand at times myself. If only rsync to s3 was easier ...)
I get that for some classes of "local-only" apps like compilers (famous from a recent discussion on the same topic), network communication can be surprising and therefore feel unnecessary. But for an app whose sole purpose is sending and receiving lots of sensitive private data to Dropbox servers, who has the energy to be outraged that there is also some other anonymous data sent such as program crash info?
I mean Dropbox has the contents of my files should I find it creepy or unnecessary that they know my RAM amount or what the last exception was?
I am on the fence as to whether I agree with you, but I'll embellish a certain aspect: these folks keep citing how the number of DNS lookups (what pihole reports/blocks) is extraordinary, exceeding all other vendors they use, which says pretty much nothing about the nature of the payload other than that Dropbox likely has very granular client uptime data. The client could cache the DNS response instead of doing so many lookups, and some amount of rage would disappear.
For any local program, I can block its access to the network and still use it. For a program whose functionality requires internet access, I can either inspect every outgoing packet for exfiltrated data, or I can choose to trust some programs to be non-malicious based on their reputation. That trust is incredibly fragile, and unannounced spying/telemetry breaks it.
I'm wondering where the line is between acceptable and unacceptable logs. Obviously no one appreciates analytics used by marketing teams, but virtually every internet service has logs used by engineers (which seem to be what this post is about). A few factors that seem relevant:
- Is the service running locally?
- Do we trust/expect that the data is not used for marketing (i.e. would the user have complained if the domain was "error-reporting.dropbox.com")?
- Is the data anonymous (think twice, everyone who has IPs or user IDs in request logs)
- Did we agree to relevant ToS or privacy policies?
If we think carefully about this, I'd bet that most people here have used or even implemented some form of logging that has privacy problems.
It’s not that difficult to make anonymous (usually pseudonymous) usage stats. Of course you don’t store IPs, computer names, user names, emails, detailed geographical data etc. I think in the past this was a lot messier but these days with GDPR it’s quite easy to draw the line. Basically store nothing that is individual, nor enough data (entropy) associated with one pseudonymous user that they could be identified as individuals.
Readit News
<begin rant>I see Dropbox as one of the biggest failures of the VC model. If only they had been bootstrapped, they would probably have stuck with their initial sync offering: A perfectly executed solution to a problem everybody has. And a small team could have made a good living here -- even with reasonably priced non-free options. Instead I imagine some VC partner convinced them to "grow their market" (or maybe "prepare for cloud"), and now they are descending into irrelevance. <end rant>
(For anyone wondering the parent is channeling https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863)
Dead Comment
Deleted Comment
Your immutable daily snapshots would be mounted in your local file system in:
(Mount point)/.zfs/snapshot
… and even Mallory can’t alter them since they are read-only.
I've also never had problems with CPU usage (Dropbox often caused high CPU usage in some cases)
The only downside is that background sync on iOS with Möbius Sync doesn't work reliably, but I think that is mainly because of how Apple cripples background processing. It does sync quickly if you manually start the app.
It's a bit challenging for new users (you need to understand machine keys, folder identifiers, ignore lists), but once it's set up it just works.
I always thought this as one of the bigger value-adds of Dropbox; easy cross user management and sharing.
I also have Syncthing installed on my home server which gets backed up. So I have a copy of all my files backed up there, in the event a laptop goes missing or dies.
The only use case I haven't yet covered is an off-site backup of my Syncthing folder, which would be sensible. I just don't know who I can trust with it.
I have a Pi with software RAID and two HDDs running Syncthing in my apartment. I rent a cheap Storage VPS from time4vps.com which is untrusted and set as an introducer--meaning, the data is encrypted before it reaches the VPS, and as an introducer it will announce devices to one another. My (former) laptop and an iMac where I do all my work are always in sync. If I need to add a new device, I only have to connect it to the VPS and suddenly all the other devices know of it.
Edit: I should further qualify that I'm not interested in solutions that would lock me into Apple's walled garden or anybody else's.
Although requested by many users throughout the years, the maintainers never considered it seriously.
I sometimes use croc to do one time file sending.
I confess I have never used it. I still rely on USB sticks for a variety of tasks, more than simply transferring files. Anyway, for me, this telemetry nonsense would be one reason I would avoid Dropbox.
Maybe there will someday be telemetry in USB sticks. We'll see. Meanwhile...
No, it’s because it was useful and simple in a way that non-techies could and would set up and use. That’s why Dropbox got popular.
Though, I moved away from Dropbox long ago when they introduced device limits. One phone, one laptop and one triple booting desktop -> over the device limit already.
Of course you can use whatever you want.
Phew boy. You really should try dropbox or a competing service.*
Picture this:
1. Double click a file 2. Type some words 3. Save the file
That's it. There is no step 4. Your file is now synced to all your other computers and to any colleagues who also need that file.
Seriously you shouldn't be using USB sticks these days. Also - I'm guessing you haven't started the transition to USB-C yet? USB sticks are going to get really painful when you do.
(* I use a competing service - more than one actually, but I have used dropbox in the past and it worked well. I just didn't like the direction the company was taking it. This story is yet another example of that)
Why not? You say that like there's a problem beyond not caring if there's a more convenient option.
Shit, not more painful than nearly everything else. You're gonna need a USB-A/C hub anyway, unless you only use very new equipment and you've gone out of your way (and, not infrequently, spent more money) to make sure you get C instead of A versions of everything—lots of A devices still being sold.
If not for current-generation console video game controllers, I'd still have almost nothing in my house that natively uses C, aside from Macbooks and one newish iPad.
(However, I am, like you, a tad scandalized at the notion of favoring flash drives over network sync of some sort—I'm a luddite in a lot of ways, but god do I not miss losing flash drives, having them mysteriously fail in 6-24 months of light use [even the good brands! If anything, that part's worse now than it used to be], the "whoops, forgot to copy the file", not being able to have any of the stuff unless you physically have it with you, "let me just print this from my phone—oh, right, I don't have an adapter to plug a USB stick into it", et c. A bunch of extra stress and fiddling, to gain... ???)
Those USB sticks that are A on one end, C on the other are excellent. They are also great fidget toys.
https://www.rubbermonkey.co.nz/SanDisk-128GB-Ultra-Dual-Driv...
Suddenly I have ripped myself out of a lot of stationary storage space, and access to a lot of files in the process. Moreover, this change was also compounded by lifestyle changes, which reduced my computer time at evenings a lot.
Then, I realized that I used these files a lot, and I needed them where I am, regardless of the device I have with me. After that, I understood what Dropbox is about. I have all my files, everywhere I need, anytime I need.
Moreover, many of the bookstores and merchants deliver things I buy directly into my Dropbox. That's great. Even updates to these items arrive automatically.
I backup the whole thing weekly via rclone to a disk, and I'm happy.
There was this "Dropbox" folder in your home folder, and anything put in there would show up in the home folder on your other computer or operating system or eventually even your phone. I also knew about Apple File Sharing and it was basically that but much more intuitive and worked on separate networks and on Windows (maybe Dropbox was inspired by AFS and the write-only "Drop Box"). Drop Box just worked, and to less tech-savvy younger me that was the only thing that mattered.
Now we have 300+ other programs which can do the same thing, and I use Git/Github for syncing and woof/AirDrop for individual files, so no Dropbox for me. And probably not for most technical users either.
But the average non tech-savvy user still needs a cross-platform service which "just works". And I'm sure their are alternatives which also "just work", but Dropbox is popular, and they don't care about the telemetry.
Do you use it for images, too? Maybe using a large file extension. Dropbox syncs around 2TB of random files successfully, and it seems like that is not something git it very good at (judging by game developers using Perforce or others to share files).
I am always open for recommendations to replace Dropbox. Even Gdrive (one of the most obvious alternatives) choked on performing the initial sync (of 2TB) last time I tried.
I say *was because I cannot speak for how it is now, I do not have any data to judge how it is now.
I stopped using it a long time ago – not because I disliked it, I just picked a different solution.
I have had experiences where putting in a USB stick automatically installs malware on the computer.
I mean Dropbox has the contents of my files should I find it creepy or unnecessary that they know my RAM amount or what the last exception was?
- Is the service running locally?
- Do we trust/expect that the data is not used for marketing (i.e. would the user have complained if the domain was "error-reporting.dropbox.com")?
- Is the data anonymous (think twice, everyone who has IPs or user IDs in request logs)
- Did we agree to relevant ToS or privacy policies?
If we think carefully about this, I'd bet that most people here have used or even implemented some form of logging that has privacy problems.
TIL it is possible from the command line, so perhaps I can make it work with Automator.
It seems like all chat, conference, and collaboration software must devolve into bloated slow buggy trash over time.
The first comment in thread is from 2020, the last - from 2021. Now where I live is 2023.
I don't have any relationship with Dropbox, but we should be precise that this information might be outdated.
How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac (1037 points on Sept 9, 2016, 423 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12463338
Revealing Dropbox’s dirty little security hack: https://applehelpwriter.com/2016/07/28/revealing-dropboxs-di...
Dropbox Lied to Users About Data Security: https://www.wired.com/2011/05/dropbox-ftc/