> There's something abrasive about implying that customers paying and using capabilities of their highest tier as non-genuine.
I disagree. Their website makes it abundantly clear that this product is for employee productivity. The people doing this are well aware that what they're doing is hacky and costing Dropbox lots of money.
yeah, I really wish the FTC would really come down on companies using 'unlimited', but companies coming out and saying "customers using the service as advertised are abusing it" are ridiculous. I do appreciate that they're at least going to a hard limit instead of a "at our discretion" limit that a lot of phone carriers used for a long time.
What's the best way to store around 300TiB data cost-effectively? Assuming would have access from time to time to around 25% of that data (monthly) through 1Gbps connection.
On-prem seems to be the best, but carrying around 30 disks is no small feat.
Edit:
The data will not be mutated after write. Might append new data occasionally after the first dump.
The main questions would be durability and availability. Maybe only because I am scarred by experience but "on-prem" seems to me quite obviously the worst possible way to do it.
Why not both? Store it locally for ease of access, maybe with a solid state cache, backup in the cloud for durability. Storage is cheap nowadays. The more interesting question is availability - at the current HDD sizes, "classic" RAID is not sufficient.
As far as I know, even with the recent increase, Backblaze B2 is still the most cost efficient option at $6/TB/mo... but I'll be watching replies closely.
Is there some 3rd party client for their backup service for linux? I was just looking at them for offsite but I have mac and linux boxes to back up, not mac and windows.
how often is the data being appended or modified? You might consider a blended solution with the most cost effective on prem-disks w/ no durability or backup, then writing any additions to cold storage which is cheap. The only time you need to access that is (hopefully rare) restore scenarios.
This blog post continues the habit of "Good News Now, Bad News Later" by titling the blog post:
"Updates to our storage policy on Dropbox Advanced"
At this point I just assume that "updates" are always a price increase. For those in the future wondering, this was originally posted with an editorialized headline of "Dropbox Axes Unlimited Cloud Storage for Businesses". While it's generally HN policy to change editorialized headlines back to their defaults, I would argue that HN should not be complicit in businesses' attempts to cowardly soften the blow. HN should keep the editorialized headline.
Aside from that annoyance, I'm not surprised in the slightest that this was done. Crypto was designed as a vehicle to push the base assumptions of Austrian Economics - i.e. extreme individual liberty in exchange for no free lunches - and thus the one thing it's good at is eating your free lunches as quickly as possible. If you give things away, people will construct a way to get paid for burning what you've given away. The Internet is uniquely hospitable to this kind of misbehavior, so everything has to have a cost, no charity, no welfare, etc.
Creators who are working with 4K and 8K assets probably need a lot of storage. What do they typically use?
Dropbox prices are pretty good. I was looking at even AWS s3 _glacier_ and it seems way more expensive.
Does this mean that if everyone used their entire capacity it's like a bank run and Dropbox goes out of business? Or is storage actually cheap and AWS makes big margins on it?
> Dropbox prices are pretty good. I was looking at even AWS s3 _glacier_ and it seems way more expensive.
That's because glacier stores exactly what you tell it to store. Dropbox is taking advantage of a lot of compression techniques to keep their storage volume down. For example, if two users upload the exact same file twice, they can just store it only once (they can also do this for chunks for files that are identical).
> Does this mean that if everyone used their entire capacity it's like a bank run and Dropbox goes out of business? Or is storage actually cheap and AWS makes big margins on it?
I don't know about a bank run, but Dropbox would most likely go out of business eventually if everyone used their full capacity and they didn't adjust their pricing structure. There's most likely some customers they take losses on to keep their pricing structure simple.
I don't know Dropbox's Enterprise storage pricing, but I know Backblaze charges $5/TB for simple cloud storage. That means, ignoring drive failures and redundancy, it takes less than 3 months to RoI on hard drive purchases. With the high level of redundancy these services tend to have, it's probably closer to 1-2 years.
On the flip side, AWS S3's standard storage tier is a whopping $23/TB. They're making absolute bank on that. Not to mention their stupidly high egress fees (Which are even higher when using Glacier!) if you ever actually use it.
> Dropbox prices are pretty good. I was looking at even AWS s3 _glacier_ and it seems way more expensive.
I'm not sure what you mean?
Unless you're grandfathered in, the new limit is 5TB for $24 and glacier would be $5 plus bandwidth fees.
And as just one example for competitors, Hetzner offers 5TB of nextcloud for €17 and 5TB of storage for €13.
If you're talking about the 35TB limit, yeah that's a great deal and nobody can have it any more. The larger users were subsidized by the smaller users, which is a delicate balance.
> enough space to store about 100 million documents, 4 million photos or 7500 hours of HD video
This is my favorite type of corporate weasel-wording. 35TB would actually only be enough for 260 hours of HD video from my camera (300 megabits per second ≈ 0.135 terabytes per hour).
Pretty much! I wrote exactly the same in a previous thread, in nowadays standards, 5 TiB is barely enough for a home storage let alone business or even enterprise!
Very few people were actually using the unlimited plan (1% only had more than 35TB, and a lot more than that) and those that actually used the unlimited part were mostly abusers. Running file hosting is not an easy business
> can't really sell something unlimited and then call who's taking benefit of that "abusers"
Colloquial versus contract. It's sold as unlimited, because for most people, it is. Similar to how salt and pepper at restaurants is practically unlimited, even if you can't demand they hand you all the salt in their kitchen.
In practice, marketing as unlimited to suss out the use distribution before capping it where it becomes uneconomic seems to be a valid strategy. (The fraction of users curtailed plays into perceptions of fairness.) With that framing, this story has no bad guy.
You definitely can if they're blatantly not using the product as designed. If I offer "unlimited pdf storage" and then people start encoding petabytes of videos as PDFs, that's abusing the system. Dropbox for business is for business documents, not for crypto miners
"Unlimited" anything is frequently taken as a challenge. If you were to create an anonymously writable S3 bucket and go on Reddit or something and say "hey everybody, store as much of whatever as you like," it'd take about 5 minutes for you to get a billion dollar bill and an arrest warrant. When GMail announced its gigabyte email thing, it took like two weeks for somebody to create gmailfs. And then you have the bad actors that say "unlimited" but declare fairly reasonable actors as cheaters, like Comcast.
This constant push for a return on investment and the mindset that we must grow forever has the vast majority of internet users churning between centralised services that promised an unsustainable level of service at an equally unsustainable price point.
It's a shame to watch the slow death of yet another service that was making people's lives easier. Can't really say I'm surprised, though. I have to imagine that it's incredibly, incredibly difficult to resist the urge to sell. The key differentiator seems to be whether you get to walk away with your reputation intact among the sort of people who take a hardline stance on this.
Thing is, most of those people probably wouldn't gamble a life-changing sum of money for yourself and the people they love on principles - and ironically, we can't really judge them for it with the world we live in and its incentives.
VC-funded blitzscaling is just the latest meta, and it's no fun for anyone. So much useful potential squandered while everyone has to watch the centralised, closed source, S/PAAS tools they rely on becoming more encumbered, limiting and expensive.
As Tom Toro so famously put it, "Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders." If people will make that choice when it comes to the land we live on and the air we breathe, you can see why they'd find it a lot easier to do exactly the same thing for some code tearing its way through a lump of silicon.
Shouganai. Someone will just make another Dropbox. The cycle continues.
Readit News
There's something abrasive about implying that customers paying and using capabilities of their highest tier as non-genuine.
Conversely, Dropbox never sold this plan as being available forever, and the transition plan seems reasonable overall I suppose.
I disagree. Their website makes it abundantly clear that this product is for employee productivity. The people doing this are well aware that what they're doing is hacky and costing Dropbox lots of money.
Businesses have different needs. Some might use it for employee productivity and some might use it to store a ton of bins.
un· lim· it· ed ˌən-ˈli-mə-təd
1: lacking any controls : unrestricted
unlimited access
2: boundless, infinite
unlimited possibilities
3: not bounded by exceptions : undefined
the unlimited and unconditional surrender of the enemy— Sir Winston Churchill
Powerful technology.
On-prem seems to be the best, but carrying around 30 disks is no small feat.
Edit:
The data will not be mutated after write. Might append new data occasionally after the first dump.
Deleted Comment
20-22TB HDDs are available nowadays, so more like 14-15 disks.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/155so84/dropbo...
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/15gf2rc/dropbo...
Aside from that annoyance, I'm not surprised in the slightest that this was done. Crypto was designed as a vehicle to push the base assumptions of Austrian Economics - i.e. extreme individual liberty in exchange for no free lunches - and thus the one thing it's good at is eating your free lunches as quickly as possible. If you give things away, people will construct a way to get paid for burning what you've given away. The Internet is uniquely hospitable to this kind of misbehavior, so everything has to have a cost, no charity, no welfare, etc.
Dropbox prices are pretty good. I was looking at even AWS s3 _glacier_ and it seems way more expensive.
Does this mean that if everyone used their entire capacity it's like a bank run and Dropbox goes out of business? Or is storage actually cheap and AWS makes big margins on it?
That's because glacier stores exactly what you tell it to store. Dropbox is taking advantage of a lot of compression techniques to keep their storage volume down. For example, if two users upload the exact same file twice, they can just store it only once (they can also do this for chunks for files that are identical).
> Does this mean that if everyone used their entire capacity it's like a bank run and Dropbox goes out of business? Or is storage actually cheap and AWS makes big margins on it?
I don't know about a bank run, but Dropbox would most likely go out of business eventually if everyone used their full capacity and they didn't adjust their pricing structure. There's most likely some customers they take losses on to keep their pricing structure simple.
Deleted Comment
That's ~$14.28/TB.
I don't know Dropbox's Enterprise storage pricing, but I know Backblaze charges $5/TB for simple cloud storage. That means, ignoring drive failures and redundancy, it takes less than 3 months to RoI on hard drive purchases. With the high level of redundancy these services tend to have, it's probably closer to 1-2 years.
On the flip side, AWS S3's standard storage tier is a whopping $23/TB. They're making absolute bank on that. Not to mention their stupidly high egress fees (Which are even higher when using Glacier!) if you ever actually use it.
Their redundancy is only +18% as of their last post about it.
Though don't forget the servers that hold the drives adding another 1/3-ish.
I'm not sure what you mean?
Unless you're grandfathered in, the new limit is 5TB for $24 and glacier would be $5 plus bandwidth fees.
And as just one example for competitors, Hetzner offers 5TB of nextcloud for €17 and 5TB of storage for €13.
If you're talking about the 35TB limit, yeah that's a great deal and nobody can have it any more. The larger users were subsidized by the smaller users, which is a delicate balance.
This is my favorite type of corporate weasel-wording. 35TB would actually only be enough for 260 hours of HD video from my camera (300 megabits per second ≈ 0.135 terabytes per hour).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37259331
Colloquial versus contract. It's sold as unlimited, because for most people, it is. Similar to how salt and pepper at restaurants is practically unlimited, even if you can't demand they hand you all the salt in their kitchen.
In practice, marketing as unlimited to suss out the use distribution before capping it where it becomes uneconomic seems to be a valid strategy. (The fraction of users curtailed plays into perceptions of fairness.) With that framing, this story has no bad guy.
It's a shame to watch the slow death of yet another service that was making people's lives easier. Can't really say I'm surprised, though. I have to imagine that it's incredibly, incredibly difficult to resist the urge to sell. The key differentiator seems to be whether you get to walk away with your reputation intact among the sort of people who take a hardline stance on this.
Thing is, most of those people probably wouldn't gamble a life-changing sum of money for yourself and the people they love on principles - and ironically, we can't really judge them for it with the world we live in and its incentives.
VC-funded blitzscaling is just the latest meta, and it's no fun for anyone. So much useful potential squandered while everyone has to watch the centralised, closed source, S/PAAS tools they rely on becoming more encumbered, limiting and expensive.
As Tom Toro so famously put it, "Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders." If people will make that choice when it comes to the land we live on and the air we breathe, you can see why they'd find it a lot easier to do exactly the same thing for some code tearing its way through a lump of silicon.
Shouganai. Someone will just make another Dropbox. The cycle continues.
https://kottke.org/23/01/the-enshittification-lifecycle-of-o...