Dropbox is alienating its user base and basically sucks now

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Personally I just loved to use Dropbox back in the good, old days: it was a lean, mean little program with tight OS integration, doing its job very well, fast and reliable. You could just forget about USB sticks when you got a decent enough internet connection.

Now Dropbox has introduced a new client together with a new business approach: they don't want to be a backup and fileshare product only any longer. No, now they want to be your single place for all of your digital stuff!

To do so, they've introduced a new desktop client, which covers all of the new, nifty features nobody ever asked for. With the relaunch also comes a new business model: the basic account now only allows Dropbox to synchronize data between three (!) different devices, which is bascially a bad joke. If you do need more, then you do need to purchase a subscription.

On top of it the new desktop client is also now a ressource hog, because it comes with an embedded Chromium engine delivered. On a modern Macintosh it can easily eat up to 500 MB of RAM during normal usage; under Windows it needs at least around 200 MB as well.


Suffice to say is that many people are largely unimpressed and grumpy about it. From a business perspective this move might make sense for Dropbox; for most users, it doesn't.

This relaunch of Dropbox comes only two days after Apple launched its new iCloud client for Windows; which now offers much better OS integration than ever, and might give Dropbox now a run for its money. At least it's suffice to say that iCloud on Windows is now catching up since Apple decided to become more of a service company.

New Dropbox uses half a gig of RAM and "sucks" | Boing Boing

Dropbox syncs files between computers, but who wants that? The New Dropbox, announced this week, has all sorts of wonderful features to organize your cloud content, package your designs, integrate …

boingboing.net

 

[Wildefire Walcott]

I am unhappy with the Cloud Storage landscape, but Dropbox is still the paid option I'm sticking with for now.

• I've been a paid Dropbox user for a couple years. It's the fastest at syncing, plus it works on Linux, which I need at work. The new client feels like a step in the wrong direction, but I'm otherwise still happy with it.
• Google Drive - still not officially supported on Linux, and the limited experience I have with the client software (doesn't it only work in Chrome or something?) left me cold. Plus I would complain about them parsing all my personal files, but I am a heavy Gmail/Docs/Photos user, so they know everything about me already.
• Google Photos - Pics and Videos only, but UNLIMITED FREE storage and some really cool AI (creepy though it is). Google Photos truly is the app I've been looking for. No folders, no tags. The face recognition is insane (it was pretty accurate at identifying individuals from infancy through adulthood), and the people/places categorization makes it easy to pull up relevant pics from my collection.
• iCloud - I am sure this is fully intentional on Apple's part, but there's literally only one reason I pay for iCloud: They make it literally impossible to surgically delete/archive more than one photo at a time in all their apps (unless it's different on macOS). So unless I wanted to spend a few hours every month archiving pictures off my iPhone, I was basically forced into getting a paid iCloud subscription to keep from getting "out of space" notifications every time I took a picture. The really dumb thing is now that Google Photos is my photo app of choice, it automatically syncs all my iPhone pics anyway, so all of my iPhone content is now stored in two different clouds. No native linux.
• OneDrive - LoL what an utter failure of a sync option. No linux support, the slowest/least-reliable sync engine I've ever seen. Weirdly/awkwardly integrated with some versions of Office in a way that's completely broken and confounding. Breaks in really astounding ways. No native linux.

 

[Katheryne Helendale]

Google Drive - still not officially supported on Linux, and the limited experience I have with the client software (doesn't it only work in Chrome or something?) left me cold. Plus I would complain about them parsing all my personal files, but I am a heavy Gmail/Docs/Photos user, so they know everything about me already.

Ubuntu (and, by extension, Mint) has integrated Google Drive support in Nautilus/Nemo. It'll probably work in any Linux distro that uses FUSE, but I'm not certain. It's a bit buggy, but it's worked pretty well for me. It's not as good as its integration in Windows, but it shows we're getting there.

 

[Noodles]

Bleh, Evernote cut the number of devices down and I immidiately moved to One Note. I guess it's time to move my Dropbox stuff to my OneDrive.

Currently I sync to my phone, Laptop, Desktop and NAS. Actually I am not sure I sync to my phone, I just have the app for on demand access. I also wonder if the NAS sync will even work anymore.

 

[Kara Spengler]

Dropbox was great back when cloud storage was new. Now they are not the only game in town and there are some pretty big players in there.

Good cloud services pick a niche and play to that. When I think box I think enterprise. When I think iCloud I think apple users. Amazon and google, well, amazon and google. DropBox used to have it in being a quick and easy way to back your stuff up to the cloud and go, sort of the 21st century version of sneaker-netting a thumb drive.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

I guess what's pushing more people away is the new limitation of syncing devices of 3 in the basic plan. This really is a harsh step into another type of usage models in order to monetise the service.

And iCloud was strictly Apple's ecosystem, but they really want to change that now.

 

[Veritable Quandry]

I have a personal Box account, but I don't use the sync function (I use it mostly to host class documents since our online learning platform sucks...if I copy a link to a document in one class, it breaks the link because students can not access files for a class that they are not enrolled in , but if I link to a file on box it works). Their big market is enterprise. We have an OSU branded version that goes out to 62,000 students and over 11,000 employees. I imagine that pays a good chunk of money.

 

[Khamon]

My basic Dropbox account holds 3GB and syncs files between my tablet, PC, and phone. It also allows me to access shared space on other accounts without counting against my quota. I use it to store charity club paperwork, photos, and sheet music. The service hasn’t failed me once in six years. That’s fairly reasonable for an annual cost of zero dollars.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

I guess what's pushing more people away is the new limitation of syncing devices of 3 in the basic plan. This really is a harsh step into another type of usage models in order to monetise the service.

I upgraded my Evernote and was about ready to upgrade my Dropbox, but now I'm on hold. The new hasn't hit me yet but sounds like it's literally worse than the web interface and will make me drop it instead.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Well the thing is you are free to name a device in the basic plan, which should not be synced any longer - so you can replace one device with the other. But if you do need more than three different devices for sycning, then you are now out of luck with the basic plan and do need a subscription, where the lowest one is now 10$/month.

 

[Khamon]

Is $10/month exorbitant pricing for the ability to sync data between more than three devices? What do other services charge for similar functionality?

 

[Katheryne Helendale]

Google Drive is free for up to 15GB of storage for personal use, and I believe you can sync to pretty much anything. You can also share and collaborate with other Google users.

The downside? You'd be feeding the Google monolith with precious data.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

Well the thing is you are free to name a device in the basic plan, which should not be synced any longer - so you can replace one device with the other.

I have more than three devices. So I was considering the $10.00 plan. It's less than I spend on Second Life.

But not if they don't actually support syncing any more. That's the whole point to Dropbox for me.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

You misunderstood me; what I was referring to is if you are a basic Dropbox user and got three syncing devices, let's say A, B and C, and you need another one, you first have to take one of A, B or C first out of the "syncing device list" of your account before you can start syncing on device D.

 

[Soen Eber]

In a growing number of use cases, it's cheaper to buy web hosting and run open source applications and services. I never thought the "free for personal use" meta would last forever once a platform or service gained enough ground vs it's competition.

It's either screw the users or screw the employees, like Amazon is currently doing. Lately I've been going to Amazon for the reviews and eBay for the actual purchase, or manufacturer's/distributor sites.

 

[Noodles]

I think OneDrive is also free with any number of devices. I wanna say free tier is 5 GB. It's been a while since I had a basic free tier because I have gotten some permenantly free additions and have like 30 or 40 gb free.

Also yeah, you could rent a 20gb Digital Ocean VPS for $5 a month an probably easily self host something.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

I have more than three devices. So I was considering the $10.00 plan. It's less than I spend on Second Life.

But not if they don't actually support syncing any more. That's the whole point to Dropbox for me.

They most certainly do support synching. I use it all the time and now I have all my important stuff synched up there, so I can readily access it even from my Samsung tablet.

That's because you can now specify which files and folders to store both locally and in the cloud, and which to store only in the cloud, though of course directly accessible from any of your machines.

It's like having a whole new 2TB data drive on the smallest of your devices.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

Are you on the new desktop client? It doesn't seem to have been generally pushed out yet (at least I don't have that update yet)? I've got the three device limit already but I'm still on the old (actually useful) client.

See Bartholemew's link to BoingBoing or this post by Gruber:

The New Dropbox Sucks

Link to: https://blog.dropbox.com/topics/product-tips/new-dropbox

daringfireball.net

 

[Innula Zenovka]

My version of Dropbox is 74.4.115, installed (on this machine) about a fortnight ago when I bought the laptop. It certainly looks and feels rather different to what I'm used to.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Yes well, this seems to be the new client. You can definitely see in the web based settings how many clients are doing the sync there.