Open-source Dropbox client, with multi-account, no-device-limit and M1 support

https://github.com/SamSchott/maestral

by daniel_iversen • 5 years ago

428 200 5 years ago

github.com

shortformblog• 5 years ago

I’ve used Maestral a few times and find it works best with narrower folder limits—I ultimately went with the official Dropbox client for my M1 but I use it on an x86 machine in which I only need a handful of folders.

The creator is doing good stuff.

est31• 5 years ago

Maestral uses the public Dropbox API which, unlike the official client, does not support transferring only those parts of a file which changed ("binary diff"). Maestral may therefore use more bandwidth that the official client.

refulgentis4• 5 years ago

Save 60 MB on Electron, burn 10 TB of bandwidth

arthurcolle3• 5 years ago

imagine using Dropbox with those storage requirements...

SilverRed6• 5 years ago

Works for my workflow. I work on reasonably small files (my whole cloud storage is about 20 gb) and I like to have the storage available in my file manager at all times. Wouldn't want to run proprietary software or waste memory on it.

The biggest problem I have with these 3rd party clients is sometimes things just don't work right. Like for example gimp just fails to open files in the synced folder (google drive not the OP project) until I copy them out and open them. Not sure what the issue is though.

elwesties• 5 years ago

I would make that tradeoff in a second.

nyanpasu642• 5 years ago

It's a good tradeoff since it lets me escape the official Dropbox client trying to upload my drives, photos, etc. to the cloud, and spam me with upsell offers on a daily basis (if you're operating with a nearly full Dropbox in steady-state).

sylens2• 5 years ago

I was a very early Dropbox adopter but eventually switched to OneDrive a few years back because they bundled Office 365 with 1 TB of storage. I just went and looked at the official Dropbox plans to see if there was a family plan similar to the 5 users I get with Office 365/OneDrive...and found their plan/pricing page overwhelming. There's rows upon rows of features to compare across versions like "Traffic and Insights" and the "Plus button" forcing me to keep scrolling just to see that a family plan costs $16.99 a month for 2 TB. No option for a cheaper plan with less storage. I feel like they are missing the mark when it comes to marketing to consumers here.

MuffinFlavored2• 5 years ago

There's rows upon rows of features to compare across versions

After you grow as a company and hire lots of engineers and your core product is "good enough", you have to try to pivot/stay relevant/compete/innovate I guess. Lots of manpower (I have no idea how large their engineering team is) need to be kept busy I guess?

remram3• 5 years ago

That doesn't necessarily mean that each of those features should appear as a different row, or even be different between plans. If you can't figure out a way to make a comprehensive pricing page, the amount of features is not really an excuse.

This one is over 5 pages, with 5 different sections which don't even look triangle-shaped as you can usually expect from increasingly-priced plans.

asaddhamani• 5 years ago

They have 2500 employees. Why does a single product company with a product that is mostly “done” need those many people?

SilverRed6• 5 years ago

Similar experience. I pay for the 100GB Google one plan which comes with the excellent google photos service and I went to see what dropbox offers and found their cheapest plan was extremely expensive comparatively and they offer less features. I'm just not sure how they even compete at this point when they do the same thing as every other cloud storage product but cost more. And you even have to pay extra for family sharing which is just free with Google.

Spooky23• 5 years ago

If you make a lot of changes, the Dropbox sync works. Google drive or OneDrive choke in a variety of situations.

The product sucks in lots of other ways.

m-p-3• 5 years ago

On the other hand, Google has a kind of pricing gap. You can either get 200GB for $CAD40/yr, and the next storage option is 2TB for $CAD140/yr.

Nothing in between..

quink• 5 years ago

I have no idea how I managed it as it was a long time ago, but I'm on exactly the plan that _everybody_ is crying out for. It might have been the result of some A-B test for all I know. I can't see any reference to it on any website, but it's 100 GB with reasonable annual pricing:

https://i.imgur.com/uTH75ex.png

It comes with Dropbox Paper, etc. Also, Dropbox, if you're reading this and are thinking about taking it away from me I'm switching to OneDrive immediately, I'm already paying for Office 365 anyway.

Also, more proof: https://i.imgur.com/BThdxTD.png

PragmaticPulp• 5 years ago

Dropbox always feels like it peaked early and has steadily gotten worse as they try to add more and more features to it.

I feel like they are missing the mark when it comes to marketing to consumers here.

I get the impression they're relying on name recognition and first mover advantage to keep the simple users flowing in, while all of the extra features and GUI fluff are built out to attract some other audience that makes decisions by counting up how many different features are listed on each product page.

These days, I'm just happy that I haven't had to force-kill the Dropbox client in many months. I wish there was some way to go back to the days where they just synced my files for me, let me share a few things, and I didn't have to fight with their GUI all the time.

temp8964• 5 years ago

My impression is that they totally gave up the customer market and focused on the business market long ago. So I gave up on them too.

sieabah• 5 years ago

I feel like they stopped being relevant when their scavenger hunts ended.

Andrew_nenakhov3• 5 years ago

In my impression, they are removing useful features and adding unnecessary ones.

Since I joined over a decade ago, they have removed an extremely useful Public folder with the capability to generate direct links, limited the number of devices, and added a ton of features I never wanted from them, like Paper.

swiley• 5 years ago

This.

It used to be really great, you just have an "ender chest" folder that shows up on all your computers with a public folder that shows up on their web server. They screwed up the public folder pretty badly and I left after that.

Now we have syncthing anyway which is better anyway for a number of reasons and most people know git which works better on mobile devices.

nolok• 5 years ago

and I didn't have to fight with their GUI all the time.

I don't even know how to make it open my folder for me in the file explorer any more. I just ignore their thingy and go to the folder by myself now.

_hyn3• 5 years ago

Just use syncthing. It's open source and works great.

homero• 5 years ago

I left too for that reason

codecutter• 5 years ago

I left Dropbox when they stopped supporting Linux client. I didn't want to go to either Google or Microsoft, so I went with Mega.nz and I am very happy with them. I pay around $30/year for 400 GB storage. (most likely a grandfathered plan, not sure of current pricing).

jez• 5 years ago

For what it’s worth (not trying to convince you to switch back, just want to provide my perspective), I still use Dropbox on Linux (Pop!_OS 20.04) via their official installer and it works completely fine:

https://www.dropbox.com/install-linux

OnlyLys• 5 years ago

I left Dropbox when they stopped supporting Linux client.

Wait a second. Did they? My Dropbox client is currently working on my Arch system.

canistel• 5 years ago

Same story here too, except that we moved to Syncthing. Periodic cloud back-ups with Rclone, in addition.

hannofcart• 5 years ago

Love Syncthing. Use it extensively across my Linux-Android-Windows devices. Where I really miss it is on iOS (I have just one Apple device - an iPad) and can't find a reliable Syncthing implementation/wrapper on the App Store.

That doesn't stop me using Syncthing though. I just use my iPad less. Which is a shame. I like the handwriting recognition it has. There's an app called Mobius Sync which promises Syncthing support but doesn't work quite as well.

gumby• 5 years ago

Are you on windows? Because I tried OneDrive and found it quite slow and a bit flakey when I tried it a few years ago on my Mac: it would get confused about sync state and just stop syncing (much better than losing data!) until I exited and restarted the app.

Also it would silently refuse to sync some files which eventually I realised were not valid windows filenames though they were perfectly fine under Unix.

Has it gotten better? It’s free so I’d be willing to use it if I could trust it.

LeonB• 5 years ago

Dropbox fails to sync some files that have valid names in Windows.

Unicode is hard.

sylens2• 5 years ago

I would say my primary device is a Windows desktop for the storage but I also use it to sync to a Macbook Air.

cerved5• 5 years ago

Dropbox at least has a Linux client and unlike OneDrive didn't delete all data because some plan expired. The problem is Dropbox is too expensive by comparison.

manigandham5• 5 years ago

Dropbox still has the best syncing tech [1][2] which handles complex situations with lots of files and responds instantly. That alone is worth it if you need it.

However the rest of the product is crap. Dropbox had a solid business with a "magic folder that syncs" but has been chasing new features and product lines with little success. Even the enterprise offering was far behind Box.com for years and now has tons of competition.

1. https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/rewriting-the-heart-of-o... 2. https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure

scns2• 5 years ago

There is a plugin for Thunderbird thats integrates with box.com to upload huge attachments there and paste a generated download link into the mail.

shapefrog• 5 years ago

Dropbox still has the best syncing tech

Can confirm without any references etc that I have found it to be vastly superior to all other syncs. Top of the pile for me is that it handles small changes in large files without reuploading the entire thing. That said, I havent used it for years.

gajjanag• 5 years ago

Maybe Dropbox's is the best out of a bunch of mediocre syncing solutions. However, I do wish to add that Dropbox struggles with scale: lots of small files slow down sync to a crawl and spin CPU at 100%.

Concretely, I had a certain folder with 100,000+ small files for some research I was doing with a collaborator. It took my laptop 24 hours to sync this folder, and throughout my CPU was at 100% throughout. For comparison, rsync got the same job done in a few minutes. See https://help.dropbox.com/accounts-billing/space-storage/file... , the above terrible experience is in line with this caveat.

kmeisthax• 5 years ago

One particular advantage of Dropbox is that it's vendor-neutral and on pretty much every platform I can think of. This is good for people like me who insist on having one foot in every ecosystem. Good luck finding, say, an iCloud or OneDrive client for Linux.

Now if only the iPad client could actually background upload files when you save files using the system file picker...

japanuspus• 5 years ago

Similar experience here: the paid options are way too expensive for private use, when none of the new features has any value to you.

Seems to me that the correct strategy for Dropbox would have been to be super focused on the core product and on not hiring in too many people/taking in too much capital. That would of course have introduced a market cap, but if 1% of everyone had ended up on a reasonably priced personal plan it would have been a roomy cap.

As it was, Dropbox has grown into yet-another ms-office-in-the-sky and there is no way they will make it against their competitors who can burn the cash, and who are slowly catching up on sync technology.

This is really a shame too: Dropbox is just the gold standard for sync. Before Dropbox I was using unison[0] and tried every other sync product, but nothing came close. TBH I am still using Dropbox every day, getting around the device limit by sharing stuff with multiple free accounts...

[0] https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/

omniscient_oce2• 5 years ago

I'm looking to setup Unison to replace Dropbox because I think their service is a bit overpriced, how did you find it?

tome• 5 years ago

Does anyone understand how OneDrive and Dropbox can be so cheap compared to S3?

- 2 TB on Dropbox is £7.99 / month

- 1 TB OneDrive is £59.99 / year

- 1 TB on S3 is $23.99 / month

How can Dropbox and OneDrive be cheaper than S3 at all, let alone after providing value add on top? Is it something to do with lower reliability and availability guarantees? Is it possible to buy direct access to their underlying storage?

https://www.dropbox.com/individual

https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-365/onedrive/compa...

https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/

oefrha• 5 years ago

Most users aren’t storing anywhere close to 1TB. For every user using 1TB there are probably a hundred using 1GB or less. Case in point: I subscribe to Office 365 reluctantly but don’t use OneDrive.

tuananh• 5 years ago

because most of ppl buy 1tb/2tb plan on Dropbox and OneDrive do not use all the space? whereas s3 is pay as you go model.

Dylan16807• 5 years ago

For a personal product with so few size options, most of the capacity won't be used.

Glacier is worth noting as a comparison point, $4 or $1 per TB per month with more limits.

Backblaze said a couple years ago their cost to provide a low-redundancy TB per month was a bit over $3.

tyingq• 5 years ago

Mostly actual use billing vs potential use billing.

manigandham5• 5 years ago

Those are retail rates, big users get much better pricing. Dropbox used S3 for years until finally moving to their own datacenter to be more efficient.

And like others have said, users are charged for storage that many don't use so there's a lot of revenue padding. Same model used by the other clouds for consumer storage like Google Drive.

rcarmo2• 5 years ago

I did exactly that. I work at Microsoft now, but two years before I joined I went through the same process but kept Dropbox for many years solely for Linux support. Then they botched that, so I moved my Linux/Mac working trees into SyncThing (since I only need local sync anyway).

gtirloni3• 5 years ago

How have they botched Linux support? It works flawlessly for me and GDrive/OneDrive don't even come close.

jl6• 5 years ago

I’m a happy Dropbox customer because I use all of the 2TB space, they have a Linux client, and their syncing works far better than Google Drive and OneDrive. I can do things like modify git repositories, add and delete thousands of files, have files open for editing, rearrange large folders… - all within the Dropbox folder - and Dropbox manages to sync it without any issue, whereas when I tried the other two, there was a low threshold of “file change complexity” above which they choked.

I don’t use any of the add-on services like Paper.

I used to be disappointed that I couldn’t get an account larger than 2TB at a reasonable price, but then I adapted my workflow to split my data into hot/cold, with hot staying in Dropbox and cold going elsewhere. Because of this I could probably adapt to a smaller Dropbox account now.

gtirloni3• 5 years ago

Dropbox has the best Linux client of all. That's the only reason I keep paying.

leokennis• 5 years ago

My strategy:

- Stuff I am working on, documents, small stuff: iCloud Drive

- Stuff I want to consume (lossless music, movies) and larger files I occasionally need but that I don't need to update: https://www.transip.nl/stack/

- Stuff I want to archive and maybe need to retrieve at some point in the future: B2

secondaryacct• 5 years ago

Yeah I found it genius to have so much space anywhere I was for basically free when I was a poor student.

But then I got richer and with a 40TB NAS, a few $ per year hostname, an ip refresh script for the registrar and a vpn server included in the nas, well I have a monster dropbox equivalent and now that I have 5G, I dont even understand anymore why people dont just do that. You lose the ability to access docs offline but then you have massive space online without having to share it with american people (Im in China). In terms of reliability, modern NASes are really good and I only ever lost stuff when I got caught in trying btrfs lol

And with the recent temptation to scan cloud stuff for dangerous data, I feel more at ease with the NAS solution.

bsharitt• 5 years ago

I used to be a big fan of Dropbox, but my problem is that they don't have a lower paid tier like Google, Microsoft and Apple have for $2-$3. I need a little more than the free plan offers, but I don't need terabytes of space.

wiether2• 5 years ago

Dropbox user for personal stuff for many years, I'm definitely not happy about them adding weird add-ons like Paper or even worse, Passwords. Just focus on file sync/storage/sharing. And I absolutely don't understand the family plan, like you have the same storage (2TB) than a Premium account, but you have to share it between multiple people AND pay more. What ?

Also, I use OneDrive at work and even if I like its integration directly within Office (especially Excel), I have issues daily with the sync. Lots of conflicts, lots of "can't sync"... And even if I keep removing it, I keep getting two or three shortcuts on the left sidebar in Explorer and it annoys me quite a lot.

So for now I'm staying with Dropbox but I will have no issue switching ship if I see something better elsewhere or, worse, if they make bad choices.

caymanjim• 5 years ago

I don't see Dropbox surviving.

They're supposedly breaking even for the first time this month, after ten years, but growth is slowing dramatically. They have over 700 million users, but only 15 million paying users. Growth in paying users from 2019-2020 was only 8%, down from 12% the year before, and the numbers are more dramatic the farther back you go.

They're at cost parity with their primary competitors for the most basic plan ($9.99 for 1TB), but there are cheaper alternatives, especially for family plans. Dropbox doesn't have the economies of scale that Microsoft, Google, et. al. have, so storage remains a loss-leader for them. The only way they can make money is trying to upsell addons that most people don't want. If not for the inertia of being first to market, they wouldn't have many paying users. The year-over-year growth in paying customers says it all.

rootsudo• 5 years ago

For most users, the 1TB limit is gone and it's almost unlimited now.

michaelcampbell• 5 years ago

Yeah, me too (early adopter, paid version). My breaking point was the Windows client kept dying, SILENTLY. When I used it for keeping data in sync with my wife on her Windows machine, this was a total deal breaker.

Using Syncthing now, and it's been solid.

tra3• 5 years ago

I wonder what's stopping dropbox from revoking their API tokens. Isn't this competing directly with the "official" clients?

encryptluks2• 5 years ago

Why would it matter to them? They are already more expensive than other providers. Rclone connects to multiple cloud hosting solutions already too. If they revoked API access I'm pretty sure the backlash would be the final straw.

CrazyCatDog• 5 years ago

He only supports platforms that Dropbox does not officially support. They won’t revoke tokens, they’ll do something far worse—they’ll hire him!

Seattle3503• 5 years ago

What does Dropbox gain here?

q-rews• 5 years ago

Companies bundle everything into their flagship product to force everyone to use it. Direct API access means Dropbox can’t advertise either. Ask Twitter what they think about that.

ec109685• 5 years ago

What API token are you referring to? Given it is open source, how are they keeping the token secure?

sorry_outta_gas• 5 years ago

what is dropbox paper?

arthurcolle3• 5 years ago

New Age neo-hypertext document type (proprietary, of course) that supports collaboration using the Dropbox™ suite of services

SilverRed6• 5 years ago

So a competitor to google docs / office?

joshxyz• 5 years ago

its like gitbook / notion / google docs, except more laggier

daniel_iversen• 5 years ago

It's an online collaborative simple document editor/space where you can embed live web stuff into these virtual "pages" and hyperlink between them. It came out of Dropbox' acquisition of Hackpad (which itself was based on open-source Etherpad). Funnily enough, Google bought Etherpad and then I suspect that's what they used to create the revolutionary Google Wave in 2009, which of course they killed off years later (just to recently launch Smart Canvas or whatever it's called which is reminiscent of Wave). It's a cool product though, and I still (disclaimer: an ex-Dropboxer) use Dropbox Paper for lots of stuff (especially long form writing and research).

jazzyjackson3• 5 years ago

Would be cool to get around a limitation of Dropbox's native client: filenames with emojis (and other utf8 I assume) won't upload. If their filesystem doesn't like utf8, maybe the client could convert the offending filenames to base64 or punycode, and convert filenames back from the cloud... maybe I can find a place in the code to try this out, thanks for open sourcing. I notice you're using type hints in python and I've been wanting to learn more about that, would love to hear what toolchain is hip these days.

cerved5• 5 years ago

what kind of psychopath puts emojis in filenames??

beepboop43• 5 years ago

screenshots of a browser where your screenshots are automatically named by the application window you're taking a screenshot of. if that tab is an article or forum post or anything that has an emoji in its title, you're getting emojis in the filename. you only find out when you go to find the screenshot later and it's missing. fun stuff

wiether2• 5 years ago

I'm usually not a "you have to go the hard way before going the easy way"-guy, and I started the easy way actually, but using CLI every definitely changes the way you name your files. And I can't see (and don't want to) how you would manage files through CLI that contains emojis in their name...

jazzyjackson3• 5 years ago

lol

I use YouTube-dl on Reddit, so the headline becomes the file name. Lots of emojis in Reddit titles. On the “nature is fucking lit” subreddit, it seems to be a rule to start your title with a fire emoji.

https://www.reddit.com/r/NatureIsFuckingLit/

mastrsushi3• 5 years ago

What about this client is M1 specific?

NiekvdMaas• 5 years ago

Maestral provides a universal binary on macOS, so it runs natively on arm64. The official Dropbox client is x64-only, so it needs to run in an emulation layer (Rosetta) on a M1. For something low-level as a file syncing service, that's very unfortunate. There are loads of request on the Dropbox forum to support arm64, but no sight of it being added anytime soon.

mastrsushi3• 5 years ago

That either reads “we don’t have the resources to support our second largest OS platform” or there are too little users still using the native desktop client.

Mind you, this is a company that went out of their way to port a Linux client in 2011.

To see them hesitate with m1 is shocking

NoPicklez3• 5 years ago

I joined Dropbox in around 2010 and used it religiously through University to ensure all my work was being backed up as I worked on assignments. I used it for group projects and it was fantastic, at the time it was the most reliable cloud storage and I tried Microsoft Live Mesh, Live drive etc and found they were unreliable in syncing changes to edited files. Dropbox was flawless.

I then shifted into using it to also back up my photos from my mobile and camera, however my photo storage started to grow and this year I switched to Google Drive & Photos for much much less than Dropbox was offering per month. I think 100GB of Google Drive & Photos is $25.99 per year opposed to $184 per year for 1TB with DropBox. I don't need 1TB but 100GB is perfect compared to 10GB with Dropbox (that I had).

cerved5• 5 years ago

It really bothers me how hard it is to download all your photos

lazide• 5 years ago

How so? If you use takeout it’s decently smooth. I have over a terabyte in G photos.

NoPicklez3• 5 years ago

I find it quite easy, with Dropbox and Google Photos you just install the app and enable background sync. It's never let me down.

citizenkeen• 5 years ago

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe Google Photos stores pictures in original size anymore.

zo1• 5 years ago

It's a setting, so you can pick. It used to be from back when Google photos offered unlimited storage for compressed photos (that they don't offer anymore Iirc).

NoPicklez3• 5 years ago

They do offer both a space saving setting which changes the quality and an original size option.

greazy• 5 years ago

I am extremely happy that my institution has it's own cloud storage and uses ownCloud. I have never had to deal with Dropbox, OneDrive or gDrive bullshit.

Hamuko• 5 years ago

I used ownCloud for like a month before giving up and moving to Google Drive. It was so slow and clumsy.

pizza234• 5 years ago

I'm fairly happy of the OwnCloud/NextCloud alternative, but they're not very well-engineered products (although they got better over the last years). Definitely much better than Dropbox on Linux though, which is clearly a third-class citizen for the Dropbox company.

The NC client (and I assume also OC) can still generate conflicts even on a single machine, when the network/server connection is not stable. I also remember the Nginx default settings for OwnCloud being suboptimal.

Long ago, the NC/OC client was slow to sync, but now it's snappy.

SilverRed6• 5 years ago

Nextcloud works decent for normal file stuff but doesn't really have a solution for photos. You can turn on the auto photo sync for a folder but after a few thousand files it gets unusably slow.

philippgerard• 5 years ago

Sam is doing an awesome job. On an M1 mac, the official dropbox client is a total no-go from a resource usage point of view. Maestral is a lifesaver for me/my memory usage.

toxik2• 5 years ago

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?

renewiltord2• 5 years ago

Considering the history of the Dropbox YC announcement on HN, surely you must be joking with #1. It is possibly the most famous HN incident of all time.

toxik2• 5 years ago

It's a word-for-word copy of that glorious comment.

slig• 5 years ago

This one is pretty cool as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079

SrslyJosh• 5 years ago

Score: +2 Funny, +1 Troll

manigandham5• 5 years ago

For reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

GekkePrutser3• 5 years ago

Well found!

walteweiss• 5 years ago

Your comment changes the context dramatically! Very well done, sir!

Macha3• 5 years ago

Ultimately the comment was somewhat correct though. Dropbox's core product is a feature. It misidentified the competition as tech-savvy users, but ultimately it turned out to be MS/Apple/Google. And consequently when those competitors added that feature, Dropbox's growth has stalled and they've been flailing around to find a USP since.

It was enough to get a decade of VC money and even start breaking even in 2020, but it's a far more tumultuous journey than their initial user uptake would have indicated.

TroisM2• 5 years ago

Most people I know e-mail files to themselves or host them somewhere online to be able to perform presentations

I used to do that, but not anymore... why not use an E2E encrypted Element/Matrix channel instead?

bayindirh4• 5 years ago

Because syncthing is much more simpler. :)

vertis• 5 years ago

This is just a rip-off of Google Drive.

No-one creates anything original any more.

:troll:

rockbruno• 5 years ago

The point where they say that you can build it trivially and then proceed to list a bunch of obviously not trivial steps always gets me. It really captures that senior engineer vibe.

agys2• 5 years ago

I’m looking forward to test this client…!

Dropbox was an exceptional product with perfect OS integration and interesting features like the “public folder” with an added web server, a versioning system, etc.

My use case was not storing big backup files in the cloud but synchronise files between several machines: keeping compatibility with older systems/devices and smaller but cheaper DropBox (100GB?) sizes would have kept me as client.

At every update the OS plugin has become more bloated and incomprehensible…

omniscient_oce2• 5 years ago

This is me exactly too.

iamcreasy2• 5 years ago

features like the “public folder” with an added web server

I thought Dropbox disabled this feature?

From here: https://help.dropbox.com/files-folders/share/public-folder

Excerpt:

Using the public folder to render HTML content :: As of October 3, 2016 Dropbox Basic (free) users can no longer use public links to render HTML content in a web browser. If you're a Basic user, and you created a website that directly displays HTML content from your Dropbox account, it will no longer render in the browser.

Effective September 1, 2017, Dropbox Plus and Business users can no longer render HTML content, and the Public folder and its sharing functionality have been disabled.

agys2• 5 years ago

That’s why I wrote “Dropbox was…” in my lament.

gullevek• 5 years ago

Dropbox is still the best

OneDrive (I use it at work): if one file fails, all files stop syncing. It sometimes tries to sync some files from teams and just never finishes. It also has very strange file name restrictions. if the file name is bad (eg whitespace at the end) it will just stop syncing anything. Still better than Google Drive as it is a standard folder. if it crashes your data is HERE.

google drive (I used that at work): on MacOS is it is utter crap as it is not a folder but a mounted thing. So it is not "there" when you login. So every application that tries to open a file on google drive just fails. Because it is not an apple FS a lot of apple apps will complain. MySQL Workbench will often fail to save and often destroy files. If not running it is not mounted and none of your files are here. you also can't copy out google files (writer, spreadsheet, etc). For whatever reason.

iCloud: some strange folder nested hundred levels deep. I only use it because of some ios stuff.

So yeah, Dropbox might be pricey but through all the years it really worked very well for me. (And I really don't care about any of the other services they have)

simonh• 5 years ago

google drive (I used that at work): on MacOS is it is utter crap as it is not a folder but a mounted thing.

That's Google File Stream. There is also a client called Backup and Sync that works like Dropbox, I'm using it now. These are apparently being merged into a single client to be called Google Drive Desktop.

Macha3• 5 years ago

It felt like when they went from the original Google Drive desktop client to Google File Stream + Backup and Sync, they really wanted to push people to File Stream so they could eventually discontinue backup and sync with extra lock in for users. But that didn't turn out the way they wanted, with most users opting for the relatively unbranded Backup and Sync, so we're moving back to the single program.

I wonder if this is a retreat from that strategy, or if the single program will be used as a way to nudge Backup and Sync users to adopt the File Stream flow.

bayindirh4• 5 years ago

I use all of them (Google, OneDrive, Dropbox) due to various needs, but Dropbox is my primary account too.

I've found that inSync is a wonderful client for GoogleDrive and OneDrive for all major platforms. It has some nice features like out of tree syncing (sync a cloud folder to anywhere on the filesystem and keep it synced), and .gitignore like ignore syntax.

I'd recommend it heavily. It's a one-time-payment application with no limitations.

They've added dropbox support recently.

austhrow743• 5 years ago

Is it on top of their respective clients or instead of?

beardbound• 5 years ago

I was an early user of insync (Linux and google seive) and had issues with it when they added one drive support. I tried it out when I was getting all of my stuff off of google a while back. I pay for office and one drive so if I could consolidate it would be nice.

JamesAdir• 5 years ago

I had very good and reliable experience with Box.

mbesto• 5 years ago

This. I've also used Box. Simply nothing compares to Dropbox's sync'n capabilities.

rbut• 5 years ago

If you're looking for an open-source self-hosted alternative to Dropbox, I've found Seafile to be flawless. Seadrive is also nice if you want to access your data as if it were a network drive.

* Not affiliated with seafile, just really like their software.

https://www.seafile.com/

Joeri• 5 years ago

I use syncthing. Open source peer to peer folder sync. There is no cloud copy, but for me this is a feature, and the rare times I want to share a file with someone else I manually upload it to cloud storage (onedrive or gdrive).

https://syncthing.net/

infinitezest• 5 years ago

I'm actually surprised to see this comment so far down on HN.

I switched after Dropbox started imposing a device limit. There was a but of a learning curve to get it all set up and the quality of the client software can be hit-or-miss. That said, the core functionality (syncing files between devices) has been rock solid.

knxl• 5 years ago

Well that's how you make companies angry!

Causality1• 5 years ago

Does using this to bypass Dropbox's device limit violate the EULA? is it possible this could get a Dropbox account banned?

matthewmacleod• 5 years ago

I really, really want to like Dropbox – but man it feels like they're trying as hard as possible to drive me away with the Mac client.

I honestly just want an app that sits there any syncs a folder of files to cloud storage for me. Add some settings and status information, keep the nice features like partial/"smart" sync—along with some shell integration so I can share stuff easily—and it would be absolutely great. I just want to give them some money in exchange for providing some useful services.

But it takes genuine effort to make a UI this unappealing. Why is it using it's own non-system font?? Why is the text blurry – in some places, and not in others? Why are all the checkbox icons broken? Why does it include a terrible file manager application??

Bah, I know I'm just yelling at clouds and the reasons are more complex. But I am definitely finding more and more apps that I've used for ages are just getting _actively worse_ for my use-cases and it's so frustrating.

kasperset• 5 years ago

Dropbox remains for me the best syncing software especially with Delta sync. No issues like file name restrictions that I have encountered in OneDrive. I like Google Photos and it remains my favorite photo storage solution. I find Dropbox more user friendly with features like folder rewind. For sure, I would like cheaper pricing plan with 200GB Storage.

GekkePrutser3• 5 years ago

I would love to have something like this for OneDrive!! Open Source OneDrive support is so poor right now. There's https://github.com/abraunegg/onedrive which is OK (I don't mind it being console-only) but it lacks virtual files and syncing my entire box to every system is just not an option.

Even if MS would build a client it would probably be Linux only which still won't help me for FreeBSD.

whydid• 5 years ago

Can we all take a moment to discuss how Dropbox, the publicly-traded company with a 1b market cap, still doesn't have a native m1 client for MacOS?

Does anyone have insight on what's taking them so long? I assume they forked an older version of Electron that doesn't support m1.

gwbas1c• 5 years ago

The new Dropbox client is written in Rust.

You can't build a file sync client with Electron. You need very granular filesystem access, which is something that Electron does poorly.

coreyward• 5 years ago

Rust got M1 support in November, 2020. There are many other Rust apps that work on M1. This isn't a viable excuse for a publicly traded behemoth that keeps taking on new verticals while ignoring the one feature users care about.

zug_zug• 5 years ago

Now all we need is the ability to set a client-side encryption key file that applies transparently before upload and on download. This would then be emailed to yourself as a backup. Then you can be secure in your effects.

pgtruesdell• 5 years ago

Dropbox is great, but their app? Not so much these days. This is absolutely awesome.

Now can someone do this for OneDrive? As bad as we might complain about the new Dropbox app, OneDrive is a giant garbage fire.

phendrenad2• 5 years ago

Now we just need an open-source server to go with it.

dc3k• 5 years ago

This looks to be a nice alternative to the official app, which I mostly dislike due to its non-standard gigantic popup that appears when I click on it in the system tray. I only use Dropbox to store my 1password vault so I don't really care about any bandwidth concerns.

michelb• 5 years ago

I would love to see a performance comparison with the regular Dropbox client, in terms of cpu/ram use.

guard0g• 5 years ago

Nextcloud is an open-source Dropbox-like system with clients for multiple OS and decent security.

Open-source Dropbox client, with multi-account, no-device-limit and M1 support

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