Introducing a more powerful Dropbox Pro

https://blog.dropbox.com/2014/08/introducing-more-powerful-dropbox-pro/

by markmassie • 12 years ago

139 144 12 years ago

blog.dropbox.com

of4• 12 years ago

lol who cares?

dchuk• 12 years ago

People didn't downvote you because they care about Dropbox Pro, they downvoted you for saying nothing of substance and sounding like a child.

__xtrimsky3• 12 years ago

I do care about dropbox, it's the only cloud system that works well on linux systems . It used to be overpriced but now the pricing is good. Also Google Drive is terrible on Windows if like me you have a lot of files. One drive is limited to 2GB of file size.

I have yet to find a great alternative to it.

CalRobert2• 12 years ago

Owncloud is great, and avoids the moral complexities of contributing to a board that includes at least one endorser of torture and warrantless surveillance.

of4• 12 years ago

I guess I just don't like the name "Dropbox", haha.

nacs2• 12 years ago

Reposting an earlier comment of mine:

it's the only cloud system that works well on linux systems

AeroFS (what I use), Bittorrent Sync and Syncthing (Golang, OSS) all work well on Linux (and Mac/Win).

of4• 12 years ago

Whoever downvoted my previous comment, can you explain to me why you care about Dropbox Pro?

s3r3nity• 12 years ago

I didn't downvote, but it wasn't a productive comment -- it was just snarky and condescending.

I don't think this is front-page worthy of HN, sure, but anytime someone at Google/Dropbox/Apple does so much as pass gas, people around here get excited.

kenny_r• 12 years ago

Helping Dropbox grow is arguably the single greatest achievement of YC to date. I think in that light it makes sense that news about Dropbox gets on the front page of news.ycombinator.com.

mikeash5• 12 years ago

I don't really care about it, but your comment was worthless and deserved to be downvoted. If you don't care about a story, ignore it. If you think it's wildly inappropriate, flag it. If you feel compelled to share your disdain with others, I recommend Twitter for that.

jonnynezbo4• 12 years ago

I've been waiting on this for a long time. Now Dropbox might actually be a viable, affordable off-site backup solution.

ptwiggens• 12 years ago

Dropbox isn't ideal for backup at all.

Look into Crashplan. Client-side encryption, unlimited versioning, never deletes files, and only $6/month for truly unlimited backup.

jonnynezbo4• 12 years ago

I'm already on the CrashPlan Family Plan. I love it. In all reality, I doubt I will get rid of Crashplan any time soon.

StavrosK4• 12 years ago

Does it have an OSS Linux client, even headless?

All I want is to encryptedly back up some directories on my home server, but nothing* really does that. I use SpiderOak at the moment, but it's not OSS.

* Except attic, but I'd rather pay for a service as important as this (I don't trust the remote server to not lose files): http://www.stavros.io/posts/holy-grail-backups/

anu_gupta• 12 years ago

More granular permissioning, and an increase in space to 1TB. Not bad.

PankajGhosh• 12 years ago

I do not have a need of 1TB of space, just 100GB would do. It would be great if they provided a tier of 100GB plan (just like Google Drive)

zzleeper2• 12 years ago

No one (almost) needs 1TB... the way they can afford it is they expect most people to use at most a few hundred GB, but with the peace of mind that they could store more

JoeAltmaier• 12 years ago

You'd be surprised how fast design artifacts can add up. 25 draft copies of a 12-layer image can be a GB, and that's one image in one project.

__xtrimsky3• 12 years ago

I don't need 1TB, but I need more than 100GB.

If Google Drive offered 500GB I would go with them, for now I'll stay with Dropbox as it's the same pricing (Dropbox's client is better quality).

rikkus2• 12 years ago

Personal photos and videos I don't want to lose, which are of course backed up to actual backup systems, but I also want access to wherever I am. That's what I need 1TB for.

jliptzin• 12 years ago

Indeed, Dropbox can respond to google drive in two ways: (1) drop the price of the existing plan to match google drive or (2) increase the storage to compete on the $/GB/mo rate. Option 2 is much better for them because they can keep all their existing $9.99/mo customers on the same recurring plan even though the vast majority don't need the extra storage anyway.

zzleeper2• 12 years ago

"You now have 1,045.GB .." Quite good news! I now just need a way to exclude some files (.aux .tmp) and will be set!

jonnynezbo4• 12 years ago

Yea, we need a .dbignore, or something of the sort.

micheljansen• 12 years ago

You mean like this? http://konolige.com/dbignore/

spindritf• 12 years ago

A comment on the site points it out already but they charge European users more now (€9.99 which is $13.17 currently). Is there an external reason?

Does that include VAT? Did they get a datacentre somewhere in the EU?

jrnkntl3• 12 years ago

Yeah, what's up with that? Apple-esque practices for digital goods. I just used a VPN to purchase the $ plan instead.

petercooper3• 12 years ago

If you bought it personally (i.e. a B2C sale) you should be fine, but as a warning for any (update: UK based, at least) VAT-registered traders or businesses, you will need to reverse charge the VAT which mostly defeats the point.

petercooper3• 12 years ago

It's weird because it doesn't really say anywhere, but prices should include VAT, although unless they're selling as an EU-based or VAT-registered company, it's not mandatory.

Since this seems more B2C than B2B, I'm assuming the £79/year I see includes VAT, so that's £65.83 without 20% VAT, which is $109.17 at today's rates. I would not consider this too unfairly deviant of the US pricing considering the volatility of exchange rates.

chmars6• 12 years ago

Many American cloud providers, software vendors etc. charged their USD prices in EUR to European customers, even to European customers outside the Euro zone. An American VPN and sometimes some further fiddling with your browsers usually allows to purchase in USD …

For my commercial purchases, i.e., purchases as a company, I have to pay the local VAT anyway upon import including digital services like Dropbox.

f3llowtraveler• 12 years ago

All that matters: Does Dropbox encrypt my data on the client side, before storing it on the server?

Or does Dropbox have the power to pilfer through my data, along with official snoopers and hackers?

adamors• 12 years ago

They would say that. Like SpirderOak are saying it: https://spideroak.com/zero-knowledge/ or Crashplan: http://www.code42.com/crashplan/features/security/

chmars6• 12 years ago

Dropbox does not claim to encrypt your data on the client side. They only claim encryption on their servers but that is not helpful in terms of encryption of your data …

In CrashPlan, you can at least set your own private key if you like. You still need to trust the provider/vendor, however, the software is at least built to do local encryption. Dropbox does not work that way.

chmars6• 12 years ago

No, Dropbox does NOT encrypt your data on the client site.

Alternatives would be Spideroak and Wuala or addon software like Boxcryptor. They work but not as flawlessly and user-friendly as Dropbox usually does …

StavrosK4• 12 years ago

I've found EncFS over Dropbox to be pretty good, retaining the best of both worlds.

jpalomaki• 12 years ago

Even if they did encrypt the data client side, it would be pretty easy for them to also take a copy of the encryption key.

If you want to have security against the cloud storage provider, it is better to use some other encryption solution.

lingben2• 12 years ago

I don't think you understand how encryption works.

fein3• 12 years ago

Is there a reason the old thread was killed and this up in its place?

I thought the sales page contained better information than the blog post.

That aside, I feel this needs to be brought up in every Dropbox thread:

Get rid of Condoleezza Rice and I'll happily use your product.

sheetjs2• 12 years ago

One possible explanation: Dropbox is a YC company, HN is a YC website, and the previous discussion seemed to take a turn for the negative

fein3• 12 years ago

As it should. We are a community voicing our opinions about a company. If we find they are doing wrong, shouldn't we say something about it?

dang2• 12 years ago

The previous thread set off the HN software's flamewar detector. No moderator touched it.

fein3• 12 years ago

Thanks for the insight.

Was this thread then manually flagged as "noflame"? It seems that the general sentiments on HN lean toward the "very critical" spectrum whenever dropbox is brought up, which seems like it would set off the flamewar filter constantly.

chmars6• 12 years ago

It is disappointing that Dropbox still does not offer any options for secure storage. Personally, you might be fine with unencrypted stories but at least for companies in Europe, having (all) your data with an American cloud provider without local encryption on your side is simply not a legal option …

Dropbox is a great service, however, it would be even greater if I could use Dropbox for all my data and not only selected data where I do not consider local encryption necessary.

(I know about add-on software like Boxcryptor but all options I have tested so far were not user-friendly enough … Dropbox competitors with encryption like Spideroak and Wuala work good enough but are in no way as user-friendly and convenient as Dropbox.)

lingben2• 12 years ago

Agreed. This was the first thing I checked. Still no client side encryption! Truly unfathomable in light of current world events, competitive offerings and the feasibility of the required technical implementation.

drdaeman3• 12 years ago

Dropbox competitors with encryption like Spideroak and Wuala

Unless one doesn't really cares about security and wants encryption for the sake of having encryption, there's no way their implementations could be considered sufficient.

Without audit you're just taking their word for it — which is exactly as when you take Dropbox's word that they won't peek at your data (unencrypted or possibly encrypted but one can't verify that). And to audit those one needs to spend a lot of time reverse engineering their applications, and then auto-update mechanism could render those efforts void at any moment. I've spent about a weekend debugging and looking at decompiled SpiderOak code and while I hadn't found anything suspicious (although I'm not a crypto or security expert) the only judgement I was certain with was "this behemoth's too complex to study in detail, not worth the time to continue the research"

The point is, the data could be encrypted, but it's pointless to just have the encryption — to assume some security one must be certain about many aspects of how it's done — when, how and where encryption keys are generated, when, where and how data's processed, what are exact crypto algorithms used and how they are composed together and so on. And, obviously, a possibility to verify the description completely matches the actual implementation.

So, I think, security should be really done by a separate software module that could be completely reviewed by anyone (from tech-savvy end-users to security researchers) and can't be remotely auto-updated without explicit user consent.

dmix• 12 years ago

I don't know about SpiderOak but I totally trust Tarsnap.

But agreed we have to trust the software companies/devs when using crypto.

Not many people really trust Dropbox anymore to build client-side encryption themselves. But you could use a different program for encryption with dropbox as simple storage. That being said, you still have to trust the Dropbox binaries installed on your system as well. Security paranoia can go deep.

chmars6• 12 years ago

It is not sufficient but it might be enough to fulfill compliance requirements. Yep, that is only cover your ass security but it is still better than no encryption at all … the glass is half full vs. the glass is half empty although we should of course aim for the full glass.

Shorel2• 12 years ago

Wuala is user friendly enough. I don't know what magic Dropbox has that makes it more user friendly than Wuala.

But Wuala doesn't work without a network connection, which makes it pointless to me.

raymondh• 12 years ago

It is unclear whether the packrat add-on for unlimited versioning is still available for Dropbox Pro.

Styrke• 12 years ago

I think it is only available if you were already signed up for it. I just chose to continue with the packrat add-on for my pro account. It seems like the alternative they are now offering is only extended version history. (which would save changes for a year)

jrs235• 12 years ago

It looks like they also changed packrat to only include/keep one year of version history instead of forever.

projectileboy2• 12 years ago

So I have the $20/month a plan, and my reward appears to be that I pay twice as much and still have 200GB...? Do I have to cancel and re-subscribe? Anyone from Dropbox out there..???

ayrx2• 12 years ago

Already a Pro user? Dropbox will update automatically in the next couple days. You don’t have to do a thing.

Looks like you just have to wait a few days.

nroach• 12 years ago

Plus, if you're on a larger plan the upgrade is to 10x your current space. So 2TB.

projectileboy2• 12 years ago

D'oh! Thanks for pointing that out. Sorry for the noise.

jingo2• 12 years ago

I've got something I like better than Dropbox. It's called rdiff.

It does one thing only: deduplication.

All the other stuff needed for remote, incremental backups, e.g., moving files back and forth over a network, can be done with other open source tools. I think I have a pretty good command of moving files around with open source software... I do not need a third party to help me via an obfuscated blob of Python and who knows what else.

I like having control over my backups versus trusting it all to some closed-source, third party, "all-in-one" application.

In my mind having control and transparency will always be more powerful than handing over my data deduplication and backup to a third party, such as "Dropbox".

But I imagine there are few others who would agree. Forgive me for not loving Dropbox. Maybe some day I will see the light.

ayrx2• 12 years ago

Don't think of Dropbox as backup. Think of Dropbox as a convenient way of syncing files across multiple platforms, both traditional and mobile.

I'm a big fan of open source when it works but there is nothing as seamless as Dropbox when it comes to syncing.

SandB0x• 12 years ago

What do you mean by better? My grandparents manage to use Dropbox. I think that's pretty amazing.

mikeash5• 12 years ago

How do I set up these tools to automatically sync a set of files between multiple computers and make them accessible from my smartphone and tablet?

ewzimm• 12 years ago

It's been mentioned in a few other comments, but ownCloud does all that.

https://owncloud.org/

You don't even need to set it up yourself:

https://owncloud.org/providers/

fit2rule4• 12 years ago

I wish OS vendors weren't asleep at the wheel. This sort of service needs to be integrated into the OS. I'm sick of having an OS that doesn't include next-generation features like seamless p2p filesharing. I guess its time to make one ..

cbhl2• 12 years ago

You mean like Windows 8 and OneDrive? Or OS X and iCloud? Or Ubuntu and Ubuntu One(now discontinued)?

fit2rule4• 12 years ago

These are just backup services between Microsft/Apple/Ubuntu, Inc., and the users.

What I want is true p2p. Like, nobody in between necessary, because the OS has everything onboard to make it happen. That sort of 'asleep at the wheel'..

mayneack• 12 years ago

Mac, Windows, and Ubuntu all do. Half the reason to use dropbox is that it works on all of them.

fit2rule4• 12 years ago

The point is that seamless peer-to-peer hasn't happened, at the OS level. If Dropbox' NS servers go splooey, there goes your backup.

However if me and every family member want to share our own private files, internally across the vast Internet, without any 3rd-party interaction - i.e. really peer-to-peer, only the open-source/3rd-party-app route works, feasibly, at the moment.

Which is what I mean when I say that I think that OS designers are asleep at the wheel; or, perhaps, brain-dead. An OS which does point to point encryption across untrusted networks, successfully, and which wraps up the whole thing in a workable GUI provided by the OS vendor .. its just not there yet. I suppose soon, though.

jamesbritt6• 12 years ago

Dropbox is morally corrupt and support for them by HN users is disappointing.

I wrote to Dropbox and said I wanted to cancel my account and get a pro-rated refund because of their hiring of Condoleezza Rice. Her involvement in the Iraq war and the mass surveillance of Americans is deplorable.

A few days after my request my account was converted to the free version, with the limitations of the free version. I could no longer sync any files. When I saw this I assumed I was going to get the refund.

Days passed. I asked about the refund. The support email included disturbingly fawning about Ms. Rice and how amazing she was, and insisted that the Dropbox ToS made it flat-out impossible for them to issue any refunds. My account was changed back to allow the 100 GB of storage and Dropbox acted like it never botched my request.

It almost funny that they would not even respect differing opinion on their hiring of Ms. Rice and graciously offer a refund to those offended by such a move. Hiding behind their own ToS just shows how deaf they are to the matter. They basically don't give a fuck, and they don't have to because they have enough people who are more concerned with convenience than principles as amply shown on HN.

There are very good alternatives to Dropbox. Both SpiderOak and ownCloud work great on Windows, OSX, and Linux. You can get managed ownCloud hosting if you don't want to set up your own: https://owner.io.

It's puzzling that anyone would trust them with their data given their behavior.

encoderer• 12 years ago

Why are you entitled to a refund? You disagree with their hiring policies? You already paid the $99 for 1 year of service. You already bought it. It's done. Your option is to cancel at renewal or not.

That's my take, anyway. I also asked for a refund when Google announced their far cheaper plans for GDrive, and this just a month after I renewed. They told me the same thing -- a policy of no partial refunds. So I asked them to ensure I would not be auto rebilled, and that was that. Why exactly are they morally corrupt for this?

jljljl2• 12 years ago

If OP's account is true, the took away the features but then refused to provide a refund. At best, that's a pretty serious customer service fail.

sheetjs2• 12 years ago

There are two logically consistent ways of handling this type of request:

A) Pro-rate the cost and immediately drop down to a free tier or cancel the service

B) Disable renewal, but keep the same level of service until the renewal date.

According to OP, he was knocked down to free tier but not issued a refund. That is incredibly odd, given that he already paid for the service

jamesbritt6• 12 years ago

You already bought it. It's done. Your option is to cancel at renewal or not.

This is technically true.

In the bigger picture we should judge people and companies by what they choose to do, not by what they have to do.

Had Drobox even replied that they understood my complaint but decided that it did not warrant their making an exception to their ToS I might be less disgusted. At least it would show some sort of backbone. Instead they pretend their hands are tied. That's dishonest.

dabernathy89• 12 years ago

It almost funny that they would not even respect differing opinion on their hiring of Ms. Rice and graciously offer a refund to those offended by such a move.

I'm not surprised at all that a company doesn't want to refund you because of a political disagreement you have with them.

jamesbritt6• 12 years ago

I'm not surprised at all that a company doesn't want to refund you because of a political disagreement you have with them.

What's important here is how they handled this. A company can issue a refund anytime it likes, the ToS notwithstanding. Those are rules they made up.

Telling me that it is impossible to issue a refund is just lying. It's not impossible; it's very doable.

If they (or any company) deliberately choose not to issue a refund they should state it like that, in plain language, not pretend that they have no choice in the matter.

Likewise with botching my account downgrade; only after I pointed out there error did they restore the quota but then acted like it never happened.

It isn't simply the lack of a refund, it's the bogus way they did it. Actions like this reveal the character of a company.

m_myers• 12 years ago

they have enough people who are more concerned with convenience than principles as amply shown on HN.

Perhaps you could instead consider that not everyone shares your beliefs or principles.

panarky• 12 years ago

I canceled my pro account when Dropbox first hired Rice, and I haven't looked back. It took far too long to get my data out, but it was well worth the effort.

rsync4• 12 years ago

If only there were a cloud storage provider that took a strong, substantive stand against government surveillance and supported true security and privacy for their users.

As long as we're dreaming, wouldn't it be great if you could use this make-believe product with standard unix tools on the command line, and access over SSH ?

I suppose a fanciful firm like this would offer a deep "HN readers" discount to anyone that asked.

If only such a company existed ...

Someone12342• 12 years ago

rsync.net aren't really competing with DropBox so I don't see the relevance.

DropBox has multi-platform support on all major mobile and desktop platforms. They also have a GUI application that will "just work" for syncing your files off site.

rsync.net is really UNIX only since the offering doesn't work particularly well when not combined with popular Linux/UNIX tools (e.g. rsync). On Windows you're left using FTP and doing the sync-ing yourself somehow and there is no mobile presence at all.

The software is 1/2 of DropBox's (and Google Drive's) value. rsync.net is certainly inexpensive but not really competing for the same business or customers.

runjake• 12 years ago

From https://www.dropbox.com/terms

  No Refunds. You may cancel your Dropbox Paid Account 
  at any time but you won't be issued a refund.

Multics3• 12 years ago

From Wikipedia[1].

'In the summer of 2014, Sam Altman became president of Y Combinator. Y Combinator also announced a Board of Overseers: Brian Chesky, cofounder of AirBnB, Adora Cheung, cofounder of HomeJoy, Patrick Collison, cofounder of Stripe, Drew Houston, founder of DropBox, Jessica Livingston, David Rusenko, Emmett Shear, and Sam Altman, cofounder of Loopt.'

Y Combinator, and by extension HN, is in cahoots with the people at Dropbox.

if investment > ethics: keep story on front page

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y_Combinator_%28company%29

oskarth• 12 years ago

This isn't a game of three generations of punishment. The problem is with Rice and her role at Dropbox, not everyone connected to Dropbox.

rwallace• 12 years ago

So you don't approve of Condoleezza Rice backing the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Okay, I agree with you that the invasion of Iraq was the wrong thing to do.

I don't approve of you attacking Dropbox, and Ms. Rice in her capacity as a Dropbox employee, for actions that have nothing to do with the company.

Would you like it if I wrote to your employer demanding you be fired because of your actions here? No? You would say, wouldn't you, that your posts on HN have nothing to do with your employer and regardless of what I think of your posts, it would be a dick move on my part to drag your employer into it?

Do unto others as you would have done unto you.

fit2rule4• 12 years ago

How well do you know "Ms. Rice"? Personally? Professionally? Politically? Psychologically?

Ms. Rice, and her associates, were responsible for committing acts of open war on another country and in so doing violated - criminally - much international as well as national law. Charges at the ICC mean something. Such individuals, no matter what, should not be allowed more access to the masses until they have answered for their crimes.

The fact that this is of no consequence to someone who 'publically defends Ms. Rice' may not surprise me. She must answer to crimes against humanity, sir! This is why she should not be associated with the Western worlds growing fascination for documenting itself ..

mbillie13• 12 years ago

I switched to Copy since the Condoleeza Rice situation and I have had no problems whatsoever. I have the app running on a macbook pro, an imac and two android mobile devices. It's also about half the price that Dropbox charges. I recommend it.

gnufied• 12 years ago

Honest question, how good is their client? The Google Drive client on OSX appears to be bit shit and I am considering moving everything away to a new system.

mbillie13• 12 years ago

Honest answer: it seems to be a bit slower than Dropbox, but it's still pretty good. I haven't had any issues yet (no lost files). They also offer the same auto-upload of your photos from your smartphone, which I am running on an Android device, and that works wonderfully as well. I'm a very satisfied customer.

rikkus2• 12 years ago

Their max personal plan seems to be 500GB for $14.99/month. Dropbox Pro is now 1TB for £9.99/month.

mbillie13• 12 years ago

Ah, I did not check the updated dropbox pricing. At the time, I was getting 250GB for $9.99/mo, and Dropbox was offering me 100GB for the same price iirc.

Shorel2• 12 years ago

I switched to hubiC.

I think right now any american company is in bed with NSA until proved otherwise.

cryoshon• 12 years ago

Ditch Condi Rice and apologize for allowing her in, and I'll consider using Dropbox again.

As it stands, there are an abundance of other companies doing the same thing as Dropbox which do not associate with known war criminals. This makes them more desirable business partners.

hackpm• 12 years ago

http://www.quora.com/Why-did-Dropbox-slash-its-price-99-yr-f...

chaostheory• 12 years ago

Was privacy ever a feature? Will it ever become a Dropbox feature or is it impossible due to either today's political climate or Dropbox's internal views on the matter?

rogerbinns2• 12 years ago

Dropbox having good Linux support is a big reason I use them personally and professionally (both paid).

But geez do they mess other things up. For example you can only share top level folders. We have to share with various outside parties and that limitation leads to a very cluttered file structure.

The solution for multiple accounts is beyond annoying. The correct way of doing it how google does it - you provide however many sets of credentials and can then easily select the current set to use/view. Dropbox do this idiotic thing where you tie your personal one into a business one, then logging into the latter also logs you into the former and everything works as though it is one account, with enforced folder names. I'm sure there is some weak justification about how this prevents issues with free accounts, but making paying users have a horrible time isn't the way to achieve that.

nacs2• 12 years ago

Dropbox having good Linux support is a big reason I use them personally

AeroFS (what I use), Bittorrent Sync and Syncthing (Golang, OSS) all support Linux (and Mac/Win) and are good alternatives.

rogerbinns2• 12 years ago

While they all have desirable attributes, especially for individual usage, they are harder to cooperate with others. (By that I mean try to get friends and relatives to use them with you, when those folk aren't tech savvy and certainly don't have their own storage.)

Rainymood• 12 years ago

I feel like I missed out on something major reading these comments.

What have I missed in the last 6 months concerning db and Condoleezza Rice?

kakashi19• 12 years ago

EncFS over Dropbox works best for me: http://ninjatips.com/encrypt-dropbox-using-encfs/

Artemis2• 12 years ago

A quick reminder of the practices of Dr. Rice, member of Dropbox's Board of directors: http://drop-dropbox.com.

jkmcf• 12 years ago

The biggest benefit of Dropbox is the mobile app client support. On iOS, you see Dropbox and iCloud support, but rarely anything else.

When other sync services like Box and friends get more integration, I’ll gladly switch away since I would love some sort of encryption, which Dropbox, and Evernote damn you, appear unable or unwilling to implement.

Introducing a more powerful Dropbox Pro

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