I am tempted to drop in the drug dealer and pricing comparison 
Flood the market with cheap stuff and then when everybody is hooked, raise the price
The reason it tends to not work in technology is because there is competition; in this case Google Drive.
My wife uses Google Drive while I use Dropbox and she has far more problems, both technical and UI.
I was intending to use her experience to decide whether to migrate and have decided against it.
Dropbox, as I wrote elsewhere here, has a better user interface because for example you can get the share link for a dropbox folder (or for an individual file) before the data is fully uploaded to the DB server.
So e.g. you can send somebody the link with a “try this an hour from now” note.
Google Drive greys-out the link options until the sync is complete, which is obviously safer but is probably less convenient.
OneDrive I have had various weird issues with; it doesn’t sync properly across different devices.
Given that all these services are data volume limited (unless you pay of the order of $100/year) I have looked at the Synology self hosted option, plus Owncloud but decided against it because it is either hard to make it secure or the clients don’t work too well. But if you can make these work well enough for your requirements, or have concerns about google’s snooping, then you could get terabytes of storage for free and totally under your control. OTOH you then have the admin overhead… this is why running a forum costs way more than the hosting cost
Worth a mention that Dropbox and Google Drive will pull your account (especially if free) if they see too much bandwidth coming out. This is why one should never publicly post one of the share links.
Dropbox has an interesting “feature” in that you can test if somebody, anywhere in the world, has uploaded a given file to it. You do this by uploading the suspected file and timing the upload. If the upload happens really fast (say a few secs for a 10MB file) then dropbox already has a copy and has merely created a link to yours This is reportedly used by companies to see if internal documents have leaked, for example.
I use Microsoft Onedrive which works brilliantly and interfaces seamlessly with the Windows 10 and Office 365 I run on 5 computers. I just pay up and accept that as the price to pay for not having to think about it.
When you consider the costs in time (and server costs) of running your own cloud service – unless it’s something you really enjoy doing – then $100/year is a bargain. I could say something about the irony of people going on about pilots being cheap :-)
I agree; it makes sense only if you already have to admin some server and there is enough spare space, etc.
Many years ago a very kind pilot offered to host my own site (peter2000.co.uk) provided I kept the bandwidth below 50GB/month. This was eventually quite tricky. Now I pay $25/month myself but have 3TB/month ceiling (actual traffic 100GB+). However I don’t have the expertise for server admin so have to pay others to do it.
The problem is, yes, $100/year is cheap but if you extend that argument to everything, you will be paying out $1000s a year. So one needs to be careful and pay for what is actually needed. A few years ago Dropbox did a deal with Samsung and you got 50GB free with every Samsung phone or tablet. I had 100GB total. Then they pulled the plug on that and asked for $$$… They reduced the 100GB to 2GB. They sent ever more threatening emails getting one to delete anything over 2GB, saying it will be removed. But on the deadline day they dropped it to 5GB, where it has remained. Google Drive seems to be at 15GB now.
JasonC wrote:
The user of a completely free product has no rights whatsoever.
Not quite. The user (of a no-monetary-or-other-valuable-consideration-cost service) clearly doesn’t have any positive enforceable right to continuation of service, right to service working correctly, right to personal help in using the service, … unless that has been given by unilateral promise by the supplier.
But the user still has some rights like his confidential / personal / … data not being made public, exploited commercially, etc without hir consent, etc. The right of not getting billed for service already provided :) Stuff like that.
But if the personal data is being used for other purposes than directly providing the service, e.g. advertising tracking like Facebook, Google, etc do, then, in my opinion, this is not a “completely free” service. This is an exchange of valuable consideration: messaging my pals vs authorisation to commercially exploit personal data on me. This is a contract, and Facebook has to keep their side of it.
Yes, exactly. As the old saying goes: if the product is free, then you are the product
Doesn’t apply to EuroGA because we don’t sell anything
With Dropbox, I can’t see how they can make money from the free users – unless it involves selling audience statistics.
Neil wrote:
I use Microsoft Onedrive which works brilliantly and interfaces seamlessly with the Windows 10 and Office 365 I run on 5 computers.
But not so great for non-Office files you want to share between iDevices.
The trouble with GoogleDrive, OneDrive and iCloud is that they are optimised for the supplier’s proprietary requirements, whereas Dropbox is non-proprietary and independent.
I hae found out why some devices continued to be connected to dropbox after they announced their 3-device limit, even though they have been turned off and on:
The three device limit only refers to computers and mobile devices with the official Dropbox app installed. Opening Dropbox in a web browser does not count toward this total and neither does using a third party app that connects to Dropbox.
And there are 3rd party apps in a lot of devices e.g. the Synology NAS drives use an app written by Synology.
And if your free account gets limited to three (because you logged something off, perhaps) then you can recover the situation by buying a month’s paid subscription, and re-log-in the devices you lost before that expires.
