Dropbox is still OK for easily sharing files with other, especially movies and stuff that its sharing web UI supports.
But in 2019 it is basically an inferior and antiquated tool for syncing your own files.
I moved to the open-source SyncThing[1] some years ago, which gave me:
1.) the ability to sync any arbitrary set of folders I want, which of course completely obviates the need to care about things like this issue (i.e., no need to use symlinks to sync other folders, because you can just sync those folders themselves)
2.) the ability to actually sync folders that contain symlinks, as many types of software projects do (Dropbox and many other purported sync tools can't do that, which means there are many common types of folder that they can't sync without corrupting them by replacing the symlink with the contents of the symlink destination) EDIT: Or, have they fixed that now, and is that why they are making this announcement? I am not sure. Back when I used Dropbox for syncing, it couldn't sync a folder containing a symlink, but this may no longer be true. (?)
3.) better sync reliability
4.) better sync performance
5.) completely superior security story; end-to-end encryption means you are in control of who can access your files (no access for employees, governments, etc)
The tradeoffs are:
a.) a little bit more work to set up (but it's really just a little bit... I walked my dad through it over the phone... basically the same amount of work as getting your credit card billing setup on Dropbox)
b.) weaker story on mobile, no iOS app
c.) no "cloud" so you have to do your own (e.g., leave an iMac running 24/7 back at your house or something)
All in all, after 2+ years I am extremely happy with Syncthing, and I don't think products like Dropbox have a very strong case to exist anymore, at least not for the original purpose of syncing folders full of computer files.
That problem has now been solved better, way more securely, and for free. (Which is probably why Dropbox seems to be trying to pivot to become some kind of enterprise team commmunication hub.)
[1] https://syncthing.net (if on a Mac just install the Mac app and it will install the other components for you)
My 24/7 server is my Android phone. It doesn't cost me anything more than before it had Syncthing on it and maintenance consists of running Android updates which I did anyway.
I suspect that most people with smartphones also leave them on 24/7.
Wouldn't that require the phone to always be on wifi, to avoid hitting the monthly data transfer cap? IIRC, the Android version of Syncthing comes configured by default to run only when the network connection is a wifi connection for that reason.
> Wouldn't that require the phone to always be on wifi, to avoid hitting the monthly data transfer cap?
True, but unlimited data plans do exist and I've found that more often than not, one laptop finds another laptop over the internet than using the fallback of using cellular data over the phone to sync.
I just installed the F-Droid android client yesterday, it syncs over both Wi-Fi and cellular data by default since until you add devices/folders, it won't spend any mobile data at all, which is when it prompts you to make that choice.
That's a fair point. For me, I am pretty much always connected to WiFi except when I'm driving. However, I understand that may not be the case for everyone.
It's not that, it's actually because of the best and most reasonable of reasons: the maintainers and core committers don't use / aren't interested in iOS.
They aren't opposed to it, and they give advice and helpful comments to those who want to try it.
But, this is just one of the many places where Apple's authoritarian platform model shows its disadvantages. Syncthing is written in Go, but Apple didn't provide a good story for doing Go development for iOS, and because of their lockdown rules, nobody other than Apple can.
Therefore, to get Syncthing running on iOS, you'd need to do a complete from-scratch implementation in one of the languages Apple allows you to use. So it is a relatively huge effort. A few people have tried, but nobody's completed anything very compelling.
You're absolutely right that, depending where you live in the world, the environmental and economical cost to run a computer 24/7 can be non-trivial.
An average computer doesn't really consume more than a couple 100W light-bulbs worth of wattage when idling, and so if you live in a region where energy is clean and cheap (e.g. myself in Montreal) then there is very little overhead.
On the other hand, there are certainly plenty places around the world where energy costs are much higher to both the consumer and the planet, so that is indeed something to consider.
Yes, of course, but shouldn't the backup part be unrelated to the syncing part?
There are many ways to do it, but in my case, I back up my main "on 24/7" workstation (which has all my sync'd folders, whereas my laptop and other machines have a subset) with Arq→S3 snapshots-over-time. And also Backblaze as a secondary backup, just in case, and while they don't support snapshots, they do let me back up 14TB for $5/month.
Duplicati does the client side encryption with the Key never leaving my device? Backblaze didn't offer that when I was choosing a cloud backup and the reason I went with the competition. But Crashplan (RIP consumer version, now only 2x as expensive small business remains) client turned out to be just so ... amateurish in many ways, now that I actually had a drive die on me and need to restore a bunch of data. I'd love to switch to a more competent backup provider and cancel Code42/Crashplan once the restore is done in hopefully 2-3 Months.
Am I right that Duplicati only works with B2, not their cheap $6/device personal backup stuff? That would be a significant price increase. At that price I'd probably prefer the $1/TB/Month of S3 Glacier Deep Archive, though restoring at ~$100/TB seem quite painful.
Duplicati does indeed do encryption locally, although I'm not in love with your options (non-authenticated AES or PGP).
Duplicati doesn't work the other backblaze products, just B2. You can also use S3 Glacier, and I think it's actually one of the better use cases for it tbh (I just avoid giving amazon money all-together).
> c) no "cloud" so you have to do your own (e.g., leave an iMac running 24/7 back at your house or something)
You really buried the lede right at the bottom didn't you? The entire point of a Dropbox type service is off-site cloud backups. If I have to buy and maintain a second server and leave it running 24/7 in my house (i.e. I'm not insulated against losing my data if my house burns down or a burglar breaks in) then clearly this product is providing an entirely different and far more limited service than Dropbox and is not an effective replacement for it.
> The entire point of a Dropbox type service is off-site cloud backups.
No, it isn't. The entire point of Dropbox is having a shared folder on multiple devices that keeps itself in sync. "Cloud backup" aspect is a side effect, but it's too easy to break that "backup" accidentally.
WRT. SyncThing, it's not for regular people not willing to expend any effort at all to set it up and keep it running, but in our adtech-driven startup economy in technology, these regular people are doomed to be ripped off and abused. Such are the aggregate ethics of this market.
There's some famous HN quote when Dropbox launched about how it would could be implemented "quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs and blah blah blah..."
Actually back then Dropbox was pretty neat an there was no way my dad could implement that himself, and even for us nerds, it would be a major hassle to set up and keep running... so Dropbox had real and obvious value.
My point replying here was that now, under some circumstances anyway (see below), it now really is quite trivial for regular people not willing to expend any^W much effort at all to set it up and keep it running. (It is less than one minute of one-step installing and then configuring Syncthing.)
However the thing I missed, as pointed out in some of these comments, is that not everybody has a machine at home that is on all the time.
I do, and I set up an iMac for my dad and sister etc and told them to just leave it on all the time and just let the screen sleep after an hour.
I think a lot of people do that, and I think it is a good idea in general, but if you don't want to do that, then yeah in that scenario Dropbox still does have some value.
> quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs and blah blah blah...
This quote has haunted me for quite some time until I realised the best way to solve the Dropbox problem lay in the UNIX philosophy with at least: a storage component + a sync component + a web UI component
> I think a lot of people do that, and I think it is a good idea in general
My experience is the opposite. I don't know a lot of people who have a machine turned on 24/7.
Additionally, I think that leaving a client machine running 24/7 is not a good idea, considering heat/consumption, (potential) noise and wear.
Also, I think other people missed one point in this discussion. If one has a local filesharing server, and carries a machine (laptop/tablet) out, they need to sync immediately every time when they come back home. It's a hassle.
I do have a 24/7 server, and used to have a filesync service on it, but all things considered, a free Dropbox account turned out to be the most conventient choice.
Yeah, I think I've realized just because me and most of my friends do it, and my family all does it (and of course they do because I give all of them a new iMac for Christmas every 5 years or so and set it up for them), probably not as many people do this as I think.
(Strong disagree that it's a bad idea though; it's super handy, all your windows are just where you left them and your email is already there before you sit down at the computer. iMac machines in particular are highly reliable and will happily run continuously for many years beyond the time frame you'd still want to use them. Seconds matter.)
But anyway, the main point of this reply is to say that with Syncthing you never need to sync immediately, or manually at all, in this scenario. If I take my laptop out and work at a cafe or something, it syncs continuously and flawlessly, and when I get back home my iMac Pro is already totally up-to-date.
It's only when you do some work with huge files on an airplane with no connectivity, or something like that, where you might need to make sure you turn it on again when you land and make sure it is on and connected to the internet to make sure all the changes get synced back to all the other machines.
If you have at least one always-on machine, Syncthing is just as convenient, but objectively superior (security and price being the biggest two). If you don't want to or can't have one always-on machine, then that might be a reasonable use case for Dropbox for file sync.
Syncthing is peer to peer replication, you don't need a server online 24/7, you just might choose to if you have a small number of devices and you want changes to replicate immediately, not hours later or whenever two devices are online at the same time.
You don't stricly need a server 24/7, but you need the peers with changes to be connected at the same time, which is inconvenient (that's why a server 24/7 is ultimately needed).
If one applies changes on a machine, then switch to another, they must ensure to leave them on for a brief time to allow syncing, then turn off the previous one. If they don't do this, they'll (likely) get conflicts.
If one's requirement is not to entrust a 3rd party with one's own data, of course, cloud/proprietary solutions are excluded, but to expect open/local solution to be as convenient as the former, is just false.
It completely depends on use case, you're only going to get conflicts if you modify the same files on different devices before they've had time to sync.
If you're using it to collate photos from different sources for example, that's fine. If you're trying to collaborate on a document, yes, of course, it's the wrong tool.
That’s a huge caveat: most people do not have multiple computers and even if you do, it leaves a lot of room for data loss if you have to go wake your desktop up before your laptop’s data is safe.
I said 'devices' not 'computers' - a popular use case is synchronising phone photos to a computer.
If you only have a single device you're probably not in the market for a cross-device file synchronisation program!
(Like Dropbox, it's not really a backup tool - bad data will be replicated just like good data. Also like Dropbox it does have versioning, but that's still not really a replacement for regular snapshotting IMO.)
My point was that for most people, a sync limited to unused space on an inconsistently available device is not a replacement for a cloud service. In the scenario you mentioned, your phone is likely not to lose too much data as long as you use your laptop nearby frequently but the reverse isn’t true unless you have only a modest amount of data which fits on the phone. It also leaves you far more exposed to correlated failures since the same compromise, flood, mugger, etc. is likely to get both devices.
(Malware is also why I really like Dropbox’s minimum retention period since it breaks the ransomware model)
Hmm, I never thought of that as the main point of Dropbox; I always understood the main point was syncing files between your different machines, e.g. desktop at home and laptop, or home and work, etc.
For dead-easy "regular person" backup, I would recommend something like Backblaze.
Right, that's what made me think that my (now years old) understanding of how Dropbox handles symlinks may not be true anymore. But I don't have two machines with Dropbox at the moment to test for sure.
Does it now just sync the symlinks as-is, so if you have a folder full of symlinks, you just get the same folder full of the same symlinks (as if you had zipped the folder, and then unzipped it on some other machine)?
If so, that is a big improvement from the old days IMO, though it would unavoidable cause the issue being discussed here.
But in 2019 it is basically an inferior and antiquated tool for syncing your own files.
I moved to the open-source SyncThing[1] some years ago, which gave me:
1.) the ability to sync any arbitrary set of folders I want, which of course completely obviates the need to care about things like this issue (i.e., no need to use symlinks to sync other folders, because you can just sync those folders themselves)
2.) the ability to actually sync folders that contain symlinks, as many types of software projects do (Dropbox and many other purported sync tools can't do that, which means there are many common types of folder that they can't sync without corrupting them by replacing the symlink with the contents of the symlink destination) EDIT: Or, have they fixed that now, and is that why they are making this announcement? I am not sure. Back when I used Dropbox for syncing, it couldn't sync a folder containing a symlink, but this may no longer be true. (?)
3.) better sync reliability
4.) better sync performance
5.) completely superior security story; end-to-end encryption means you are in control of who can access your files (no access for employees, governments, etc)
The tradeoffs are:
a.) a little bit more work to set up (but it's really just a little bit... I walked my dad through it over the phone... basically the same amount of work as getting your credit card billing setup on Dropbox)
b.) weaker story on mobile, no iOS app
c.) no "cloud" so you have to do your own (e.g., leave an iMac running 24/7 back at your house or something)
All in all, after 2+ years I am extremely happy with Syncthing, and I don't think products like Dropbox have a very strong case to exist anymore, at least not for the original purpose of syncing folders full of computer files.
That problem has now been solved better, way more securely, and for free. (Which is probably why Dropbox seems to be trying to pivot to become some kind of enterprise team commmunication hub.)
[1] https://syncthing.net (if on a Mac just install the Mac app and it will install the other components for you)