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

boing
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Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/06/14/new-dropbox-uses-half-a-gig-of.html

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…using a simple, single-purple tool…

If your tool is purple, you should probably see a doctor… :wink:

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Now:

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The PC Google Drive seems to be drifting that way too. “No, I don’t want to backup my entire system, just sync this one stupid folder. Got that?”

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All of those cloud drive systems want to do that. It’s really annoying, but if you’re only syncing one folder you are probably a free tier peasant and they need to grab as much as they can if they want to convert you into a monthly subscriber.

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locked inside a toolshed full of rickety contraptions

Looking for an image of the shed interior from Twister.

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Oh man, they turned it into one of those goddamn Electron apps didn’t they? Signal is like this, and it means a simple chat app eats up a full gigabyte of memory and burns a hideous amount of CPU even at idle.

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https://syncthing.net/ works really well if all you want is “Just sync a folder”.

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I hate that business type can’t accept that offering a clean, efficient, and simple product for a competitive price is in fact a viable way to run a business. They’re too busy trying to disrupt each other to see the forest for the trees.

You’d think even trying to be a modern tech business, Dropbox would just try to sell themselves to a bigger company or something instead of going against them.

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The trend of “just make it Electron” is a virus infecting many “web developers”. Looking at you, Discord! Can’t even mod old games without running into Electron. Phooey.

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When I saw this news, I looked at the Dropbox icon that’s been sitting in my menu bar. Disabled, not synching, waiting for me to clean up from the period where I’d been a paid user and went over the free allotment.

I went to the menu bar, told it to stop launching at startup, and quit it forever.

Which is maybe what they wanted a non-paying user like me to do anyway at this point in their life, I dunno. One less thing wasting my battery when I’m out.

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Well I guess I’m going to remove everything from Dropbox now and stop using it forever.

Why can’t people stop making shity exploitive software?

Oh yeah, avarice and greed

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DropBox is rubbish for more than an amateur hobbyist’s file collection. New or old. Had it at my last place of work and it confused the living hell out of everyone. It was a tech co, so no shortage of capability.

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I recently stopped paying for Dropbox when I realized google drive offers more storage in its free version (and I don’t really need the amount of space that you gotta pay for)

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I stopped using Dropbox when they elimated Linux support for filesystems that weren’t plain ext4. I’ve been pretty happy with a self hosted NextCloud instance.

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Would like it if storj was more mainstream

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Dropbox has made a lot of promises to investors that they have to try to fulfill.

If they took Gruber’s advice, they could reduce their staff to a very small number of people and have a great, but small business. Doing so would be conceding that they are done growing and a lot of growth is baked into their stock price.

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Do they still share all your data with anyone who asks or did that policy change?

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So, anyone want to suggest any alternatives to switch to? I’d be willing to move all of my stuff over to a self-hosted solution (like Synology’s Cloud Station), but that doesn’t offer the same ease of sharing files with others, nor the other benefits of a cloud-based solution.

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I switched to box.com when Boing Boing pointed out that Condaleezza Rice was on the board of directors. They seem to be encouraging a switch to their remote disk volume hack, but their folder sync and share stuff still works nicely on the Mac and IOS. You might just have to search a bit to find it.

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Next Cloud on an old server that lives on top of the fridge has worked well for my needs.
As long as there is a stable external IP, just open up the needed ports on your router and you’re self-hosted.

The web client is similar to Dropbox for uploading from remote machines (drag and drop), and of course there is file-system level syncing as well, plus good mobile app support.

For the music collection side of things Airsonic is a good option as an replacement for the likes of iTunes.

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