Thursday, November 27, 2008 at 6:43PM An Ode to Dropbox
One of my favorite new things in the world is Dropbox, an online syncing utility for all your stuff. If you use multiple computers (Mac, Windows, or Linux), Dropbox will automatically sync your documents, photos, music, etc. between those computers completely behind the scenes. The best thing about Dropbox, as noted two days ago by Rands in Repose, is that it is “dumb”. It does just what you would expect and doesn’t try to outsmart you. If you accidentally delete something, it offers the opportunity to restore it (or any earlier version) via the web interface. Lost data is a virtual impossibility. Even if you only use one computer, the opportunity to have access to all your data via the (secure) web interface is worth the price of admission — it keeps track of all of your changes, no matter how minor. And for me the $99 a year upgrade to 50gb is a no-brainer. I’ve already filled up 75% and am hoping they will offer more space in the near future. I’ve been using it without a hiccup for a couple of months now. Rands’ insightful and laudatory post reminded me I’ve been meaning to praise Dropbox myself.
NB: Michael Tsai’s post yesterday about Dropbox’s lack of support for upper-level file system features in Mac OSX seems to be dealing with out of date info., as noted in the comments.
P.S. Dropbox is using Amazon’s S3 data storage service to host the files, and all the files are encrypted before the transfer. See the faq for more details.
SFJ | in Technology
Reader Comments (4)
Dropbox still lacks support for the filesystem features I mentioned. The CTO e-mailed me yesterday to say that they're "working on them." I think that's great; I just wish they were up front about what their product does to your data.
The thread that you linked to concerns the treatment of packages, which are not really a filesystem feature and whose support is still a work in progress, despite what the thread says.
Sorry, Michael. It seemed to me from the support article that, at the very least, your complaint in the comments about packages appearing as folders had been solved. Apologies if I overstated the case. It would be helpful for me, and others I’m sure, if you could explain in layman’s terms what Dropbox is doing that is so nefarious.
SFJ: If there is data in the resource fork, extended attributes, or HFS+ attributes (e.g. stationery bit, label), Dropbox throws it away without telling you.
As to packages, some (such as .sparsebundle) still turn into unusable folders when synced. Packages are treated as folders of files rather than atomic units, so if the same package is modified on two Macs, you end up with one broken package instead of two good packages representing the different versions. Also, the Web interface doesn't understand packages (except for the small, hard-coded list mentioned in that thread), so it reports changes to files within the package and doesn't let you download packaged documents (clicking on it shows the contents like a folder).
I should add that what Dropbox actually does isn't so bad. They've made engineering decisions that are reasonable, although not friendly to Mac users. What is nefarious is that they never disclose the limitations (and possible dangers) either in the documentation or through error messages. And they made forum posts that misled people into thinking that things were fixed, when they knew they weren't.