The main problem is that, if they wanted to, it shouldn't take Apple/Microsoft/Google/Amazon too much work to put out a comparable product and offer it for free.
As an anecdote, my girlfriend already cancelled her Dropbox account because iCloud provides what she needs at a much cheaper cost.
Personally, I require Unix support and also use a large portion of the terabyte of space, but I'd bet that the majority of users don't.
> it shouldn't take Apple/Microsoft/Google/Amazon too much work to put out a comparable product and offer it for free
I worked on SkyDrive/OneDrive for a few years. That's what we thought too. This stuff inevitably starts out with "seriously, how long is it going to take to make essentially a wrapper around rsync" and ends up with "Hey, guess what happens when you cross filesystem errors with distributed systems errors when dealing with unmergeable files?"
This is a deceptively challenging space, particularly if you want to do sharing and group work in a reasonably intuitive way. Which is why Dropbox has managed to remain a company instead of simply being eaten up the first quarter that appl/ms/google decided to get into this business. Note that all three have an offering, and at this point I know that OneDrive is actually pretty good, but for years it was kind of an uphill catchup struggle.
I am curious, why would you go into the project thinking rsync and not git? It seemed to me most of these syncing folders are really a special case of source code control.
I wasn't involved in these design discussions early on, and Skydrive certainly didn't use rsync, this was just meant as an example of "this is essentially a solved problem, we just need some UI". It isn't, and presenting it as such just gets you into a bad situation.
But Dropbox doesn't handle any merging of changes; any conflicts are left for the user to resolve. In this way it's basically an automatic version of Unison, which is exactly "some UI" around a "solved problem." Right?
It doesn't handle merging of changes within files, however, if you take a step back, consider that you're essentially merging lists of metadata (with hashes of blobs), not just uploading these blobs; and because the systems that need to be synced are distributed, not always connected, and users want to read/write all of them you get the limitations of the classic CAP theorem.
E.g. the quite feasible scenario with two computers, both partially synced, and both getting files changed/added/removed/moved while the sync is happening. Consider applications creating temporary files while a document is being edited, and expecting to be able to create those files... and then it results in some app being unable to open the same document because it's "already open" on another machine. There are all kinds of interesting conflicts and race conditions possible, and you need to resolve them all in some way that doesn't weird out the users.
Stock git explodes when dealing with binary files that are above a certain size or are changing frequently.
So forget about photo collections, shared Photoshop files, or any other non-text document formats.
The workarounds had a lot of pain points for a while (that maybe are fixed now in 2017, haven't explored that recently).
I was more thinking the concept of source code control than the specific, but used a specific since a specific file transfer program was mentioned. Some source code control programs handle binaries just fine.
Nobody can seem to do it very well, despite all of them having one. Every major provider has some sort of cloud drive product, but all of them, save for Dropbox, have some annoying limitation.
Apple iCloud Drive: Unusable out of MacOS.
Amazon: Unclear storage limits with potentially catastrophic consequences for going over them. No free tier. No Linux client.
Microsoft OneDrive: Individual file size limits. No Linux client.
Google Drive: Stories of unreliable syncing behavior, app instability, and so forth. No Linux client. Google history of killing non-core products.
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Not only did Dropbox get there first, they did it mostly right, to the point where their competitors can be described as also-rans.
The other thing is that Dropbox has "good file sync service" as their entire mission, while every other provider of note has it as some value-add into their other services, meaning it's subject to the whims of what those companies are doing on a particular day.
Also, Dropbox is the only one that offers delta-sync which is a godsend when editing multi-gigabyte PSDs/Media Files. Other providers would simply not work for this use-case with my 100KB/s upload speed. Seems very wasteful as well, uploading every file from scratch for every edit.. kinda curious how users on these providers deal with it?
For iCloud, you actually can use iCloud Drive via a web interface from other OSes - I think the biggest limitation is actually that you can't share arbitrary files, only certain types of files (Pages, Keynote, Numbers, Notes, Photos).
I could easily go all in on iCloud Drive if I could make arbitrary files available to other users.
Apple also has a Windows client for iCloud Drive, and you can use standard Word/Excel/PowerPoint files and still edit them through Pages/Numbers/Keynote on a different Mac.
And that's fine for you and me, but limits its adoption (hence appeal, hence longevity) to people that download unofficial, unsupported third party clients and manually set up cron jobs.
The reason Dropbox is kicking ass is that nobody wants to deal with the manual work. Download a program, put stuff in folder, stuff appears elsewhere. No thought required. Simple.
I've been using Dropbox on Linux for many years, and it's definitely had some occasional issues with memory leaks, and its general CPU and memory usage has definitely increased. Used to be it never went over 100 MB RSS, but now it's always well over that, at about 250 right now.
Anyway, I run it at nice 5 and "ionice -c3", and even though I'd like to switch to something else, I still haven't found anything better for Linux use. Everything I've looked at has some issue that makes it a non-starter.
> The main problem is that, if they wanted to, it shouldn't take Apple/Microsoft/Google/Amazon too much work to put out a comparable product and offer it for free.
Apple[1], Microsoft[2], Google[3], and Amazon[4] already do have comparable products, with comparable prices[5].
> it shouldn't take Apple/Microsoft/Google/Amazon too much work to put out a comparable product and offer it for free
This kind of thinking is exactly why Apple/Microsoft/Google/Amazon will never deliver something better.
Yes - they can deliver something better for free but they think "it shouldn't take a lot of effort" so whatever they deliver is not adequate.
They also do not have no business reason to do it since valuable engineers and time can be better spent on other business sectors. For example, Amazon Cloud Drive is just a checkbox (look you can save you photos and videos also on our storage) from point of view Amazon management. Google Drive is the same. Microsoft has the same thinking: look here is OneDrive - but we really want you to buy Sharepoint.
So do not expect anything of Dropbox quality from these companies.
> it shouldn't take Apple/Microsoft/Google/Amazon too much work to put out a comparable product and offer it for free.
OneDrive is perhaps not quite as polished and its Linux support is lacking/unofficial/nonexistent depending on your viewpoint, but Microsoft's push to Office365 means that if you subscribe to it you're getting at least as much storage as Dropbox offers at a monthly cost that's ~70% of Dropbox for a single user, or 5x that (5 * 1TB/user) at the same annual price as Dropbox. On top of that, you get the assorted Office apps.
One notable weakness of the non-Business version of OneDrive is the lack of version history, so if that's important or you have no other forms of backup then that could be a deciding factor.
I'll leave out of it the question of whose servers data resides on and passes through.
Even the big service providers, like Dropbox and Microsoft have run into issues of scale that result in price increases or reduced storage quotas, later in the product cycle, forced onto existing customers. Typically a result of poor early planning or lack of insight into actual resources required per user.
Or bait and switch to grow fast quickly.
Dropbox, recently (quietly) raised prices on their Business plan, forcing existing Business customers to choose between a fixed storage space quota or a price increase. The decision will be forced on users on renewal in 2018, which is why we haven't heard much about this yet.
https://9to5mac.com/2017/01/30/dropbox-smart-sync-and-paper/
At the same time you've got a race to the bottom from big companies targeting the consumer market. These providers most likely have no hope of generating revenue directly from the cloud storage itself, and instead use cloud storage as a loss leader for other channels and products.
For example, Google integrating free "unlimited" photo storage into their products, Apple iCloud integration and significant price cuts. If these loss leading experiments fail there will be another round of forced price increases or reduced storage quotas. Only time will tell.
So far it's a good bet against "Unlimited" free services:
Then you've got Amazon cloud drive, offering unlimited Storage, but only for non-commercial personal use, with all sorts of restrictions. Sole practitioners and small businesses not welcome.
Using Your Files with the Services. You may use the Services only to store, retrieve, manage, organize, and access Your Files for personal, non-commercial purposes using the features and functionality we make available. You may not use the Services to store, transfer, or distribute content of or on behalf of third parties, to operate your own file storage application or service, to operate a photography business or other commercial service ...
And this open-ended goodie:
The Services are offered in the United States. We may restrict access from other locations. There may be limits on the types of content you can store and share using the Services, such as file types we do not support, and on the number or type of devices you can use to access the Services. We may impose other restrictions on use of the Services.
And finally most consumer grade cloud providers offer little protection in terms of encryption. Google, Amazon and Microsoft might get big brother on your data. You might even have real people looking at your files for whatever reason.
Our Use of Your Files. We may use, access, and retain Your Files in order to provide the Services to you, enforce the terms of the Agreement, and improve our services, and you give us all permissions we need to do so. These permissions include, for example, the rights to copy Your Files, modify Your Files to enable access in different formats, use information about Your Files to organize them on your behalf, and access Your Files to provide technical supporthttps://www.amazon.com/cd/tou??ref_=cd_unlimited_tou
Our automated systems analyze your content (including emails) to provide you personally relevant product features, such as customized search results, tailored advertising, and spam and malware detection. This analysis occurs as the content is sent, received, and when it is stored.https://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/terms/
Big brother with good intentions:
Microsoft Anti-Porn Workers Sue Over PTSD - ex-employees of the company’s online safety team say they had to watch horrific online videos of child abuse, bestiality, and murders—and that Microsoft ignored their PTSD.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/01/11/microsoft-a...
Finally, as a few others in this thread have stated, the underlying technology behind syncing and sharing is quite complicated. Cross-platform compatibility and maintaining backwards compatibility with older operating systems is mind boggling difficult.
In this regard in might be better to choose a cloud provider that offers end-to-end encryption, and has been in business for more than a few years (to ensure they've got the business model worked out).
Interesting. I had to sign something saying that I would be exposed to terrible stuff during the course of my job at MSN, and I wouldn't sue the company for damages. This was back in 2003. Maybe they stopped asking employees to sign this document?
* you must not even try to ... sell the Services unless specifically authorized to do so; publish or share materials that are unlawfully pornographic or indecent, or that contain extreme acts of violence;
advocate bigotry or hatred against any person or group of people based on their ... *
As an anecdote, my girlfriend already cancelled her Dropbox account because iCloud provides what she needs at a much cheaper cost.
Personally, I require Unix support and also use a large portion of the terabyte of space, but I'd bet that the majority of users don't.