Take a server with sftp access, so you can mount it locally and browse with winscp if you need to. Put filestash on top and you have a nice ui. That's probably 90% of the original features
For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
Isolated from everything else, that comment was true at the time and is still true today. You can't propose that as an alternative to Dropbox, but that is a specific context. eplanit specifically said "cobble together my own dropbox for my simple needs", so:
- I'm assuming they have the minimal technical skills to make this trivial and accomodate the rough edges that come with it: no easy "signup" flow but creating an ssh key and putting it on the server, for example. Not that it's much harder though
- I'm assuming they don't care about business viability because it's just for them
- I'm assuming they don't need a lot of features: automatic syncing, a simple ui for listing/downloading/uploading
Dropbox has become bloated and has tons of useless features I and most other HN users probably don't care about and find annoying. But the original core functionality still works really well and is a big quality of life improvement over more hacky personal backup implementations, IMO.
So I agree with the criticisms, but I think it's still a useful service at heart and worth the money. It just - very predictably - got way too big for its britches and tried to expand a useful app into a multi-domain conglomerated platform. Steve Jobs's comment that Dropbox is "a feature, not a product" (to which he might now add "and not a company/ecosystem") was pretty much right, I think. It's still a really good and well-executed feature, though.
That said, would I switch to something that was cheaper and gave me all the same core features with the same level of reliability? Probably.
Is this a joke about how the top comment on the HN post for dropbox was just "hmm don't see the point it's just FTP". Are people really doing this again?
Comments
Take a server with sftp access, so you can mount it locally and browse with winscp if you need to. Put filestash on top and you have a nice ui. That's probably 90% of the original features
=> https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash
For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
Isolated from everything else, that comment was true at the time and is still true today. You can't propose that as an alternative to Dropbox, but that is a specific context. eplanit specifically said "cobble together my own dropbox for my simple needs", so:
- I'm assuming they have the minimal technical skills to make this trivial and accomodate the rough edges that come with it: no easy "signup" flow but creating an ssh key and putting it on the server, for example. Not that it's much harder though
- I'm assuming they don't care about business viability because it's just for them
- I'm assuming they don't need a lot of features: automatic syncing, a simple ui for listing/downloading/uploading
And we re back full circle to the point where that comment was right
I know that's the joke, but, I think, not really.
Dropbox has become bloated and has tons of useless features I and most other HN users probably don't care about and find annoying. But the original core functionality still works really well and is a big quality of life improvement over more hacky personal backup implementations, IMO.
So I agree with the criticisms, but I think it's still a useful service at heart and worth the money. It just - very predictably - got way too big for its britches and tried to expand a useful app into a multi-domain conglomerated platform. Steve Jobs's comment that Dropbox is "a feature, not a product" (to which he might now add "and not a company/ecosystem") was pretty much right, I think. It's still a really good and well-executed feature, though.
That said, would I switch to something that was cheaper and gave me all the same core features with the same level of reliability? Probably.
Is this a joke about how the top comment on the HN post for dropbox was just "hmm don't see the point it's just FTP". Are people really doing this again?
First thing I thought of too!
For reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
Well if you don't need multi device sync(i don't), it's literally as useful as a FTP server that is reliable(i just use backblaze b2 with rclone).