
The Dropbox terabyte conundrum - jaimebuelta
http://sixcolors.com/post/2014/09/the-dropbox-terabyte-conundrum/
======
hemancuso
Shameless plug for my product, ExpanDrive

[http://www.expandrive.com/expandrive](http://www.expandrive.com/expandrive)

Mount Dropbox as a network drive. Smart local cache. Access the data on demand
without syncing the repo in first. Also supports gdrive, s3, sftp, onedrive,
box and more.

Makes a 1TB account make a lot more sense if you only have a 128GB SSD. Use
selective sync with the primary client to only sync a portion of your Dropbox.
Then use ExpanDrive to offload the rest and access it as needed.

~~~
lelandbatey
On the product page, please list your price more clearly. It was non-trivial
to figure out what your product actually cost. A walkthrough of my thoughts:

1\. He said product, so it's probly not free. I wonder how much it costs?

2\. _Scrolls through the whole page_ I don't see a breakdown of price. Hmmmm

3\. _ctrl-f "$"_ Ahh, I see it says upgrade pricing is $24.99. Wait, does it
cost that much, or is that a special "upgrade only" price?

4\. _looks around on the page more_ Ahhh, there's a store link, I hope it
lists the price there!

5\. Ok, so the price is $50 for a single-user license. Why was that so hard to
find?

I don't mean to be rude with these remarks; your product seems perfectly
relevant and it's awesome if it works as you say. But as a customer, I found
that a bit confusing and I thought you as the business owner may want some
feedback about one particular users experience.

~~~
hemancuso
Fair. I want people to download and not think immediately about price. It's
not cheap. I see your point and you might be right. But it's not an entirely
uncommon/bad pattern. I had a/b tested it a while back.

~~~
computer
I'd like to note that an a/b-test saying it's more profitable doesn't mean you
should automatically follow it.

A random example: The people who don't download your software because they
can't find the price might think very negatively about your product.

~~~
baddox
> A random example: The people who don't download your software because they
> can't find the price might think very negatively about your product.

If that doesn't hurt your profit, shouldn't you still do it?

~~~
Someone
But how do you measure that it doesn't hurt your profit? Conversion rate may
go up, but if those not buying because they felt lured with a lower price,
through negative mouth-to-mouth advertising, make fewer new potential
customers visit your site in a few months time, profit could eventually go
down.

~~~
hemancuso
Negative mouth to mouth because you had to go to the store to see the price
options? There are two, fwiw. Lots of people pick the lifetime upgrade option.

------
ryankshaw
I just want to point out that spacemonkey (spacemonkey.com) handles this very
elegantly.

spacemonkey was designed from the beginning to handle storing much more data
than you'd ever be able to store on your laptop hard drive. The way it does
this is it actually mounts itself as a FUSE filesystem and keeps it's own LRU
cache of your spacemonkey data on the drive. If you access a recently created
or accessed file it will just load from the disk cache. If it detects that you
are running out of hard drive space it will automatically prune the stuff that
hasn't been accessed in a while (so spacemonkey never causes you to have an
"Out of disk space" error). you still see it though, it tells you its size,
metadata etc. and if you try to open one of those files it will grab it from
the network transparently behind the scene for you it just might add a little
bit of latency (as if you were accessing something on a network share).

In 2014 you should not have to be thinking about what to "selectively sync"
the service you use should just figure it out for you (and let you customize
it if you need to)

disclamer: I used to work for spacemonkey but do not any more, although I
think they make a great product and are a super smart team.

~~~
gregd
SpaceMonkey was recently acquired by Vivint, Inc. "The Space Monkey team is
excited to announce that the company has been acquired by Vivint, Inc." I
don't hold out any hope that SpaceMonkey as a product will continue on, or if
this was more or less an acquihire.

~~~
alenlpeacock
Co-founder of Space Monkey here. I can assure you this was not an acquihire.
At the highest levels of the org from CEO and down, Vivint believes in the
Space Monkey vision. We're super excited to have their backing, and think you
will be excited to see where this goes from here.

------
davidu
I have this exact problem. The original reason I use Dropbox is now the thing
that annoys me about trying to just store all my files there in the cloud.

It's like I need a ~/Dropbox and a ~/DropboxCloud where the ~/DropboxCloud is
just virtual, not real disk space on my HDD.

~~~
jmathai
Bitcasa's Infinite Drive is exactly what you're describing for ~/DropboxCloud.

Unfortunately it looks like they've changed focus to the enterprise.

[https://bitcasa.com](https://bitcasa.com)

------
ivyirwin
I think you've articulated a great point about the current trend in the Cloud
services and fast SSD personal computers. I have personally stayed away from
the large storage plans at services like Dropbox because, as you point out,
they would fill my entire 128GB Macbook Air instantly. But that seems to be
the common theme with laptops these days – blazing fast hard drives at the
cost of larger storage.

I actually think iTunes Match does a good job of solving this problem, on a
media storage basis. I have my whole library "uploaded" to iTunes, but then I
can selectively download and listen to songs on any device when I need them,
even to my 8GB phone. Now my music library doesn't clog up my computer or
phone or tablet, etc.

If dropbox found a similar model, I would sign up for that in an instant.

------
huhtenberg
The actual link - [http://sixcolors.com/post/2014/09/the-dropbox-terabyte-
conun...](http://sixcolors.com/post/2014/09/the-dropbox-terabyte-conundrum/)

------
jude-
(Disclaimer: tooting my own horn)

It sounds like you want my PhD thesis project.

Link:
[https://github.com/jcnelson/syndicate](https://github.com/jcnelson/syndicate)

------
ramLlama
This is a very interesting problem, espeicially since consumer computing
devices quickly shunted to small storage space when SSD's arrived. A few years
ago, a laptop with 500GB of hard drive space was rather small! Nowadays, a
500GB SSD is top-tier. Granted, SSD capacity is quickly rising, but with the
combination of small computing like phones and tablets, space is at a premium.

Funnily enough, this problem has been solved before! If you look at
distributed file systems, especially something like Coda
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coda_(file_system)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coda_\(file_system\))),
they are designed to make the local computer a "thin client for storage".
Basically, local storage is used as a cache for the main copy on the server,
and this behavior is transparent to user applications via the FS driver.

Dropbox uses a user-space program to sync the files and cannot intercept
system calls. As such, they had no choice but to synchronize all of it rather
than bringing things in "on-demand" and releasing local copies that are not
used. Nowadays, this can easily be done via FUSE driver in Linux. I do not
know if something like FUSE exists on other platforms though.

Overall, I personally love the idea of a local machine being a "cache" for the
server copy. However, the technical challenges are greater than a simple
mirroring scheme, and there may be UX issues as well.

~~~
btown
Dokan for Windows (last updated 2011) and MacFUSE for OS X do exist, but
they're not battle-tested, to say the least. It wouldn't be wise for Dropbox
to stake its reputation on such unreliable software.

~~~
jrochkind1
MacFuse worked well when it was first released, but it has not been maintained
in years and has no maintainers and does not really work with any recent OSX
versions at the moment.

It looks like there might be something called OSXFuse which might be more
recent and maintained, but I haven't looked at it, it also might not be.

~~~
hemancuso
OSXFuse is very well battle tested. We use it in ExpanDrive. CBFS by eldos is
a commercial userspace filesystem lib for windows. We also use that.

~~~
jrochkind1
awesome, thanks for the info! I will check out OSXFuse.

------
bbx
Ah! Same kind of user (paying customer for years) and same issues (too much
space on my Dropbox, not enough on my drive).

My Macbook Air is the only computer I use, both at home and at work. Its SSD
is 60 GB. Last month, Dropbox upgraded my account (for free) up to 1 TB.

Selective Sync? It's not optimal. We use several shared folders at work. Some
of them become rapidly heavy without me noticing, unless I sense my laptop
slowing down and find the culprit folder (with Diskwave) and unselect it from
my sync. Plus: any (non-empty) shared folder you join will automatically sync
on all your devices. It should be opt-in, not opt-out.

Offloading massive files? I use the (very good) web interface. It's a two-step
process though: upload via the browser, and then delete your file. It's
usually a one-off event, but is not what Dropbox is usually about: being
seamless. Remember Doug's pitch to YC? The level of abstraction where you just
hit "Save" and you're done? That's what's still missing with one-way transfers
to the cloud.

------
cortesoft
Just because the author uses a machine that doesn't have that big a hard drive
doesn't meant that everyone else does. I use dropbox on a computer with 15TB
of HD space.... so having a 1TB drop box is great. Saying drop box should not
offer the bigger size just because he doesn't have that much hard drive space
is a very limited view.

~~~
jaimebuelta
I'd say that 15TB is not a common case.

Most of the hard drives installed in new computers these days are less than
2TB, and less than 1TB on laptops (which are very popular).

At the moment Dropbox has only a (free) plan of 2GB and another of 1TB. I
think this is something that needs to be managed by Dropbox, if they want
users to be happy.

------
cmkrnl
Camlistore ([https://camlistore.org/](https://camlistore.org/)) is the answer.
Here's hoping it becomes just as easy to use as Dropbox someday.

------
daveloyall
I don't know anything about dropbox, but based on the types of things the
author spends time thinking about, I think s/he might find [http://git-
annex.branchable.com/assistant/](http://git-annex.branchable.com/assistant/)
useful.

------
kyriakos
This is exactly the problem Microsoft solved with OneDrive. You can choose
what is kept only online and what is also offline. In windows at least its
integration goes as far as keeping lower resolution versions of your photos
offline for previewing purposes and seamlessly downloading the full-res when
you try to open it in say Photoshop.

Unfortunately as nice as this sounds in practice its extremely slow (at least
for us in Europe).

I am facing the same problem with hubiC which has a 10GB plan only and unless
you have some crazy raid configuration on your desktop there is no way you can
fill it up unless you use the web interface exclusively.

------
ycombosnator
I think this limitation is actually fundamental to Dropbox's (and Google/etc)
pricing model. Only a small subset of users can fully utilize the space they
pay for, which means the remainder of users are more profitable. If the
average user consumed 1TB, or if pricing was by usage rather than tiered, I'd
expect the price per GB to go up.

------
ShaunK
I've often wished Dropbox's selective sync was managed by folder rather than
by client. It would be more helpful to me to mark folders to not automatically
sync account wide than to have to choose and re-choose those folders every
time I setup Dropbox. I feel like that would potentially be helpful in this
use case.

~~~
CPAhem
The selective sync is one way to manage the larger storage space, and do it
effectively.

------
alimoeeny
I personally like [https://bitcasa.com](https://bitcasa.com) in this regard.
They have this feature that you can choose a "directory" to be a bottomless
storage that is not actually on your device, it is on the cloud for you when
you need it.

------
cr4zy
I just store large files I don't want synced in Google Drive and don't run the
Google Drive client. Dropbox selective sync is a huge pain when setting up a
new machine since it doesn't recognize yet unsynced folders and files.

------
joshstrange
I have the same problem. My MBP right now only has a 256GB SSD in it and so I
can only fit about 1/8 or less of my DB on it once I load up other data/apps.
I had to create a "Camera Uploads Archive" folder and move all my pictures to
that then turn on selective sync for it because the "Camera Uploads" folder
got way to big to keep on my MBP. I really wish I could still see the "Camera
Uploads Archive" and if I tried to open or use one of the files it would
download it until after I had finished with it. I'd love to be able to browser
all my picture but I just don't have the space.

------
Osmium
Yeah. I have this problem too. I want to upload a ~ 200 GB photo library so I
have access to it on the go now that Everpix has shut down, but I can't do it
from my main machine because the drive just isn't big enough. Selective sync
seems to be the only option.

I hoped iCloud Drive would solve this: iCloud Drive supports similar
capacities, but obviously iPhones can't store the whole Drive so presumably
it's been designed with this in mind, but it _seems_ like the OS X version
still syncs the entire thing (at least I haven't been able to find any
information to the contrary).

------
dwg
I'm surprised to see so many people saying they have the same "problem". You
don't have to use the extra space. You had less space before and the problem
didn't exist, and now suddenly it does?? It makes no sense.

1\. It's a _good_ thing for the many people who DO have more space on their
computer.

2\. It's a _good_ thing because it leaves room for growth.

3\. It's a _good_ thing because it makes the service more useful for power
users.

hit "Save" and you're done? Newsflash: it STILL works that way!!

~~~
jrochkind1
The "problem" is that they WANT to use the extra remote storage, with a UI as
good as DropBox's and consolidated with the other stuff they have on DropBox,
but can't because they don't have enough local space or don't want to sync all
their remote storage to every machine.

It is true that in some cases they may not have realized they had this desire
until ExpanDrive gave them enough storage to think about it, but they do now.

------
honestcoyote
Seems like Dropbox has already solved this problem on mobile devices. Using
the Dropbox client on my Nexus phone or on the iPad, I can read or edit a
file, and then mark it for offline use which keeps it in local storage, or
just leave it alone, where I assume it's eventually deleted from the cache.

It's pretty transparent and intuitive. I would think this could be done on
desktop / laptop systems, maybe via an optional client, with all files set
initially to a no-sync value.

------
abroncs
I never bought a pro account because, like the OP says, I consider Dropbox for
smaller things. 100 GB was too much then, and now 1TB is ridiculous. I would
have liked a smaller tier (20-25 GB at the most), but I guess they can't
really make money if people actually use up their space. oh well..

~~~
1123581321
You can get that much space with referrals. I maxed my referrals out with a
$40 Adwords campaign a few years ago and it's been a good investment.

------
vader1
Wuala has supported this for as long as I can remember, it's called
"WualaDrive": a network mount of your entire file archive.

------
laacz
The only reason I use Dropbox is because it works beyond any type of firewall
(be it simple HTTP proxy or socks). Others tend not to.

------
PaulHoule
Do you live in Italy or are you stuck in the U.S. where it would take few
months for most people to upload a TB of data to dropbox?

~~~
harryh
Italy has an average connection speed of 5.2Mbps (47th in the world), the US
is ranked 12th at 10.5 Mbps - about 2x Italy.

Just so you know.

[http://www.akamai.com/dl/akamai/akamai-
soti-q114.pdf](http://www.akamai.com/dl/akamai/akamai-soti-q114.pdf)

------
mark_l_watson
I don't understand the point of the article that 1 terabyte of storage is not
worthwhile if your laptop has a small disk drive.

I use a MacBook Air with only 128GB of storage. I use "selective syncing" to
not keep most of my Dropbox files on my laptop.

If I need anything not synced to my laptop, then I choose it to be synced,
wait a short while, and then it is available locally.

------
spindritf
I don't think they want you to use 1000GB of storage so the fact that you
won't is a feature. Terabyte limit essentially means "unlimited but don't do
anything silly."

Dropbox has a really good Linux CLI client so I'm sure there are people who
will manage to bump up against that limit.

------
mbesto
Just use Selective Sync:
[https://www.dropbox.com/en/help/175](https://www.dropbox.com/en/help/175)

~~~
tonyhb
I don't know if you read the post, but he says:

> Right now the only way to do that would be to put something in the box, then
> turn off Selective Sync everywhere for that folder. (Or upload files via
> Dropbox’s web interface, to a folder that’s been unchecked on all your
> devices via Selective Sync.)

> It’s not ideal. Selective Sync wasn’t meant to be used in that way… but for
> that matter, neither was Dropbox.

I think his gripe is the core premise of dropbox — file syncing — isn't the
same as 1TB backup.

------
angersock
So, the proposed solution is basically to regress to FTP.

That's why my old startup offered FTP with no frills: _it just works_.

------
orenmazor
you can do this pretty easily with bittorrent sync

------
nihaody
They basically need this feature: [http://windows.microsoft.com/en-
US/windows-8/onedrive-online...](http://windows.microsoft.com/en-
US/windows-8/onedrive-online-available-offline)

Totally agree though. I'm not going to pay for a TB of storage until I can
moves files I don't need on my SSD anymore (ie RAW photos I've developed) into
Dropbox and have them removed from my computer seamlessly.

Sooooo easy to implement, just upload the file. When it's done, run an md5 on
the local and the cloud, if same then delete local.

~~~
techrat
I've been using my Dropbox space as a way to turn my systems into a thin(ner)
client. I install portable (ini and not registry based) Windows apps into
d:\Dropbox that I know can be run in Wine and run them in Wine on my Linux
systems from ~/Dropbox

Best part of it is that UI changes done on one system remain consistent when
using other machines. Completely took the pain out of a format/reinstall, too.

Trying to constrain Home to my Dropbox folder also reawakened an old skill:
Space discipline. With drive space exploding and SSDs still being relatively
constrained, I had forgotten how much crap I tended to hoard and not sort
through until I was feeling pinched again thanks to my Dropbox quota.

~~~
lelandbatey
This is also what I do, but almost the inverse: I use Cygwin on Windows to get
all the same applications (I do everything other than browse the web in my
terminal) as I would on Linux, then use Dropbox to keep everything the same
across machines.

Each of my machines is configured (almost) exactly the same, and all the
media/projects/work is available on all my computers at the same time.

I also experience the forced "space discipline" and would add that I also have
to have a better organizational structure in general. I'm constantly "re-
balancing the tree" that is my directory structure, re-defining and re-
grouping my media into ever finer groups in an effort to stop things from
accumulating in digital "junk drawers".

On a different note, I disagree with the suggestion of having a "virtual
filesystem" that is the entire Dropbox service. I feel that doesn't fit with
what Dropbox is: _a folder that syncs_. I don't want to have to worry about
the physical location of my files, which I most definitely would have to do
based on my internet speed (which is as good as it can get right now).

------
suprjami
Are you seriously so well-trained by Apple that you think you need to pay for
software to run a local LAN Dropbox clone like rsync/btsync/ownCloud?

~~~
coldtea
What does Apple have to do with anything? The same problem exists on Windows
and Linux.

And, no, I don't want to run and manage a local "LAN Dropbox clone". It's all
about the integration with different mobile and desktop apps and services, the
remote backup, and that you don't have to manage it.

------
vex
Whine whine whine, I have a mac, whine whine whine

get a computer with actual expandable storage

~~~
objclxt
Like a Chromebook, right?

