
Amazon turns Cloud Drive into a Dropbox rival with file syncing - shawndumas
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/04/amazon-turns-cloud-drive-into-a-dropbox-rival-with-file-syncing/
======
lubos
I guess Dropbox is not going to be too happy about their key supplier
competing with them and doing it at 50% cost.

~~~
jonemo
I was also under the impression that Dropbox uses S3, but then I read this
article in Wired: [http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/06/flash-data-
cent...](http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/06/flash-data-centers/)

"But if you walk into the right building and down the right aisle, you’ll run
into a giant Dropbox logo. Clearly, the file-sharing upstart is proud of its
data center gear. [...] Inside its cage, Dropbox is running servers equipped
with solid-state drives, also known as SSDs — super-fast storage devices that
could one day replace traditional hard drives. The company doesn’t use SSDs in
all its servers, but it’s moving in that direction."

~~~
Scaevolus
Dropbox has dedicated servers for metadata and business logic, but the actual
file data is stored on S3.

~~~
swinglock
Sounds about right, using SSDs to store the user data would be ridiculous.

------
saosebastiao
So does this mean that I would have a persistent JVM daemon running in the
background monitoring file system events? I don't know why, but that gives me
a nasty feeling in my gizzard. Besides, something tells me that I don't really
need a ~100 MB process to do something like that.

------
overshard
This requires Java, is desktop only and doesn't have a solid command line
client. How does this rival Dropbox at all.

~~~
Paul_D_Santana
It syncs files.

------
joseph_cooney
Having to install java is a deal-breaker for me, as Java on windows seems to
be a recurring source of drive-by vulnerabilities.

~~~
rschmitty
Java as a plugin in the browser yes, I've been bit by that earlier this year
(thank you MS Security Essentials!)

However Java on your system like the .net framework is no less secure than any
other runtime. You are running an executable you are at that executable's
mercy

~~~
trimbo
Yeah, really a critical PR mess that Oracle hasn't stopped installing the
browser plugin. Who uses that anyway? It's not worth the confusion anymore.

------
venus
Good to see some competition, even though it's not quite as advanced. I have
been having grave doubts about Dropbox's management since they bought Mailbox
and it will be good to get some depth into the field.

------
jpalomaki
Dropbox feels expensive when think about the storage space it provides, but
maybe we should think more about the syncing side. Usage patterns may differ.
In my case I have maybe just 20 gigs of stuff in my Dropbox, but probably I
generate quite much traffic since I host all my software development projects
there. That also means all the build results etc end up in the Dropbox folder.

And as everybody knows, the syncing mostly just works. And it is fast, almost
real-time. I regularly work with the same projects (Java/Eclipse, .NET/Visual
Studio, node.js) from three different computers and haven't seen any sync
related problems.

I believe is easy to challenge Dropbox on the pricing side, but it will be
much more difficult to replicate their syncing functionality.

Two things I would like to see from Dropbox is support for client side
encryption and support for long path names. Currently I'm using Boxcryptor to
do the client side encryption.

~~~
bambax
Totally agree. Dropbox is perfect. It's super fast, even when you make
duplicate copies of huge files (like Lightroom catalogs!). I have a local
backup using rsync, and it's much slower than Dropbox.

Dropbox also syncs over LAN, which is a big deal if you use several computers
from the same location.

I don't think $99/year is expensive.

(Search doesn't work too good, though).

------
rsanders
It appeared to be syncing my entire Cloud Player music folder to my local
machine. That's quite a few GB of data -- 12,000 songs or so out of a possible
250,000. So it's not going to be of much use to me until they add some kind of
selective sync option.

------
StavrosK
Does anyone know of a good service that does backups? I don't much need
syncing, but I have a headless Linux server that currently backs up 50 GB of
files to SpiderOak every night (they're usually the same files, so not much
data transfer). Is there something like tarsnap for around $25/yr? SpiderOak
is pretty good for backups like that, especially since I can check that it's
working on any computer and restore files, but it costs four times that and
doesn't have a decent headless client.

Any recommendations?

~~~
andymoe
I install crashplan on everything. Cross platform (java I think) crashplan+ is
60 bucks a year for "unlimited" storage and I'm pretty sure you can set up the
client to be headless. You can also have them generate the encryption keys or
just provide them with your own and not upload the private keys to their
servers.

------
hsshah
Timely update. Currently am exploring cloud storage options for ALL my files.
Anyone has experience with Bitcasa? How do Dropbox/Cloud Drive/Google Drive
line up?

~~~
jonemo
Been using Dropbox for all my files (I keep it under 100GB) for several years
now. So far never had any problems, in fact they saved me from lots of tears
when they recovered an accidentally deleted folder beyond the 30 day limit for
me. The collaboration and sharing options are another huge plus. I frequently
give out the link to a folder which results in a beautiful and intuitive
website view of its contents for the recipient. I also have a shared folder
with every member of my family which is much more convenient than sending file
attachments around. These last two sentences are also why I wouldn't want to
jump ship to Amazon despite the attractive price: At least in my case Dropbox
has realized a network effect that more or less locks me in.

I did quite a bit of research into other options before and while using
Dropbox: Tried GDrive and found the online interface (GDocs) not suitable for
the amount of content I have, tried SkyDrive when it was still Live Mesh and
had tons of problems with it (hour-long delays when syncing). At one point I
tried a peer-to-peer type system (I remember their logo being red, forgot the
name) and it was Java based which made it annoying to me. And I tried a system
where files were encrypted before transfer (some Dutch company, again forgot
the name) and the problem with that was that it was way too slow at dealing
with all my files.

~~~
Mithrandir
> (I remember their logo being red, forgot the name)

Wuala? <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuala>

~~~
nodata
Wuala _still_ doesn't support camera sync/instant upload.

------
cmkrnl
The setup fails for me (in Norway), timeout while downloading assets from
CloudFront.

App seems to be using Jersey;

    
    
      Downloading https://d29x207vrinatv.cloudfront.net/Sync/Windows/Application Files/AmazonCloudDrive_2_0_2013_0841/LocalServiceJars/jetty-servlet-8.1.0.v20120127.jar did not succeed.

------
WalterBright
I signed up for it and am planning to use it, but am disappointed it doesn't
work with the regular kindle (just the Kindle Fire).

------
TomNomNom
"File Sync puts your files at your fingertips from _any_ computer"

...

"Sorry, we only support Windows and Mac OSX at the moment"

I can't say I'm surprised, but that doesn't stop me from being disappointed.

I know they would probably claim puffery, but it's just as bad as companies
peddling 'unlimited' usage, IMO.

