

Dropbox launches (YC summer 07) - sharpshoot
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/11/dropbox-the-online-storage-solution-weve-been-waiting-for/

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aston
We just realized some folks around here might be itching to see what's up,
too. Have at it! (50 invites for folks here)

<http://getdropbox.com/beta/yc50>

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mrtron
I realize part of the benefit of it is to share files - but what about things
I want to make sure are private?

I see photos and public when I first sign in - are these both public folders?
How do I store things, lets say my resume I want to be able to access from
anywhere, but want private?

Other than that, it appears to 'just work' amazingly. Having built a somewhat
similar backend to a system like that, it really is quite a feat.

Edit: Since the startup I was at is now defunct - email me and I may have some
a good potential market for your product (very slightly modified)

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mhb
From the FAQ (<http://getdropbox.com/faq>):

15\. How public are Public links? How Private are my other files?

    
    
        * Any file in your Public folder is accessible to anyone who can guess your public file link and the path to the file. No one can browse the directory, though.
        * Any file in your Dropbox outside of the Public folder is by default only accessible via computers linked to your account or to you via the web interface.
        * If you give out a shareable link to a portion of your Photo Gallery (from here), people who know the link will be able to browse any photos in the album you linked from and any sub-album.

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marcus
Congrats guys, I have 2 requests:

1) Get a Linux version out, it shouldn't take too long as you developed the
thing using Python (not sure what OS specific bindings you have)

2) Add support for LAN connections, when two boxes sit on the same LAN there
is no reason for them to wait for S3 to be updated, get the update done
locally and then propagate to S3, this will save you bandwidth and shorten
latency.

~~~
BrandonM
In regards to #1, a simpler solution for me is to just use sshfs. It hooks
into the kernel's fuse module and allows you to mount any SCP-able location as
a local filesystem. I don't know if it supports any kind of caching or not,
but it seems like it would be quite easy to build that on top of it.

Fuse also has support for things like curlftpfs, so if you can't get ssh
access somewhere, as long as you have a host with ftp access, you can do the
same thing.

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marvin
At the risk of getting grabbed by the MPAA...I want to use a system like this
to globally access my media archive, which includes all my legitimately
acquired games and music, but also a decent amount of pirated material.
Obviously storing copyrighted material without a license on a server in other
people's control is a very bad idea. This would be a very useful thing to do
though; maybe in a different world where the copyright system has been
reformed... I often find myself at a friend's house wanting to see some movie
I have on my disk, but I never bother to bring my portable HD unless it's
planned.

I have about..50 gigabytes of images of games that I own, i think? Having
access to those anywhere would be really nice. I would run my private server
to do this kind of thing anyway, but this networking solution would make
things a lot easier. However, I wouldn't want anyone to instigate a raid based
on what to the casual observer seems like a fat load of illegally acquired
copyrighted material. This would be a problem even if I only uploaded what I
own.

And then there's the problem of storage cost, 1.5$/10GB/month turns into a
considerable number very quickly. So I suppose you intend this kind of thing
for the small stuff; images, documents, small-to-medium music collections
etc.?

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spydez
That's my problem with all these online storage things. It's too expensive to
save my 150 gigs of FLAC/mp3 on their service. Not even S3 is cost effective.

And I do not want to waste all the time to rerip all those CDs if my computers
gets stolen (again), so I finally had to settle for rsync and Dreamhost @
$12/mo for 500 GB, but Dreamhost is far from fast, so it's not perfect.

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kingnothing
Why not just buy a hard drive, store your audio on it, and leave it at a
trusted friend / relative's house?

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spydez
I'd like to keep it up to date, so just a harddrive is inadequate, since all
my trusted friends and relatives are 3 hours away. I'd need a whole computer,
on 24/7 with some ports forwarded and stuff.

I don't want to impose the... 8 or 10 bucks extra electricity per month a 24/7
comp uses.

(Also, there's the nice side benefit of having a webserver to host my random
forays into web design, personal blog, etc.)

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dhouston
we've got a new screencast up too, which isn't linked to from the tc article:

<http://getdropbox.com/screencast>

shameless reddit/digg plug:

<http://reddit.com/info/6boh3/comments/>

[http://digg.com/software/Google_Drive_killer_coming_from_MIT...](http://digg.com/software/Google_Drive_killer_coming_from_MIT_Startup)

~~~
jgrahamc
Nice use of the AACS key in your screen cast :-)

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ashu
Congrats, folks. Get a linux client soon, will ya? :)

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hwork
"Google Drive killer coming from MIT Startup"... awesome. Top in all topics on
digg at the moment.

Update: Top of digg, top of news.yc... SECOND on reddit... can they complete
the trifecta?

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zach
Wow, I forgot all about this after getting pumped about Dropbox (along with
everyone else here) last spring:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863>

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vlad
Congrats! What's ironic is that I was lucky to record a video of Drew coding
an early version of Dropbox last March, but as I didn't have a painless
solution for backing up, I don't have a copy of it anymore. :)

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KB
Looks like the Dropbox client doesn't work if you're behind a Proxy servers.

Any plans to allow a proxy configuration setting in the future?

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huhtenberg
Gave it a swirl just now. I have tested Wuala, AllMyData and a couple of other
similar services before and DropBox does stand out in a general look&feel as
well as the implementation details.

IMO it has two major problems at the moment -

* On Windows, if DropBox is _not_ running, it causes Windows Explorer to lag like hell; entering a folder on a local disk takes seconds and the Explorer basically plays dead at this time

* There is no detailed description of the security model - what's encrypted/authenticated where and how exactly. While some (most ?) people don't care about this sort of thing and tend to take devs' word for it, the model needs to be disclosed to allow independent review and evaluation. Otherwise it's just a proprietary crypto, which should be assumed broken until proven otherwise.

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jgrahamc
Very interesting. I actually built something like this myself (I was going to
call it satchl) and I eventually stopped after looking long and hard at the
online storage market and deciding that it wasn't worth the effort.

What convinced dropbox that they could do better?

~~~
run4yourlives
Funny I was doing the same... I think that alone suggests that the marketplace
isn't filling every need.

I really love the S3 peice... should allow them to keep prices way down and
stay profitable.

~~~
jgrahamc
What I wanted to do with satchl was provided the ability to drag and drop
files onto a drive/mount point which would also appear as a web page (a
'desktop' if you like). There would be a couple of versions of the desktop
available: a public one and a private one with a single password for making
changes. I was targetting a family that needs to share files across the world,
or a small company. I had fun writing all the Ajax stuff for the virtual
desktop...

~~~
run4yourlives
Have you used Tortoise SVN on windows? I'd really like something along those
lines to be honest.

Dropbox looks like a great alternative though.

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nickb
Nice!

Just in case I need to remove it from my Mac, how do I do it?

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csmajorfive
So, just curious, why haven't you guys bought dropbox.com from whoever owns it
now? Seems like a smart move because if I tell people to "try dropbox",
they'll go to dropbox.com first.

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rms
Techcrunch says 15k of funding so if they've had an angel round it hasn't been
announced. It could also be a small angel round. At this point, it's probably
not worth spending a large percentage of their bank account on the domain. The
dropbox.com domain owner also might want a number that is close to their
entire bank account balance.

~~~
pg
TechCrunch's info is a bit out of date.

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ph0rque
So I used dropbox as a beta user for close to a year now... the thing I really
like about it is the "set it, forget it" feeling it affords me--it's there
when I need it, and stays out of my way when I don't. What I would really like
to (eventually) see is some kind of a dropbox server I could download to e.g.
my SAN (external hard drive attached to my router) that would work the same it
does now, i.e. over the internet.

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whacked_new
Destined to succeed since day 1.

Is there encryption?

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derefr
Does the Windows version work with applications that don't understand shell
extensions (e.g. DOS/Win16 apps, Cygwin &c)? For all the time that I've been
searching through syncing programs, I haven't yet found one that presents as a
drive/real folder (ala FUSE).

~~~
dhouston
yeah, it's a local folder that gets watched and synced

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rrival
Double points for TPS Report and Pets.com exec summary in the screencast -
brilliant

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henning
How well does this work with large binary files? (I'm not interested in using
this to share DVD rips, I work with legacy blob databases at my day job at the
salt mines which are usually several hundred MB in size)

~~~
dhouston
binary diffing (rsync-like algorithm) and compression is built into the
protocol.

i've been using it to sync my 3gb development VM across my computers; also
works great with photoshop files, big documents, etc.

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pchristensen
Minuses: Tab order on the "Link your account" page is wrong.

Pluses: Just works!

Great job, you've solved a problem I've been fighting with for a long (long)
time!

~~~
pchristensen
Plus, when you read the FAQ, it's even cooler than it sounds at first:
automatic photo albums, public/shared/private settings, automatic versioning,
secure sending, etc. This is one sweet product.

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staticshock
i haven't gotten a chance to test this yet, but how does dropbox do conflict
resolution? ie: i'm offline at one place, make a change, offline at another
place, make a change, go back online at both places.

for text files, i suppose this could potentially implement svn-like text
merging. how would that feature feel, from a design perspective? unintuitive?
error prone? or excelent?

edit: damn, this is a really cool app. goodbye emails to self.

~~~
pchristensen
From FAQ:

# How does Dropbox handle editing conflicts?

If two users share access to a file (either through sharing the same account
or within a shared folder) and a conflict between their two versions appears,
the Dropbox server retains only the first version to fully make it to the
server.

The machines still in conflict with the server will get copies of the file
with a suffix like "(Drew's local copy 1-25-2008)." Users can then manually
fix the conflict and remove the extra copies of the conflicted file.

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petenixey
great work guys - YC is rockin' the valley as usual :)

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ctingom
Just went by the Dropbox booth at SXSW. Looks cool.

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danielha
Can you go by again and take a pic?

~~~
ctingom
Sorry, I would have but I got your reply too late.

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danielha
I was just joking. They most definitely were not at SXSW.

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ctingom
You're right. I got the names and logos confused. I went by the BoxCloud
booth. <http://www.boxcloud.com/>

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herdrick
Congratulations to Drew, Arash and Aston! As a happy user of Dropbox, I'm glad
to see more people get a chance to use it.

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brlewis
Any plans for an API? Any site that people upload files to would love to share
this interface.

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kilowatt
This looks awesome. What are you using to do version control on the backend?

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run4yourlives
I really like this... well done! Any chance for an invite?

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mhb
The invite link in the article worked for me.

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mrtron
no more invites there - any chance of me getting an invite as well?

looks like a great concept.

~~~
lyime
i would like an invite too. Very Interesting idea, eager to try it out.

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timothyandrew
Oh this is maddening! Can someone please invite me? :)

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8en
I'm excited about drop box. Congratulations guys!

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acangiano
They entirely nailed it. Excellent job.

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thingsilearned
Congrats guys! Very awesome product.

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eusman
accounts shouldn't be linked to e-mail addresses at login

