
Dropbox Hits 25 Millions Users, 200 Million Files Per Day - ssclafani
http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/17/dropbox-hits-25-millions-users-200-million-files-per-day/
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brlewis
Thanks to Dropbox my photo sharing site has the world's best uploader. (1)
Since it's an ordinary folder, all photo management software (iPhoto,
Aperture, Lightroom, etc.) can export to it without installing a plugin. (2)
People can queue up photos to upload while traveling even if they're currently
without Internet access. (3) Mobile clients are already built, and people can
use the same client either to upload to my site or to send to their desktop
for post-processing.

If you're running a site that people upload files to, I highly recommend
integrating with Dropbox. They have an API, but I just did it by letting
people share a new folder with box@ourdoings.com and pulling photos from that
folder.

~~~
joelhaasnoot
Sounds great for people that already have dropbox, for others that might not
work so great. Most savvy computer users understand dropbox, but sometimes
(less savvy users) just can't get it to work.

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brlewis
I wouldn't make it the only upload method, but I highly recommend it at least
as an option. And with 25 million users, there's a good chance a lot of your
new users already have Dropbox, especially within the early adopter crowd.

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staunch
I know it will probably end up being the first $1 billion+ exit for YC but I'm
really hoping it's the first IPO. It'd really put an end to the myth that YC
startups are "dipshit companies" once and for all (not that Heroku didn't do a
decent job of that).

~~~
citizenkeys
Your comment makes me wonder if Dropbox has an exit strategy. Or if they're
going to do like Digg and sit there until the entire industry moves on. With
anything cloud-related being big busines right now, Dropbox should quit
winners and either sell-out or go public.

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pg
"Your comment makes me wonder if Dropbox has an exit strategy. Or if they're
going to do like Digg and sit there until the entire industry moves on."

Those are not the only two alternatives.

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hnsmurf
Especially not when your company has a solid plan for making money. Digg never
did, Dropbox does.

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edanm
Dropbox is the best startup to rise in the last few years. In terms of
startups I use that have actually changed the way I use computers in a _huge_
way, it is right up there with Facebook. It is one of the services that I
simply could _not_ imagine living without, now that I know it exists.

If you haven't used it, or are still on the free plan, you really should try
it out and buy at least 50gb. Stick all your most important files in there,
and forget about that annoying thing called "backups".

~~~
JonnieCache
_> Stick all your most important files in there, and forget about that
annoying thing called "backups"._

Good luck with that, when dropbox has its first inevitable data loss incident.

If you don't have physical control over the hardware, it doesn't count as a
proper backup.

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TillE
The neat thing about Dropbox is that your files get automagically mirrored to
all your computers with Dropbox installed. So unless the client blows up too,
odds are good that a data loss incident on their servers wouldn't be
catastrophic.

This isn't an enterprisey backup solution by any means, as I don't believe
previous versions are stored locally. But it's a whole lot of really
convenient redundancy.

~~~
rlpb
Does it automagically sync file deletions and corruptions, too?

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davidu
It keeps file revisions server-side. So you'd have to have one heck of a
failure to find out:

1) Have all your nodes syncing at the same time and connected. 2) Introduce
file corruption and deletion. 3) Have all your sync'd machines get the
deletion. 4) Have Dropbox's file revision history go wonky on their side.

~~~
rlpb
> 1) Have all your nodes syncing at the same time and connected.

That's not necessary. All you need is your nodes to connect and sync at a time
before you notice a problem, or if after you notice a problem but accidentally
let it connect (consider a non-technical user here).

> 2) Introduce file corruption and deletion.

If this didn't happen, you wouldn't need backups. By discussing backups, we're
already assuming this might happen. Unless you consider backups to protect
only against theft or fire. Accidental deletion and corruption are also major
factors.

> 3) Have all your sync'd machines get the deletion.

That's what the system is designed to do, so that's a given.

> 4) Have Dropbox's file revision history go wonky on their side.

There well be one error that leads to both file revision history going wonky
_and_ the introduction of file corruption or deletion.

I'm not having a go at Dropbox, it works as expected. But backups need to be
independent, not heavily integrated. Otherwise what you get is some kind of
pseudo-backup that won't cut it in particular, relatively common failure
modes.

It certainly isn't "one heck of a failure". It's one failure.

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Dylan16807
The clients hold copies of old revisions for three days. That's a healthy
margin to find the corruption in case of the dropbox servers failing terribly.

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citizenkeys
Proving that dreams sometimes do come true, the Dropbox Y Combinator
application from 2007: <http://files.dropbox.com/u/2/app.html>

Google never got around to releasing the "G Drive". None of the other
competitors for Dropbox ever caught on, either.

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maguay
It'd be really interesting to see how many of their users are paying
subscribers. Most of the heavy Dropbox users I know do have pro accounts, and
for me, it's the best spent SaaS money I've every spent!

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rmorrison
Wow, the most impressive thing here is the exponential growth: 2 million users
in late 2009, 4 million mid 2010, 25 million now.

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tzs
Looks like O(n^2) growth to me. If we take month 0 as being in late 2009, then
it looks like at month n they have about 19x^2/162-5x/6+2 million subscribers.

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anonymoushn
This is true of any function if you evaluate it at only 3 points.

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tzs
That was the point.

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jcampbell1
Has dropbox taken money since the $6M in 2008?

Their financials must be incredible. If it costs $2/yr to support a free
customer, they must already have 500k paying customers to cover the cost. They
could just as easily have 1M paying customers and be wildly profitable.

My guess is they are keeping their financials a massive secret, because if
they became public it would invite competition from copycats with a budget for
TV ads.

~~~
jackowayed
They do have something like 40 employees, so they're spending on the order of
$10M/year on salaries + benefits + office + etc.

That said, I get the impression (from how PG talks about them, the fact that
they seem to have supported this massive growth in users & employees without
more funding, etc) that they are doing very well, and improving quickly.

~~~
roel_v
I don't know - the Backblaze guys did several blog posts on the economics of
online file hosting/backups and it came out very expensive in terms of
hardware. Plus the custom software and management. Dropbox accounts are
generally small, so maybe that's making it easier. I'm not saying they aren't
doing fine, just that online backups are low margin (Dropbox is special, they
aren't regular 'online backup' providers, I realize; and they operate at a
premium price point; but still...

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jonknee
Plus, Dropbox isn't doing hardware (they use Amazon's). I'd imagine they are
S3's largest customer.

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sachinag
They may be S3's biggest customer, but Netflix is easily AWS' biggest customer
overall.

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tropin
Dropbox it's ok, but what I'd really love is a software which does something a
bit different: to arrange all the unused space in the hard disks of a LAN as a
big virtual folder, with redundancy and all.

Every time I think of the Outlook-and-Word users I have at the office with
500Gb hard disks...

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RK
Maybe I should send an unsolicited job application to Dropbox for a (sexy)
data scientist position. 25 million users is pretty crazy.

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dhouston
go for it :) jobs+hn@dropbox.com

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tuhin
Do you even need UI designers especially that there is basically just no
UI/Interaction?

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roc
have you ever seen the web interface?

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tuhin
Yes, but I honestly believe it suffers neglect and a lot can be done to
improve it. I have never seen a posting for a UI Designer hence wondering.

Also the major USP is that Dropbox behaves just like a folder on the OS and
not a seperate entity.

~~~
roc
I was just pointing out that there definitely is a UX piece and plenty of room
for designer contributions.

Not to mention the installers and the rarely-used menus and preference
windows. Just because you don't see them very often doesn't mean they wouldn't
benefit from thoughtful design.

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revorad
A hockey stick made of money! Thanks Dropbox for setting such a kickass
example of a great technology product and company.

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stef25
Dropbox worked great for me for quite a while. Then my Keypass password.kdb
file got corrupted. This file contained all the passwords to my personal /
freelance and office projects. Impossible to retrieve the data. Major PITA. So
now I just use it for funny pictures and music but I don't trust it with
really important things anymore.

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ssebro
I'm pretty sure dropbox does file versioning, so you should be able to revert
to an earlier (uncorrupted) version of your file. Tell me if that works for
you, b/c I use dropbox+truecrypt for hosting my super important docs...

~~~
stef25
Can't seem to find a mention of file versioning anywhere. When I login into
Dropbox I find the file via search, clicking on it just downloads it.

When I try to open the file it says The following error occured while opening
the database: Hash test failed. The key is wrong or the file is damaged.

I'm not the first one with this problem:
<http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=26321#post-163634> and
[http://superuser.com/questions/187885/keepass-lost-
password-...](http://superuser.com/questions/187885/keepass-lost-password-and-
or-corruption-due-to-dropbox-keepassx)

~~~
ssebro
Looks like the directions are here: <http://www.dropbox.com/help/11>

It does seem like it only keeps 30 days worth of versioning though...

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lubos
I use dropbox on multiple computers. one of the computers is running
jungledisk to backup whole dropbox content. The problem is both services work
on top of amazon cloud but I will eventually resolve this issue too.

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nielsandersen
Jungledisk lets you choose where you want your data hosted. You can choose
Rackspace over Amazon IIRC.

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loso
This is definitely a service that I have no problem paying for. Whenever
people say to me that people will not pay for online services and you have to
use ads, I use Dropbox and Netflix as an example now that Netflix's streaming
service has really taken over.

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geoffw8
Dropbox - the result of building something people actually want.

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rakkhi
I am massive fan of Dropbox and like to see it doing well. I have talked about
its virtues on many Quora posts. I have ussually recommended using a Truecrypt
volume within the Dropbox folder to guarantee encryption.

Now reading findings like this and the authentication issues exposed in the
last few weeks I'm getting quite worried about the security of the whole
solution. Going to have to change a lot of my posts to say do not store
anything sensitive without Truecrypt:
[http://paranoia.dubfire.net/2011/04/how-dropbox-
sacrifices-u...](http://paranoia.dubfire.net/2011/04/how-dropbox-sacrifices-
user-privacy-for.html)

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didip
Dropbox had helped me accomplished the impossible.

Convincing a girly teenage girl to have a habit in backing up her computer
regularly.

No other service could do that, not even Time Machine.

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sdizdar
Amazing... One thing I would like to point that even though people claim that
systems such as Dropbox are "simple" it is really not so simple to implement.
Just ensuring that Windows piece does not mess up your computer (eat all your
CPU, bandwidth etc.) is really hard. There are a lot of not-so-sexy work
behind the curtains.

BTW, we just started private beta for cloudHQ for Dropbox
(<http://www.cloudHQ.net/dropbox>). Basically this service provides
synchronization of Google Docs and Dropbox files and backup of Google Docs to
Dropbox. And we have a cool thing that you can edit Dropbox files directly
with Google docs (you need to install our Google Chrome extension). We need
some beta testers ....

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plainOldText
im wondering how many of these users are paying customers, since subscription
is dropbox's only source of income as far as i know.

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Fester
Awesome numbers. I wish I could participate in design/implementation of a
system like that.

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brown9-2
Anyone know if that is 25 million _active_ users or 25 million registrations?

~~~
huhtenberg
Registrations, of course.

