Dropbox’s 10x Increase: More than Just Space

This week, Dropbox announced they’re increasing their $9.99 Pro plan from 100GB to 1TB. On the surface, this seems straightforward: more space, better value. (Or, even more straightforward: Google and Microsoft both offer $1.99 100GB plans, and Google already has a $9.99 1TB plan.)

But given Dropbox’s emphasis on syncing (vs. full-on cloud storage and access), the magnitude is interesting when compared with hard drive sizes. With only 100GB, users had to choose which files lived in Dropbox. With 1TB, users can afford cloud storage that far exceeds the combined capacity available of all their devices.

That’s great news for Dropbox, since it turns their service from a sharing and transfer mechanism into a user’s primary storage. But over time it also means they’ll outgrow the simple sync-everything-in-a-folder model that helped popularize Dropbox in the first place. If you have more data than will fit on your laptop, you can’t sync it all.

Dropbox already offers “Selective Sync,” which lets users manually select what to sync with a particular device. But that’s awkward and brittle: what I think I need locally may differ from what I actually need, and will almost certainly differ from what I’ll need tomorrow. Dropbox built its brand on simplicity, and to maintain that they’ll have to solve this at some point.

One startup, Bitcasa, thinks it has the answer: they provide a similar 1TB storage plan, and (if I understand correctly, and I’m not sure I do) a service that sits between your physical hard drive and your filesystem, silently caching and swapping data so your 128GB hard drive looks like a 1TB one.

I’m a little reluctant to trust a startup with such a fundamental component of my computing experience; but the idea is intriguing, and might be easier to accept from a larger, established player.

Then there’s the question of photos. With 1TB of storage, I can put all (or nearly all) my photos in the cloud. But other than backup, what’s the benefit? Dropbox’s photo app, Carousel, is fairly lightweight vs. even the built-in iOS Photos app, and doesn’t run on computers. My Aperture or iPhoto library will be useless on my iPad when synced via Dropbox. So I’d be surprised if Dropbox weren’t working feverishly on a more robust, cross-platform photo-management offering.

One can’t discuss moving all one’s data to the cloud without considering privacy. I don’t doubt that Dropbox is doing what it can to keep data safe; but the more people have your data, the less safe it is.

BitTorrent Sync attempts to solve this via peer-to-peer sync among your devices, making it a viable Dropbox alternative for those of us with servers in our closets. When I tried it a couple years back, it was difficult to set up and lacked sharing functionality; but an update this week appears to have changed that.

There are also hardware-based “private cloud” options like Western Digital’s My Cloud, which effectively create a Dropbox equivalent on your home network; data is synced and backed up to the device in question instead of a remote server.

But it’s tough to compete with easy & free (or freemium), and I think most users will choose price and convenience over privacy, especially when the distinctions between P2P, home-network storage, and true cloud storage can be a bit abstract for non-technical folks. It may be telling that one private cloud vendor, PogoPlug, seems to be moving away from its hardware offering and providing more traditional cloud storage instead.

Cloud-centric storage, photos, and privacy: a 10x increase in capacity brings opportunities and challenges greater than simple product evolution. Numerous players are tackling them, from different perspectives: Dropbox from its original stronghold in file-synchronization; Google from its more cloud-centric core; Microsoft from wherever Microsoft is coming from these days; BitTorrent focused on P2P and privacy; hardware vendors using the privacy angle to play to their strengths; and smaller players like Bitcasa suggesting newer, better models. Should be interesting.