Some rants on Dropbox

Anyone who has crossed 300GB would have got the opportunity to see the true face of Dropbox. A crappy product/service with so much broken workflows. Mine is expiring this month end and I am not planning to renew.

In summary Dropbox was designed to work well in smaller conditions with 10–20GB storage with superior syncing experience.

You can’t apply small kids to do adult jobs. Handling 1TB they have to think and solve greater problems which dropbox doesn’t care @ all. And they won’t and they can’t. Because by design Dropbox is flawed for bigger setup.

Here are few big problems that Dropbox can’t solve neither care to solve.

- Mass operation (Dropbox was never designed for doing mass operation), Ever deleted/move files in large volumes ? (Problem 1. You can’t do it in Web UI, Problem 2. Every move causes a delete+copy operations which is misleading, you will be shocked to see them in trash unless you know this behaviour Problem 3. Browsing list of massive events is a nightmare)

- Web UI (Dropbox will/can never realize web UI is the single source of truth for a 1TB user with 7–8 devices)

- Serial and longer sync (Dropbox was meant to do tiny sync fast & efficient) if you try to sync a few folder of 80GB each.. Dropbox chooses random order to sync (by file size ???) instead of sequential. You won’t find no folder ready until all folders is synced. You can’t control DB’s sync order.

- Browsing the deleted files and events, Massively deleted files will be displayed as paginated flat list instead of a tree/folder structure. You wont have any clue whether they are your files, all you will see is thousands of .css .js files and keep clicking ‘next page’ (Again Dropbox was designed to work fine on smaller environment.

The verdict is. Use Dropbox(free) for programming and work where the size doesn’t get more than 20GB.

For backups images, videos and mammoth stuffs…. Keep them separately with Onedrive or Amazon cloud, Even kids like pCloud, Mediafire, Mega are doing good job compared to DB