Dropbox says that these changes are necessary in order to curb abuse from malicious actors and also because it’s not feasible to keep updating its acceptable use-cases list and apply it in a scalable manner.
“Malicious actors” aka customers fully taking advantage of the agreed upon service cotract they are fulfilling their part of, by paying money. But when time comes to allow them to store 18PB of linux iso images – they magically turn to malicious actors…
I do agree with the second part of the statement there, that unlimited storage plans are unfeasible and unsustainable evil and should have been curbed long ago. Even google has done it, after decades of offering unlimited storage.
Yeah, I hate this change of attitude regarding customers, that many companies manifest. Instead of calling themselves stupid, they rage against customers who use their service in full.
“Hey, here’s 10 free oranges! Come, get some, kind sir!
Ouh, you took them all, you rude, malintent, creep, scum!”
I hope this will change Dropbox to finally become a better service!
I have one small business customer I do consulting for. They have 5TB of data, they wanna access inhouse and on the road. They also do a lot of collaboration with other small businesses. That is why it was clear from the beginning of the evaluation 8y ago, the most important factor for the storage solution is user friendliness. Unfortunately that ruled out Nextcloud and only left Dropbox because “that is what people already know”.
Boy is that a shitty service. The speeds are dog slow, the API calls to backup the data to TrueNAS takes roughly 8h. It used to be a simple file sharing tool, now it is filled with bullcrap like Dropbox Papers, Passwords and 20 other services. They pay thousands of dollars a year and only use 5TB. They don’t care to much about performance but I think it would be better to pay per TB or API call and get decent performance.
I have heard from people in my private tracker, that they share 400TB from Dropbox. Maybe some people here misuse Dropbox for STORJ?
I’ve found the Nextcloud Windows app behaves pretty much the same as Onedrive Sync. Been running Nextcloud for a bit over 2 years now and use it every day at work Some updates have broken things but I’ve never been in the position of not being able to fix it and having to restore from backup. Would be close to 1TB stored in my Nextcloud now.
Market analyst: Hey Boss we found out that our customers only use 500GB each, but they gladly pay for 1TB
Boss: so we can sell them infinite storage for more money and they won’t use it… lets do that…
Some Time Later…
Engineer: So Boss your brilliant plan failed… now we have PB scale customers and no earnings.
Boss: i think we are all to blame here, we better walk it back and fire some people to make up for the losses.
It probably went more like this:
Marketing: Please give us unlimited, that helps to promote the product! Worry free storage for everyone!
A few years later
Marketing: The initial Drive war is over, we don’t need the unlimited claim anymore
Boss: If we would impose a limit of 35TB, how many customers would that affect?
Engineer: less than 1%
Boss: And how much would that save us?
Engineer: X$
Boss: Hell yeah, let’s do it! Give these people a one year runaway so we don’t have to bother with contracts.
Kudos to the Boss, she/he did everything right.
And the moral of the story:
Cloud is just someone else’s computer and they can prices as soon as your contract runs out. That sucks even more if you have to pay for egress 