Dropbox Irks Mac Users With Annoying Dock Icon, Offers Clueless Support (arstechnica.com) 67
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Dropbox now opens a new file browser and an associated Dock icon every time it starts, even if you don't want it to. If you're not familiar with Macs, the Dock is the line of applications on the bottom of the screen (or the side, if you've moved it in the settings) and serves the same function as the Windows Taskbar. If my computer restarts or if Dropbox restarts, the new Dropbox window that I don't want pops up in the Dock. This isn't a huge deal, as I can quit Dropbox's new file browser and get rid of that Dock icon each time my computer starts up. I'm not going to stop using Dropbox -- I've been paying the company $138 a year for 2TB of storage and for 12 months' worth of file history, which saves all deleted files and revisions to files. (It's going up to $158 next time I get billed, in February.) It's worth it to me because Dropbox still works great, while the alternatives have always been unreliable or disappointing in other ways when I've tried them. I'll get into that more later in this article.
But the Dock icon and window is a major change in how Dropbox presents itself to users. Dropbox has always been the kind of application that is there when you need it and gets out of the way when you don't. Dropbox's syncing and file-sharing features are integrated with the Finder (the Mac file manager), and there's a little icon in the Mac's Menu Bar at the top of the screen for when you need to change a setting. But now, Dropbox wants to be front and center at all times. The company built its own file browser to replace what's already available in the Mac Finder, and it opens that new file manager every time Dropbox starts. We wrote about it last week when Dropbox started rolling it out to more users. I've had it for more than a month since I somehow ended up in Dropbox's Early Access program. Ars' Jon Brodkin, the author of the article, also discovered that "there are numerous Dropbox support employees who apparently have never used their company's Mac application and do not understand how it works." Specifically, the employees Brodkin talked to didn't know "that it's possible for Mac applications to run without a Dock icon even though that's exactly how Dropbox worked for a decade... And they've been giving bad advice to users who want to change back to the old way of doing things."
But the Dock icon and window is a major change in how Dropbox presents itself to users. Dropbox has always been the kind of application that is there when you need it and gets out of the way when you don't. Dropbox's syncing and file-sharing features are integrated with the Finder (the Mac file manager), and there's a little icon in the Mac's Menu Bar at the top of the screen for when you need to change a setting. But now, Dropbox wants to be front and center at all times. The company built its own file browser to replace what's already available in the Mac Finder, and it opens that new file manager every time Dropbox starts. We wrote about it last week when Dropbox started rolling it out to more users. I've had it for more than a month since I somehow ended up in Dropbox's Early Access program. Ars' Jon Brodkin, the author of the article, also discovered that "there are numerous Dropbox support employees who apparently have never used their company's Mac application and do not understand how it works." Specifically, the employees Brodkin talked to didn't know "that it's possible for Mac applications to run without a Dock icon even though that's exactly how Dropbox worked for a decade... And they've been giving bad advice to users who want to change back to the old way of doing things."
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Re: if ur on macos just use fuckin icloud (Score:1)
True it is cheaper than Dropbox for 2TB and is part of the Finder. Sync documents or whatever you want.
Re: if ur on macos just use fuckin icloud (Score:2)
can it share folders with people who dont use apple yet?
Im probably switching to syncthing next dropbox billing cycle.
Re: if ur on macos just use fuckin icloud (Score:2)
I don't use cloud backup/sync services (Score:3, Interesting)
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They all have their flaws.
I finally got a $99 NAS box (Zyxel) and some 2TB hard drives and built my own local micro-cloud. The NAS sits in a basement closet, out of the way, and even if the house burns down it'll probably survive. Total cost for the NAS and a pair of 2GB drives was just under $200.
It may not be fancy but it works and there are no monthly fees.
(I do have offsite backups, but this way I get 4TB of storage and no fees and don't have to run any applications like Dropbox.)
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Your data won't last long on that RAID 0 / JBOD.
Don't you worry your pretty little head about it, sugarplum.
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Lately I've been using Sync [sync.com]. Your files are encrypted before being written to the server - the only one with access is you. It similar to Dropbox in terms of functionality and access - and there are clients for Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android.
Lots of alternatives - Diversify (Score:4, Insightful)
"Roll your own" is the stupid macho answer. If you're serious about data, you'll do both. If you work in IT, you know anyone who makes money off their data has at least one offsite backup. Cloud storage is expensive if you need more than 1 TB. Then again, if you can fit all your files in that much (strongly suggest Marie Kondo-ing your files), 1TB per year is about the price of a mid-range 2.5" USB drive.
Devices fail and almost no one does a great job diagnosing their NAS boxes to spot problems before they occur. Those are largely "set and forget." I bet anyone who gives you that line of crap that real men run their own servers has/will experience data loss in a 10 year time span.
I still have Dropbox and have been meaning to cancel them since they dropped Desktop Linux support. I use iDrive for a full backup (replacement for beloved CrashPlan) and a USB drive for Time Machine for storing long history. I value my family photos and am sure not to trust any single source, including myself.
If you're a grown-up with money, you diversify your savings and investments between stocks and bonds and other investments and if you're a grown-up with data, you diversify your backups between inexpensive local solutions and offsite solutions just in case someone breaks into your house, your device fails, or your house floods or burns down.
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I had a few qualms when Dropbox was announced. Still do:
1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
2. It doesn't actually replace a USB drive. Most people I know e-mail files to themselves or host them somewhere online to be able to perform presentations, but they still car
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NAS + Backblaze B2.
I have 2x2TB HDDs in RAID1 in my NAS (which sits in the attic) and all my important files are synchronized offsite through Backblaze B2. For 600 GB of data I am billed 3 dollars a month. I can share whichever files I want through FTP (large files). Files requiring collaboration (personal business) sit in Google Sheets or Docs.
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The fact it syncs is what most people want - they want a cloud service for backup and sync. They edit a file, and it's synced to all their other PCs automatically, and backed up not only to those PCs, but to the cloud. Thus a user is automatically doing best practice backups - their cloud account h
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This isn't a huge deal, .... (Score:2, Insightful)
This might help... (Score:1)
Dropbox Customer Support doesn't know how their own product works on Macs and gives bad advise?
I guess Dropbox could dock their pay. :-)
Re:This might help... (Score:4, Interesting)
I was a "Dropbox Super User" on their forums from around 2007 to around 2017 (Im still a "Super User Alumni" now), along with a small bunch of others (probably around 7 or 8 - thats how many were invited to the Dropbox HQ in San Francisco in 2015, all expenses paid for several days) and we regularly knew significantly more about the platform than either the people running the support desk (outsourced) or the Dropboxers posting in the forums. It was quite amusing at times, correcting a Dropboxer on how their app worked.
I dropped out in 2017 as the forums were regularly just threads of abuse directed at Dropbox and anyone who responded on behalf of Dropbox - mainly around "I *want* this feature and therefore you *must* give it to us, because we *demand* it" style issues (its amazing how entitled some users feel).
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Re:This might help... (Score:4, Insightful)
The *vast* majority of users weren't paying for the features - and one of the biggest complaints we had was "the free 2GB isnt enough, give us more".
And even if the user is paying for the service, they don't have any right to demand new features and complain when they don't magically appear - if you are buying a product on the basis of features that may come along, you are doing it wrong. You buy a product because it does something that helps you or makes your life better.
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I think at this point, you need to be reminded that you're not buying a product, you're paying for a Service. That distinction is important, as you likely have expectations when you're paying for a service that it improve.
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Whether you want to dress it up as a product or service or a donkey or anything else, the issue is the same - you spend your money on the basis of what it *is*, not what you want it to be. You can hope for improvements all day long, but you have utterly no right to spew hatred on a forum because your personal desires haven't been implemented.
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you have utterly no right to spew hatred on a forum because your personal desires haven't been implemented
Well why not? Can I get that as a service? =P
But yes, if you aren't happy, go elsewhere. Stop giving them money for something that doesn't do what you need (or some appreciable fraction of what you need).
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Yes they do, actually. You can chose to ignore them, and you risk that competitors might actually act -- on what is literally "customer demand" -- and win over your users.
It's called competition.
You offer product because it fulfills a market need, or you'll find that you don't hav
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The problem was that you were acting as free customer service for a for-profit company, and got butt-hurt about it, in typical martyr fashion.
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Yes, they do have every right to demand new features and every right to complain when they don't appear.
And Dropbox has every right to ignore their demands if they so choose.
Also violates MacOS security settings (Score:5, Informative)
Dropbox also seems to violate MacOS security settings by ignoring (somehow) it's access control for the Finder integration.
Previously, there was a checkbox in the dropbox app itself that allowed users to turn off such integration. In a recent version this was removed. At the same time, unchecking permission to "integrate with Finder" in the MacOS settings does not seem to work - Dropbox somehow appears to be able to integrate even if this setting is denied (look under Settings->Extensions->All, for Dropbox->Finder Extensions checkbox).
Dropbox support is likely "clueless on purpose". Unfortunately, no way to report this in a meaningful way to Apple either (I tried using my old Apple dev. account, but not really holding my breath for a response)
It's worse than an annoyance... (Score:3, Insightful)
The new version uses half a gigabyte of memory [twitter.com].
Dropbox (as a company) has been in full on self-destruct mode for a couple years now. Any application that silently auto-updates itself to change the core of how it functions and use significant new resources is asking to get the boot. If they don't respect you as a customer now, that situation isn't going to get better in the future.
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Yeah, I didn't believe that until I checked Activity Monitor. It turns out to be true, but the worst of it is that the main app (there were five helper apps) had 144 threads and over 6,000 open ports. (I think these are Mach ports, not TCP ports). The only process with more threads was the kernel task and only two processes had more ports: the Window Server (basically the graphics subsystem) and a process called BlueJeansHelper with a massive 20,000 ports. The last of these is a helper for Adobe's screen sh
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You can run Dropbox as regular user rather than superuser on a Mac. You just get an annoying prompt for superuser password once every boot. If you ever allowed it superuser access, good luck trying to remove it.
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Dropbox breached customer data (Score:1)