This. Recently came back to macOS after a decade on the other side, and one surprise was how terrible the official Dropbox client was. Installed Maestral instead and it just works -- just like Dropbox used to.
<begin rant>I see Dropbox as one of the biggest failures of the VC model. If only they had been bootstrapped, they would probably have stuck with their initial sync offering: A perfectly executed solution to a problem everybody has. And a small team could have made a good living here -- even with reasonably priced non-free options. Instead I imagine some VC partner convinced them to "grow their market" (or maybe "prepare for cloud"), and now they are descending into irrelevance. <end rant>
Yeah, I remember when they were briefly going to solve the problem of being a universal translator of file formats. They announced this at a conference I attended and I could see the thought bubbles of everyone in the audience: What? That will fail, are you nuts?
Sure, but without VC money the product space wouldn't exist at all, at least not as a free service.
Who doesn't want free storage? No one, that's who.
See also: everything from Sourceforge to Docker Hub. Very few can complete the transition into a paid service.
The important distinction is whether you sell a product or a service. Dropbox is clearly a service, but it's easy to envision a product instead.
Had the user paid for storage up front, the product would be incentivized to support multiple backends to be able to compete on cost. But it doesn't, because it is the storage service that is the actual thing being sold.
SyncThing, while indeed amazing and my goto for personal file sharing, might not go well with your corporate policies. An alternate program, like InSync, allows you to disable telemetry on DropBox, OneDrive and Google Drive at the same time, and is easier to justify.
Syncthing is indeed amazing. I've been using it for the last years, had some problems way back, but haven't seen a single issue over the last year or so.
Worth mentioning that Syncthing doesn't have a cloud part, while DB does. That said, I've been running it since the very beginning, even before it became public/known, and it had never failed me so far.
Syncthing does encrypted nodes now, so I have an encrypted laptop node running offsite; that, coupled with a mostly-on desktop pc and an always-on headless mac mini running void, and I have a 100+GB 'cloud' with syncthing.
Honestly, the best way I found to prevent sync errors is to make sure there's continuity...that there's always some computer, somewhere, that's running and knows what the latest version actually is.
“On other platforms, you can install the Python package or a Docker image based on Alpine Linux” isn't going to fly for a lot of users, though maybe there is quite an overlap between people who know the details of why they might want to install it and people with the ability to.
If you're using Windows at this point, you must have decided that this sort of telemetry is acceptable for you. It's about the same level as the stuff you can't disable in current versions of that OS.
Hey, thanks for this. I didn't know that it existed and it gets around the limits for the maximum number of devices with the official client without a paid plan. I had whatever the max number of sync'd devices + 1 before they limited the device count. It wasn't a big deal because the last device was infrequently used, but it was annoying that the terms changed.
In the grand scheme of things, music bought on iTunes was only DRMd from 2003-2009. Steve Jobs actually proposed to the music industry to allow it to sell DRM free music as early as 2007 in his famous “Thoughts on Music” open letter that at the time was posted on the front page of Apple’s website.
