Dropbox Enhances Dropbox Pro With 10x the Storage and New Features
by Brandon Chester on August 27, 2014 10:20 AM EST- Posted in
- Dropbox
Dropbox was one of the first of the major cloud file storage and sharing services that still exist today. But since its inception, there has been increasing competition from other companies. One way that these companies have competed is on their features for creation and collaboration. Microsoft offers Office, and Google offers Docs, Sheets, and Slides. Another area of competition has been with pricing and storage. All these services offer their user a certain amount of free storage, with options to pay a monthly or annual fee to upgrade to a larger amount. For quite some time now there has been a disparity between the price per gigabyte of storage on Dropbox and the price on Microsoft OneDrive and Google Drive. Microsoft offers 1TB (defined as 1024GB) of storage plus a Microsoft Office subscription for a fee of $6.99 per month for a single user, or $9.99 per month for a family of up to five people to share plus 5 Microsoft Office installs. Google Drive also offers 1TB (defined as 1000GB) for $9.99 per month. Until today Dropbox Pro offered only 100GB to subscribers paying $9.99 per month, but with this update Dropbox is bringing their pricing in line with the competition and giving Dropbox Pro users 1TB (defined as 1000GB) of storage. This 1TB tier is now the only plan for Dropbox Pro, and I personally think some users would have appreciated a less expensive plan that maintained the old 100GB of space.
The enhancements to Dropbox Pro also include new features on top of the greatly increased storage. Dropbox Pro users now have access to new sharing controls like passwords on shared links, shared links that expire after a certain amount of time, and view-only permissions on shared folders. A new remote wipe feature has also been created to be used in the event that a device is lost or stolen.
It looks like competition in the cloud storage space is really paying off for users. With Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, and Google Drive all adopting essentially the same pricing it's now up to Apple to deliver their new iCloud pricing and replace their current price of $100 per year for a measly 50GB of storage.
Source: Dropbox Blog
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Impulses - Thursday, August 28, 2014 - link
That lower tier on Drive is the one thing that might eventually convince me away from using all three services (since I currently have about 25GB free on each)... It's cheap enough that sheer convenience might override any of the particular benefits on the other services and the redundancy factor.nerd1 - Wednesday, August 27, 2014 - link
Baidu already gives away 3TB of cloud storage for free. Yes it won't be secure, but no cloud storage is anyway...bsd228 - Wednesday, August 27, 2014 - link
free cloud storage is the least secure possible - at some point they either go out of business or cancel the service or start charging you for it. You want to pick a provider who is at least breaking even, since it takes a very long time to upload a terabyte of data.2disbetter - Wednesday, August 27, 2014 - link
As someone who has spent a considerable amount of time and energy investigating the various cloud services, I've come to appreciate Dropbox above the other commercial solutions. For my secure cloud storage needs I've resorted to either Bittorrent Sync (free) and the Transporter Go. The issue with using your own hardware for clouds functionality is that you are limited by your broadband connection. My upload speed will be the same across my own solution and that of DropBox or Onedrive. The place where a commercial entity shines is the remote download aspect. If you have a lot of files that need to be synced, this will be done the fastest across the board on local hardware, but when you are remote and must sync, your upload becomes your weakest link. Commercial services are able to fill your download bandwidth while out and about. What I've found though that really helps with this is block level syncing. This is where only portions of a file are uploaded and downloaded versus the entire file. Transporters don't support this just yet, but BT Sync does. So does Dropbox. I'm not sure if OneDrive does. This significantly helps with syncing. It works so well with Dropbox's desktop client that it almost made it useable in my case. The problem with all commericial cloud services is that the server has to first upload everything before any local lan sync functionality can be affected. This is a shame. If Dropbox could permit computers on a LAN to realize the most current version of the files are present on that network and sync via the network WHILE the cloud server is being updated it would greatly improve performance across the board, and would actually, at least in my case, make having a local hardware based cloud not necessary. (Not that I would ever get ride of it.) All that said Dropbox's client and backend has always impressed me. They really have the best client and backend in my opinion. I sincerely hope Dropbox could survive the now saturated cloud market.2disbetter - Wednesday, August 27, 2014 - link
I just noticed that Dropbox partially improved their upload performance with what they call streaming sync. I suppose the problem with what I'm asking is that it works if you are sure all of your computers are on one network, but if you are geographically separated you run into problems with collaboration use.TrackSmart - Wednesday, August 27, 2014 - link
Here's what kills DropBox for me: They double and triple count data. This prevents me from sharing large DropBox folders with my collaborators who not have enough storage space left in their accounts (particularly 'free' users).The person who "owns" the folder should be the only person who has the data count against their quota. Google got this right. It is the reason I will probably be switching to Google Drive, despite Dropbox's increased storage allowance and many years of using their service. It's become more and more problematic as the size of my shared data increases. Sure, it looks like both now offer "1 TB" of data to Pro users, but DropBox does not let me share my folders with my collaborators unless they have enough free space on their accounts for MY FILES AND THEIR FILES. That's a serious problem.
My other major issue is that "Selective Sync" is broken by design. If I add a new folder to Dropbox, it will sync across all of my machines, despite enabling 'selective sync'. There is no way to turn off that hazard. Again, the larger my folders grow on DropBox the more deadly this problem becomes.
2disbetter - Thursday, August 28, 2014 - link
The shared folder issue seems like a truly easy fix for Dropbox. Certainly sounds like something they should give some attention too. I've not had any problems with Selective Sync. It appears to work in my use case. Of course I'm using all of 4 gb of space on mine.Personally I think Dropbox should bite the bullet, get a bunch of capital investment and purchase their own storage space that they own. It would be expensive and take some time to pay down, but in the long run will be the only way they can compete with the like of Google and Microsoft.
icebox - Thursday, August 28, 2014 - link
Why is it more expensive for europe? The price is 9.99eur (~13$) instead of the 9.99$Drazick - Thursday, August 28, 2014 - link
Nothing beats Microsoft OneDrive's integration with Windows / Office and price.I see no reason for Windows 7 / 8 users to chose something else, really.