Syncing outside folders to Dropbox used to be such a pain because symlinks/junctions don't sync changes as they happen (you need to restart Dropbox each time in order for it to sync changes) so that's why we built Boxifier. Disclaimer: I am one of the founders.
These should definitely be opt-in, however (I don't use the badge), and I would definitely argue that the way they get on the accessibility list is deceptive at best.
The long term game for Dropbox is in having businesses outsource storage to them. While consumer cloud storage is a tough market (due to it being a race to the bottom), the vision of getting businesses of all sizes to replace their legacy file servers with Dropbox sounds very compelling.
You can already see Dropbox has transitioned its focus to businesses. Mailbox and Carousel shut down.
That is because a single consumer can easily switch to another service based on price alone and can afford to spend his/her own time on figuring out how to migrate their files.
On the other hand, once you have 100 business users which got used to Dropbox, switching to another solution has a real cost for your business. That's why Dropbox is focusing on businesses: they are stickier in the long run.
However, Dropbox will still maintain a strong consumer presence because familiarity is one of the key points for selling Dropbox to businesses. Moreover, every business starts small and every founder is a consumer at heart.
The promise of Dropbox for businesses is in outsourcing the complexity of storage in exchange for a monthly/yearly subscription. Consumer cloud storage is just a step in executing a bigger vision.
I can attest to this. I do some tech support for a growing construction company nearby, and I just tossed out their aging server. Moved all their data to Dropbox and set it up on the PM's laptops. Took me about a week of answering questions before they were all happy and smooth again.
Agreed. We had a SMB share on our network that had grown increasingly unused. Since there wasn't a business processes in place users organically started using Dropbox to communicate with clients.
Eventually they have you because then you realize that you have so much business information in them that you can't let employees walk out the door with.
”On the other hand, once you have 100 business users which got used to Dropbox, switching to another solution has a real cost for your business. That's why Dropbox is focusing on businesses: they are stickier in the long run.”
Great point! Hadn’t thought of it like that before.
Which is going to be a struggle due to businesses also shifting other things to cloud and other providers offer complete solutions whereas dropdox is a piece of a large puzzle.
this is where Box is king and they've pretty much been focused on businesses since the start. They've been inking partnerships with everyone from Microsoft to IBM to make their service king among corporate/enterprise users.
>The long term game for Dropbox is in having businesses outsource storage to them.
Is the business version somehow different? We simply don't all users to run Dropbox, because it eats up local disc space on our terminal servers, or desktops. Unless Dropbox starts working more like a local file server there's a ton of business that will never adopt it.
The default where Dropbox just sucks down files until you run out of disc space, and the on-disc-cache can't be shared between users, needs to change for Dropbox to be truly successful in business.
From a first look on Windows, this is implemented with NTFS sparse files [1] and a file system minifilter. The sparse files act as placeholders so that you can browse your entire Dropbox structure. When you access a file, the minifilter sees that and starts fetching the data from Dropbox servers in the background. You can think of it as HSM [2]
> Having to save them in your Dropbox, or having to move them to your Dropbox afterward, turns out to be a massive friction.
This also bothered me so I looked for a solution. As much as I love Dropbox, I still have data stuck on external drives and NAS boxes. I looked at some Dropbox competitors but you always get that half-baked feeling with them. I sticked with Dropbox in the end (especially after they introduced the 1TB plans) but I still wanted to get the files from my external drive in there.
I tried symlinks which felt neat at first, only to later discover their nasty shortcomings: imagine the horror of files getting deleted when my external drive was disconnected. Symlinks also don't get the updates so in order to sync changes I always had to close and restart Dropbox. Back to square one.
In the end, all I wanted was a simple way to have files synced from my external drive and NAS, without having to worry about it or doing voodoo to get it working. That's why I created Boxifier (http://www.boxifier.com). I wanted a super easy, set-and-forget, "it just works" solution.
I think Dropbox doesn't get enough credit for solving the sync problem for the masses in a way that feels so simple. That simple that it's easy to forget that it is a hard problem in the first place.
What happens here is that Windows Explorer asks Dropbox whether it should display a green or blue icon for a file. It does this for all files, including those outside of the Dropbox folder.
The big difference here is the principle of least privilege[1].
We could have built Boxifier so that it requires you to login into Dropbox and get back an access token to be used by Boxifier with the Dropbox API.
If someone wanted to get access to the data in your Dropbox account, they could do that with an access token (that they received when you authorized their app to access your Dropbox). Then they could use that token from any computer to download data from your Dropbox, without you ever finding out about it.
Boxifier works completely offline so it doesn't need any network access (which could be misused). If you want to be 101% sure you can setup a firewall rule and block all network access for Boxifier. This way you can make sure it cannot get data from your Dropbox folder and upload it to a remote location.
On the other hand, with an access token you have no control on how it is used outside of your computer. You may argue that you can always revoke it, but the reality of today's attacks is that they go stealth for a long time before you find out about them.
We used to work in the antivirus industry so that's why we care so much about security and privacy. Boxifier has been designed with security in mind from its early days.
