(Politics is irrelevant to me, but power is not. The government can already twist your arm; being on first name's basis with somebody important will be invaluable.)

Edit: I thought we could openly state our opinions, but it seems I am getting punished with downvotes. Editing again because it's now going the other direction, but my point still stands: don't downvote or upvote just to normalise your own political beliefs.

Political links to the US govt are also a bit of a hazard-- the more you willingly approach them and enable them, the more they will take from your pocket and the more they will push you around. The Snowden leaks have painted a bad picture of the US companies as a result of their compliance with ridiculous government policy, and these companies are being scrutinized fiercely as a result.

It's not like ISPs and tech companies went to the NSA and offered up their data--there is no proof at all of that. What the evidence shows is that the government used its force of law to compel cooperation from these companies.

The people's tool for controlling the force of law is politics. So, being politically connected is an important part of playing defense against government action.

Whether Condoleeza Rice is the correct person to fulfill that role is in the eye of beholder. I certainly don't fault people for opposing any connection to her. But I would fault anyone who thinks that that is a universal sentiment. There are quite a few people (in government and out) who still respect and perhaps even like her.

That may be true. It probably is true once you reach the numbers-beginning-in-B level.

Nevertheless, there are lots of political operatives, former officials, and other contacts you could find without stooping as low as a former member of the Bush administration.

Direct approval of torture.

From Wikipedia's page on war crimes:

A war crime is a serious violation of the laws and customs of war (also known as international humanitarian law) giving rise to individual criminal responsibility. Examples of war crimes such as:[1]

    murdering, mistreating, or deporting civilian residents of an occupied territory to slave labor camps

    murdering or mistreating prisoners of war or civilian internees

  it is wise for us to have more political links to the US government.

You also write,

  Politics is irrelevant to me

  > You make a claim that [...] but fail to explain why

  > demostrates that your 'opinion' comes from a place of indifference,
  > perhaps another reason for downvotes.

Us? Are you on Dropbox's board? Why is wedding corporate power to political influence wise for this industry? Astonishing naiveté.

> don't downvote or upvote just to normalise your own political beliefs.

What a meaningless statement. Post on your blog if you don't want your opinion torn apart like a piece of meat. All the comments I've seen thus far are civil.

EDIT: It's too bad OP is unwilling to engage in any real dialogue on this issue. Other comments make excellent points which lhnz also ignores and dismisses.

Wedding corporate power to political influence is wise for the industry because that is exactly what we are up against already: corporate power has been wedded to political influence for a very long time and one can easily point out attempts that have already been made to protect previously established industries.

See, it's easy, I was able to argue back without resorting to name calling.

There's that pesky collective noun again. Again, you labor under a delusion of a shared struggle.

> one can easily point out attempts that have already been made to protect previously established industries.

Such as a company that's raised over a billion dollars seeking to protect its position in a lucrative market by appointing politically well-connected board members? No way!

> I was able to argue back without resorting to name calling.

And so was I. What's your point?

You have not been "civil". Quit being an ass.

I was hoping to be part of the several voices that were telling you you were wrong, because maybe hearing it from lots of people would make it more convincing.

  > I was able to argue back without resorting to name calling.
  And so was I. What's your point?

Hilariously your comment "all the comments I've seen thus far are civil" completely rung true until you got involved.

The best course of action is to leave the emotive language out of the discussion.

- Nobody in the entire tech industry has influence over government

- A few key players like Apple and Google have influence over government

Your parent is saying, the latter is better, because Apple & Google (being tech companies) have shared interests with other tech companies.

Certainly there is risk that the big companies would use their influence in government to trample smaller tech companies, but could it be that risk is smaller than the risks of the whole tech sector having zero say/influence in government at all?

In the past, it may have been rational to overlook deeds, such as war crime, to reach a Nash equilibrium which results in a net positive outcome. And it may still be the rational move to cuddle up with a metaphorical Hitler.

However, there's a strong argument to be made in changing the dynamic, and spurning people/companies who think it's justifiable to optimise for power, regardless of the human cost!

The costs are lost lives, devastated lives, and the tearing apart of 'other' nations.

Don't care? That's for each person to decide. It's not like anyone can 'legitimately' come and rip Dropbox from your devices... other than your government, of course.

  1. The poll was framed in a way that did not make my opinion
  available.
  2. Nobody else had expressed my position so I thought that it 
  was uncommon.
  3. I assumed the poll was meant to try to force Dropbox to drop 
  her from the board.
  4. I expressed a position that wasn't that political but that 
  I knew would anger or confuse political witchhunters.
  5. It is quite common for people to downvote information that 
  does not agree with their ethical aesthetics.

Have you read the newspapers lately from ANY part of the world? Does it still need to be explained why, in general, being cosy with the politicos is usually a good thing?

I couldn't possibly speculate on who the best people to make or maintain political links are, but my speculation is that the more connected to government you are the more you will be able to affect policies affecting the tech industry.

I said no such thing. Seems like you're the confused one now.

(Also, anent voting patterns, anecdotal but perhaps still of interest: I've noticed, when expressing on HN political opinions which don't accord with the local consensus, that there will generally be a few slow downvotes early, followed by a quick spike of upvotes bringing the comment up to a net positive score, followed eventually by a few more scattered downvotes, with the net result being usually positive but not as much so as the initial spike would suggest.)

This is the case not only with unpopular political opinions, but anything mildly or even vaguely controversial. I'm convinced that it's mostly the same few individuals who sit on HN all day and downvote away.

I've also wondered about the possible existence of a bot or bots that downvote comments with certain keywords, in a misguided effort to avoid any Reddit-like dilution of HN's usual quality. What makes me think it might be bots is the consistent speed with which mildly controversial posts get downvoted once or twice. It seems too regular to be human-mediated (and if it is, then I worry for the mental state of said human).

You keep painting this as a political issue, when it isn't. The point is not that Rice is controversial, or a republican.

The point is that by international standards, she's a WAR CRIMINAL.

So you're not interested in politics. Fantastic. In 1930's Germany you'd be the idiot with his head in the sand, talking about how the Nazi party is really energizing the manufacturing sector and how great that is for the economy.

I am so sick of hearing people like you taking pride in how ignorant they are of the world around them.

And in all honesty I don't think you have any clue what my perspective would be if I had been there in the 1930s. I think it's quite likely that I'd be anti-genocide, anti-authoritarian and quite willing to stand in front of the persecutory masses and tell them what I believe. What I'm trying to say quite nicely to you, is can you quit slandering me?

It should be. Irrelevant, that is.

Alternatives aren't as good as dropbox. Google drive is a close second, but without official linux client it's borderline useless to me - also their photo backup system is too complicated with g+, private/public albums, sharing, galleries etc and I don't want to spend time figuring it out when I just want simple photo backup service that I enable with one click.

I don't want spend time setting up my own servers, I don't want to use beta software, I don't want buggy 3rd party software, I don't want to compile stuff from sources.

I want to install something that works out of the box and is cross platform, and right now dropbox is literally the only option there is.

May we invite you, provided you just need cloud storage and not happy-clicky-gui-sharing, to try rsync.net[1] ?

Just works on any unix, including mac, with nothing to install. HN discount, as always.[2]

[1] http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt [2] https://www.rsync.net/signup/signup_offer.html?code=710b50

I see there are a fair number of SFTP clients for IOS, and those would all work perfectly.

My thoughts exactly.

also duplicati is open sourced

Full Android and Linux support on both. Wuala and Spideroak even offer automatic camera upload on Android.

That seems a bit odd, since 4 sentences previously you state that you are pretty unfamiliar with the space "I've heard of 5 of those, I know how to use 3 for storage".

Rackspace cloud files, as one of the things I haven't used from that list, is not even same thing as dropbox. I've researched software like dropbox when I deactivated it, I did not look into all possible file storage offers that may or may not work with 3rd party clients (such as duplicati, which doesn't have android client as far as I can tell).

Another often suggested option from comments here wuala did not work on my phone, it crashed instantly (not sure if it's fixed now). Spideroak was buggy iirc, I did try it but I'm not totally sure why I dropped it.

Also, both of those options are roughly 10 times more expensive than dropbox when you compare GB/$.

Wuala, SpiderOak, even GDrive/DropBox + EncFS/Ecryptfs/BoxCryptor. So many better options than DropBox for those of us with privacy concerns.

And for the more DIY people, there's OwnCloud, git-annex assistant (which supports encrypted remotes!), SyncThing and TahoeLAFS. Anyone know of a good sync client for TahoeLAFS though?

Dropbox is probably the LEAST feature-rich and mid-range to high in the cost part , compared to all the other file sharing services out there.

edit: http://www.geek.com/news/dropbox-security-glitch-meant-any-p...

If you have privacy concerns, you're going to pick something where that's not possible anyways.

Maybe someone can explain this to me - is it just partisan political crap?

Also, definitely a partisan decision on my part. I'm sure if the appointment was a "liberal/democrat" with a similar record of facilitating NSA snooping, etc, I'd find a way to justify not dropping dropbox.

And to be clear, the actual client you install to make the backups is extremely easy to install and use, it's just the server that can be tricky to set up.

I didn't take my RE any deeper, but trust it at your own risk. I'd recommend SyncThing over it as a good open alternative, though it's admittedly not as polished yet.

Admittedly I am listing several closed tools, but only those I've had good experiences with.

I do love the idea of OwnCloud, and I've tried it a few times in the past. But it almost feels like they are paying more attention to making a "virtual web desktop" with the new file editing stuff, and less attention to proper file syncing. I've tried to use them for syncing in the past on my CoLo file server, and on a fast machine in my home, and it's just too slow and buggy for now. I wish I was a competent programmer so I could contribute in that department.

Late edit: I just realized you took my statement about BitTorrent's "open nature" to mean open source or protocol. I apologize, I didn't mean it that way and should have worded it better. What I meant was "open for all to see what you're transferring". Basically, the contents would be easy to snoop from what I understand. Sorry about any confusion.

I'd be willing to accept closed source if they at least published a cryptographic protocol, but closed source and closed protocol, where I myself have seen that the little bit of vague documentation that they do have has been incorrect in the past, is quite untrustworthy in my opinion.

Considering the number of alternatives available - may as well just use something else. I'll give it another look if they open the protocol in one way or another as they do surely have the ease of use nailed down.

My .bash_profile is much more of a mess now, but I'm more aware of where all my hard copies are. Before, I relied on Dropbox way too much to keep important stuff around.

Besides, tarsnap has a better CLI, am I right? ;)

I miss the ease of use and I've had to put much more work in to (mostly) match the features I gave up. Owncloud, cron, rsync, and a few other tools are all tested and working now, but it isn't as slick and requires occasional maintenance.

I miss using Dropbox but there are some things that are unacceptable to me, and require a permanent change even if burdensome. It isn't that I trusted Dropbox before - I used client-side encryption for most files. It's appointing her and the huge 'fuck you' message it sends to those of us who care about privacy. There's just no overlooking it.

I would be amazed if even 20% knew about this in the first place, and amazed if as much as 1/10 of those people truly stopped using Dropbox.

I suspect that is massively biased towards people who did drop Dropbox.

At the very least the results useless unless we can estimate the self-selection bias.

The entire point of a poll on HN is to poll HN users, not the general population.

It's not specifically about the appointment of Rice, but in general the whole collision between my data and foreign (US) politics, given the privacy disclosures in the past few years.

I already have Owncloud set up on my own private server for less money than I pay Dropbox each month and that kind of setup allows me to share files publicly online (and use owncloud to host sites) as well as even an in-browser text editor to alter the files. I can host and edit a website using nothing but Owncloud!

Not everybody is left-leaning here.

In right-winger logic they are, of course.

Racists prejudice a specific race. Sexists prejudice a specific gender. Conservatives, however, are just people that have a different view on how a country should be run. These three things are completely separate qualities. Some people may exhibit several of these qualities, while others do not. I imagine this is why you are being downvoted.

I was about to say something like "welcome to modern politics", except we have evidence of this kind of thing going on since elections in ancient Rome, and it's probably far older than that, too. So "welcome to human nature", maybe.

Basically, most of the people on this planet that consider themselves conservative wouldn't want to be associated with the US Republican Party.

Interestingly both Lyndon Johnson and Bush Jr. were Southern Democrats. Most of the craziness about today's GOP can be traced to the fact that they were overrun with former Dixiecrats. Bush was basically a Dixiecrat who ran as a Republican.

The Southern Democrat position combines everything bad about the Democrats (big government, high taxes, etc.) with everything bad about the Republicans (fundamentalism, warmongering). (Bush did raise taxes, just indirectly. Taxation equals spending as per simple double-entry accounting, and Bush raised spending and increased the size of government considerably.)

I'm wanting to set up a backup server for music and such, but most virtual server providers (like Linode, DigitalOcean) don't seem optimized toward hard drive space. Could you point me in the right direction?

[0] https://leastauthority.com/

I really don't keep magic lists of people that are cool or not-cool.

As far as privacy, it remains a concern, but Rice has absolutely zero impact on that, so the whole thing was not germane to my internet activity.

What concerns me more about Dropbox is this practice of giving away space -- but only for a limited amount of time. I bought some products and got a huge amount of space, but only for a year or two.

Now what the hell am I going to do two years later? Download 100GB over my satellite connection? They've effectively trapped me into doing business with them. That's the kind of thing I find much more objectionable than keeping a roster of who plays on which team in SV.

This is my biggest issue with them, once you get past the privacy issues. I have a 500GB colocated file server that I can use OwnCloud, rsync, btsync, etc. on once my 30GB of "free" Dropbox space runs out. I've already got it all backed up to that server anyway using rsync. Now I just have to figure out which sync method works across all of my devices (GNU/Linux, Windows, Windows Phone, Android, OS X).

Besides, who says you need to transfer to your home? There are ways of doing cloud-to-cloud transfer. The most basic of which is simply getting a cheap VPS with a couple of TBs of storage (mine costs 20€/month) and pull from there.

(edit: why would you downvote this? that's crazyballs!)

There are many decisions that Dropbox will have to make which will not be in your favour but will be in theirs. If you're lucky, they'll even tell you about those decisions.

But I think we have a disagreement on who that employer is. The employer stays the same, no matter which artificial side, the "employee", takes.

I thought that much was clear, in today's world. Maybe it isn't. Maybe I am way too cynical. Who knows.

We really recommend the product, it may have some disadvantages to dropbox but it's very very usable, evolving and we're very happy about it.

I'd also be curious how much maintenance, setup, etc., work you estimate is involved.

Another disadvantage might be that their mobile apps are not free, they are at a more than reasonable price and I don't mind the business model but it could be a little bit uncomfortable, do the employees pay the $1 and then get it back, do you send them as gifts? (Google play doesn't support gifts for example). Not the end of the world but still.

Well, we didn't pay for a Dropbox enterprise account or anything, we always try to minimize costs, that meant that you wither needed to switch between personal and business accounts or use the web interface for one. It also meant that we were constantly overflowing our limits. Dropbox is no offering more than when I last checked, but right now it would be for 22 users €3,168 per year.

I was not so closely involved with the setup but I believe it was pretty straight forward and we've been using with basically no troubles. The software works nicely.

Paid Android apps are not available in most countries so this is why you'll see some released in both markets like this.

Tell the employees to grab it there, and make a donation to ownCloud if that's easier for you.

[1] Actually works, reliably

[2] Works on Linux

[3] Generous free quota

Of course, I'm probably not the best customer profile to target. I'm a shameless freeloader, and would never even consider paying money to go beyond a free quota. Until my home Internet service is an order of magnitude faster, these services are only useful to me for simple file sharing and photo backup.

Truth be told, I would drop Copy.com and consolidate around Google Drive if they had a simple "automatically backup my cell phone pictures" feature. I can get Drive to work on Linux, and that's already where most of my word processing documents reside. Unfortunately, Google's photo backup feature is tied to G+ rather than Drive, which makes it useless at best.

No option for this.

I use BTSync for "heavy lifting", since there is no cap on usage (other than bandwidth caps) but it doesn't run on everything.

Google Drive suffered the same crashes (it's a 32-bit memory limit thing), so I'm currently using Backblaze for entire PC backup and it's been working great.

I still maintain my free DB account, as it's the most commonly known/used "file sharing" service known to my clients.

I originally jumped from DB to GDrive because of pricing, but this was before Dropbox answered Google's price cuts with their own new tiers.

PS: They were weary of BitSync b/c of BitTorrent pirate news but the news about the celeb nudie pictures helped them finally come around to what I've been saying all along: RETAIN CONTROL OF YOUR DATA!!!!!

Edit: -derision

Now privacy concerns are another matter. In my case this is not a particularly important issue. But if it were, Dropbox gives us enough reason to leave in that department.

Undoubtedly dropbox has one of the best offering in this space. It is highly unlikely for anybody to dislodge them.

I otherwise don't really have need for cloud storage for my personal files (1 machine for work and for home!)

I patronize other companies that employee people whose politics I don't agree with, so I don't really see the need to get rid of it for political reasons.

I think the proper way to deal with the things she is accused of having done is via court. If it is believed she committed war crimes, then accuse her of it.

I'm not against a third party managing my data synchronization, but it was pretty clear our priorities did not align.

It's far preferable to the situation with Eric Schmidt who was a trojan horse and ushered in Google's most egregious cooperation with intelligence agencies.

Till date, out of OneDrive, iCloud, Google Drive and Dropbox, only Dropbox offers differential sync (delta sync). I simply can't imagine uploading the entire file when only a few bytes might've changed.

Dropbox "just works" better than any of its competition for our organization and is therefore worth the premium over more economical solutions like Google Drive.

The tipping point for me was Condoleezza Rice. But there were other issues that were building up. It was consistently eating my laptop battery, and on my desktop with traditional hard drives, it would take forever to start up and finish indexing files.

I replaced Dropbox with a mix of things. My documents went to Google Drive. I converted my old windows desktop into a xubuntu linux home server type thing, and installed BT Sync for the other files I had to sync.

I also do plenty of other things with my home server. Really wish I set one up sooner.

Anything stored on servers in the USA, UK, New Zealand or Australia should be treated as compromised, exposed or public information.

I certainly wouldn't hand my 1password file to random strangers in the street, much less anyone associated with any kind of law enforcement or intelligence agency.

So treat cloud storage as that random stranger in the street. Sure, E's always there with your bag of loot and E's pretty reliable about giving your stuff back, but you have no guarantee that E isn't letting everyone else look at what's in your bag (or that other folks haven't figured out a way to see what's going into and out of the bag, or figured out a way to determine what's in the bag without letting E know they're looking).

Since then I've been searching for a suitable replacement:

btsync (broke git index files) -> unison via star topoogy (no history) -> syncthing (0.9.17 - very promising, but too memory hungry for my synology ds213j) -> synology cloudstation (simply broken, conflict files everywhere) -> seafile via seacloud.cc (promising, but keeps on eating 100% CPU core) -> btsync 1.3.109 (1.4.83 is ridiculously broken) with ntp everywhere in the hope that my git index problem won't come back.

(blog post will hopefully happen soon)

As for Condi, I don't see the big deal. As far as politicians go, she's a little too left-leaning for me, but she's a nice enough gal and it's not like the Dropbox board is a government position.

Personally, I continue using DropBox the same way I did before: that is not much. Several people I work with use it to share data with teams. I don't generally have much say in that. For me, a much more pressing problem with Dropbox is headless operation support, especially on Linux. Debian packages would be nicer than letting Rice go.

I use Copy.com now - clean interface, but something about their sync takes longer than it should.

With the discussion of privacy and ownership I've backed away from lots of cloud services. The Condolezza Rice appointment just made it easier to do so sooner.

I always treated Dropbox as if it was a wholly owned subsidiary of the NSA. Having Condoleeza Rice on the board doesn't move my opinion away from that state.

Unfortunately, I've liked the dropbox solution way better than all these others. So I still use dropbox. Anything I want to be encrypted on dropbox I store in an encrypted container.

  Copy
  Wuala
  syncthing (foss)
  Bittorrent sync / btsync
  Seafile
  Box
  Expandrive
  rsync.net
  pcloud
  Tresorit
  Google drive
  Hubric
  Amazon S3
  onedrive
  SafeMonk within Dropbox
  Spideroak 
  owncloud 
  Tahoe-LAFS

https://github.com/silverwind/droppy

It is against the HN rules to solicit upvotes for posts.

DropBox is still the best product, currently I'm in the free tier as well. And I also use the other competitor products, but they don't work well enough with groups of people.

I'd say the safest bet is a CoLo with an encrypted drive that only you have the keys to, or else a home server and VPN.

When I get some free time I'll fully switch to SpiderOak as well.

But thanks for reminding me I need to check if I can downgrade to a free account now.

Just use it with client-side encryption, as you should have from the start. It's easy (on OSX):

    encfs ~/Dropbox/freedom ~/Dropsafe -o volname="dropsafe" -o noappledouble

That said, I'm currently installing my own file server at home over a VPN. Once I'm done with that, I shouldn't really need any other third-party solution.

However, I just reinstalled yesterday because a partner on a new project I'm working on shared some files with me via Dropbox.

I tried Box and Copy, btw.

All you need to do is run your own server which I already do and you basically have the same functionality.

Better FOSS versions exist - the best one that I know of (and which I currently use) is http://syncthing.net/

Didn't really know about it, started using btsync when it launched never searched for alternatives since.

Because setting up and maintaining your own server is a lot more work than a click and a download. And a single server is a single point of failure, whereas Dropbox's architecture isn't, whereas downloads speeds will be limited to your upload speeds when you are away from home, whereas many other reasons such as sharing, and the Dropbox ecosystem.

So what if the sever goes down for a few minutes or a hour sometime, your files will just sync when it comes up.

A small virtual server in a data center can do a decent job of it.

For pictures of my family, yes that high reliability is worth it, I don't want to permanently lose a single photo because of a hardware or software failure. I backup my dropbox to s3 via Arq and also have a IFTTT that pushes photos to the free TB of space flickr gives everyone.

[1]https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Btrfs

Unless you happened to live in New Orleans in 2005. And really of all that sounds like a lot of work to set up and maintain for the near zero chance that some government type wants to spy on me to look at harmless and boring pictures of my pets and family.

I admit that the client being closed source is not ideal however i would still call it more private then Dropbox or Google Drive.

For the last 4 years, i have been using rdiff-backup in combination with a cheap, $10 100GB VPS and it has never failed me.

I don't let the politics of one board member of a company determine if I use their service or product.

https://www.copy.com/price

Switched to Wuala.

Switched to owncloud. Happy.

1) I know how to VPN. 2) I know how to setup a NAS. 3) BitTorrent Sync exists.

It is as easy as 1,2,3! :-)

This was of course a bad idea, especially after I got a Galaxy S4 phone, which came with a 50GB Dropbox upgrade, and I started using my own account for personal stuff a lot more.

So I disconnected my Dropbox account from the work computers, and I'm now actively looking for a solution that is not Dropbox. The main reason is this Condoleezza Rice thing, and the fact that we need a bit more than the default 2GB storage (my old acct was already 4.5GB due to referrals), and getting a paid Dropbox account is really the last thing I want to do (before it was because their pricing scheme is kind of steep, but Condoleezza Rice gives me an extra reason).

Problem is what are the proper alternatives. I'm open to suggestions!

We're using Google Drive now for a bit, but it's soon going to be replaced. It's got sufficient space, but it's got some weird problems with making duplicates, duplicates(1) duplicates(2), and it seems it doesn't always sync up the latest version either, and you still have to try and remember which was the PC you worked on to get the file. This again causes chaos and mess, if you have many different children all working in their own little folder on 7 different computers. Additionally, Google Drive seems noticeably a lot heavier load on the computers than the Dropbox client. And this is a big deal, because these are donated PCs, so they're not the fastest to start with.

Currently I'm looking into SyncThing, see how that performs. But I've only set it up on two computers yet (sharing the computer IDs for initial sync is quite cumbersome, they should add some simple feature to help with that or something). We wanted to try BitTorrent Sync, but it's not open source, and I figure as long as I'm trying to do the right thing, I might as well to it right and open source.

SyncThing doesn't upload to a "cloud" storage, but we don't really need that. We just need something that syncs up all the little folders and tidbits between all seven computers, so everything is available everywhere. Maybe we should instead just set up a shared network folder thing? (this is not at all my line of expertise, I'm a comp.sci/math/code guy that likes working with kids, if any of the people here have some solid advice to go with one solution or the other, greatly appreciated) (the computers are partly Win7 partly Linux Mint).

Finally, while finding alternatives for the above has my priority, if I happen to stumble upon something that'll allow me to easily drop my personal Dropbox account, I'll do it in a heartbleed. I'll probably have to, at some point or other, since the 50GB bonus only lasts a year or so.

I mean, it might be a specific use-case, but I figured personal stories would be what this thread is about ... ?

The drop-dropbox.com has its arguments pretty well presented really.