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Dropbox
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Author:  LR24 [ Mon Dec 13, 2010 1:20 pm ]
Post subject:  Dropbox
Hey

I just did a quick search in the board and found out that almost nobody talked about Dropbox here before. While most probably heard about it or have it already, it may still be worth a thread. It's a rather easy to use service for file backup and synchronizing. You basically get 2GB (for free - or if you pay, you get more) of internet-space that is automatically synchronized from the internet to your computers. Like this, you have a backup of all files - and say you add or edit a file on your notebook, you have it automatically copied over to your computer.
If you want to know more about it: https://www.dropbox.com/tour
You can obviously sign up on the same page.

I'm actually not using dropbox for anything go-related, but as an obvious idea, you could synchronize all your SGF games between your computers. I mostly use dropbox for having all the files for studying pn my laptop and computer without any need to manually copy new files over or even have both computers running at the same time.


Now, here comes my part: :twisted:
Dropbox has a referral system. Someone, who has a dropbox account (in this case: me) has a ref-link. If other people (= you) sign up using that link, both you and me will get an additional 250MB space. So, if you'd like, sign up using my (or any of the other ref links people will post :)) link:
https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTEzMTcxNjMzOQ?src=global0
Author:  wms [ Mon Dec 13, 2010 1:40 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Dropbox
LR24 wrote:
I'm actually not using dropbox for anything go-related, but as an obvious idea, you could synchronize all your SGF games between your computers.
"All" your SGF files? That depends on how many SGF files you have. ;-)

I tried using dropbox but it worked really, really badly on my phone (which was mostly where I wanted to use it), so I don't bother with it any more.
Author:  SpongeBob [ Mon Dec 13, 2010 2:26 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Dropbox
Haven't heard of it before - thanks for the info! I will wait for some more comments here before I try it out - using your ref link of course. ;-)
Author:  goddess [ Mon Dec 13, 2010 2:30 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Dropbox
I have been using Dropbox to keep all of my important files synced between my desktop and laptop for quite awhile. I really like it.

Terri
Author:  daniel_the_smith [ Mon Dec 13, 2010 2:36 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Dropbox
Yeah, dropbox is great.

Unfortunately for them, 2gb (the free account) is more than enough for all my syncing needs ^^
Author:  hyperpape [ Mon Dec 13, 2010 2:53 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Dropbox
Let me just say that wms may be the only person I know of who has tried dropbox and doesn't really love it.
Author:  kirkmc [ Mon Dec 13, 2010 2:58 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Dropbox
I was hesitant at first, but I've come to depend on it. Not only does it make it really easy to transfer files from my desktop to my laptop, but many Mac programs can "sync" their data if you put it in Dropbox. Also, it's very useful with an iPhone, iPad or iPod touch, because, again, many programs on iOS devices can access files on Dropbox.

I just started using 1Password today, and putting its file on Dropbox means that my two computers are always synced. It's quite brilliant. I also use it for certain work projects, where an editor I work with uses it to exchange files with writers. And you can even give public URLs to files you put in your Public folder. Very useful indeed.
Author:  wms [ Mon Dec 13, 2010 4:32 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Dropbox
hyperpape wrote:
Let me just say that wms may be the only person I know of who has tried dropbox and doesn't really love it.
You challenge my claim that it sucked??? I accept the challenge! Here is my story:

I had over 200 photos on my phone. I want them somewhere more useful, like on my PC. The USB port in the phone is flakey so I can't transfer them the "normal" way. The flash card is one of those super-tiny ones that doesn't fit the flash reader slots on the front of my computer. So I needed to use wireless to transfer them. Dropbox seemed perfect; drop the pics in dropbox, then there they are on my computer, right?

I install dropbox on my phone. Then I see that on a phone, you must put files on by one in the box. Can't do a folder or anything like that - a FILE, one at a time. Selecting each file requires firing up a file browser (not part of dropbox), navigating to the file you want, selecting it, going back to dropbox, and telling it to upload. Now repeat the whole sequence for the other 200+ files. GAAAH. That would take all day.

"Aha", thinks me, "I'll just zip those pictures up, and put the zip file in dropbox." Seems smart, but no, this is where dropbox completely collapses. I get a 240MB zip file and try to drop it in dropbox. Dropbox freezes and sits there burning the wireless connection. No progress meter, no feedback, nothing, just sits there. It runs for 2 hours, during which my phone is slow slow as to be unusable, then my battery dies.

So when I get home, I plug it into the battery changer and try again. Oops, I have to start over, it apparently can't continue. This time I set up the phone to never shut off (just to be sure), leave dropbox running all night. By the next morning...still running. Not transferred yet.

Overall, I think dropbox pretty much sucks on mobiles for large files or large collections of files. It wasted a pile of my time and was useless in the end. It needs a progress bar, it needs to be able to select a group of files at once, it needs to be able to stop a transfer and resume later - until it has those it's not usable for me, and it has none of them. It's great on PC's and laptops, but that isn't what I need.

(I finally used the picasa uploader to move all my photos to picasa. This worked great; easily select images and they are queued for transfer, where they go one by one until they're done. And it keeps track of which files are transferred and which aren't. Now I just need to suck all the photos from picasa down to my desktop and I'm all set.)
Author:  hyperpape [ Mon Dec 13, 2010 5:43 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Dropbox
Didn't mean to challenge you, just to say that until today, I could say that everyone I know who'd used it loved it.

P.S. It sounds like you're using android. Is there no file-syncing over wifi? I had thought that sort of reliance on tethering was a place where iOS lagged.
Author:  wms [ Mon Dec 13, 2010 5:48 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Dropbox
hyperpape wrote:
Didn't mean to challenge you, just to say that until today, I could say that everyone I know who'd used it loved it.

P.S. It sounds like you're using android. Is there no file-syncing over wifi? I had thought that sort of reliance on tethering was a place where iOS lagged.
Sorry, I was just trying to be lighthearted with the whole "challenge" deal.

Yes, I'm on Android. There may be file syncing over wifi, but I'm not sure how to do it. Also, my android is old (version 1.5, which came out about 18 months ago), so a lot of the newer apps and tools don't work for me. I sort of have to keep this phone for a while, too. To test the KGS client, I wanted to make sure that my phone would be worse than anybody else's in every way - slower CPU, less memory, and older firmware. That way I knew if it ran all right on my phone, it would work for everybody else too. I'm probably one of the few people who did market research before buying their phone to make sure that it really sucked. :)
Author:  oren [ Mon Dec 13, 2010 5:50 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Dropbox
wms wrote:
I'm probably one of the few people who did market research before buying their phone to make sure that it really sucked. :)


To be fair to my phone... it is much better after the upgrades. :)
Author:  kirkmc [ Tue Dec 14, 2010 2:02 am ]
Post subject:  Re: Dropbox
wms wrote:
I install dropbox on my phone.


Sounds like the problem is more with your phone than with Dropbox itself. You say it sucks because it froze on your phone, but with what you were doing, pushing that much data, it's more likely that your phone sucks (or that your network connection was a problem).
Author:  alejo [ Tue Dec 14, 2010 3:58 am ]
Post subject:  Re: Dropbox
oren wrote:
wms wrote:
I'm probably one of the few people who did market research before buying their phone to make sure that it really sucked. :)


To be fair to my phone... it is much better after the upgrades. :)


I upgraded mine to version 2.2 a couple of months ago and the desktop became somewhat slower. I can't use the widgets I used to since opening home would take me over 5 seconds.
On the other hand, some apps work better...

Congrats WMS for your wise market research, very "user-friendly" indeed.
Author:  flOvermind [ Tue Dec 14, 2010 4:13 am ]
Post subject:  Re: Dropbox
hyperpape wrote:
Let me just say that wms may be the only person I know of who has tried dropbox and doesn't really love it.


Now you know a second person ;)

The biggest issue I have with dropbox is that I have to install their software on every device. If their software isn't available for a certain device, I'm out of luck. If the software they provide for my device sucks, I'm out of luck. If I'm unable to install software (e.g. I don't have admin rights), I'm out of luck, too. Why can't they just support a standard protocol like rsync?

kirkmc wrote:
Sounds like the problem is more with your phone than with Dropbox itself. You say it sucks because it froze on your phone, but with what you were doing, pushing that much data, it's more likely that your phone sucks (or that your network connection was a problem).


Syncing 250 MB over a mobile data connection shouldn't take that long, and even if it does, it shouldn't make the phone unusable for a long duration.
A software should never lock up a phone, no matter what happens. The software is provided by dropbox, so it's their fault. It's as simple as that.

Of course, if they would support a standard protocol, this problem wouldn't arise, because then you could just use another software that works better for this phone ;)
Author:  wms [ Tue Dec 14, 2010 10:58 am ]
Post subject:  Re: Dropbox
kirkmc wrote:
wms wrote:
I install dropbox on my phone.


Sounds like the problem is more with your phone than with Dropbox itself. You say it sucks because it froze on your phone, but with what you were doing, pushing that much data, it's more likely that your phone sucks (or that your network connection was a problem).
It's a 3G phone on a fast cell tower network. I have no problem with any other network intensive apps. Things that take a long time show completion bars and I can go do other things while they finish. Not dropbox.
Author:  kirkmc [ Tue Dec 14, 2010 12:15 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Dropbox
wms wrote:
kirkmc wrote:
wms wrote:
I install dropbox on my phone.


Sounds like the problem is more with your phone than with Dropbox itself. You say it sucks because it froze on your phone, but with what you were doing, pushing that much data, it's more likely that your phone sucks (or that your network connection was a problem).
It's a 3G phone on a fast cell tower network. I have no problem with any other network intensive apps. Things that take a long time show completion bars and I can go do other things while they finish. Not dropbox.


I don't think it actually can show a progress bar, because it's constantly updating. (I know that the Mac and iOS versions don't.) Every time you change a file, it would have to recalculate the entire contents of its folder, and how many files have changed and need to be updated. My guess is they don't have any progress bar for this reason.

Also, you say you were pushing 250 MB; have you done that with other apps over 3G? Just curious, as I don't use a mobile phone...
Author:  wms [ Tue Dec 14, 2010 12:29 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Dropbox
kirkmc wrote:
I don't think it actually can show a progress bar, because it's constantly updating. (I know that the Mac and iOS versions don't.) Every time you change a file, it would have to recalculate the entire contents of its folder, and how many files have changed and need to be updated. My guess is they don't have any progress bar for this reason.

Also, you say you were pushing 250 MB; have you done that with other apps over 3G? Just curious, as I don't use a mobile phone...
Kirk, the mobile versions of dropbox don't constantly update. You tell it a file, the file is added to your box. You can get a list of what is in your box, and read a file out. The dropbox becomes more like an upload/download protocol, where whatever you upload appears in the dropbox on your other computers, and you can download files from the box to your SD card. So for the mobile version, a progress bar would make a lot of sense.

Have I pushed 250MB? Yes, as I said originally, after dropbox was clearly unusable for this task I switched to the Picasa uploader. It worked great. I could select batches of files at once, it gave me constant progress updates, and it could stop and continue later; all of these features made it quite easy to move such a large amount of data off a mobile phone.

Dropbox works great on PC's, I'll agree with that. But their mobile client sucks if you want to do more than transfer the occasional small file.
Author:  kirkmc [ Tue Dec 14, 2010 12:38 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Dropbox
wms wrote:
kirkmc wrote:
I don't think it actually can show a progress bar, because it's constantly updating. (I know that the Mac and iOS versions don't.) Every time you change a file, it would have to recalculate the entire contents of its folder, and how many files have changed and need to be updated. My guess is they don't have any progress bar for this reason.

Also, you say you were pushing 250 MB; have you done that with other apps over 3G? Just curious, as I don't use a mobile phone...
Kirk, the mobile versions of dropbox don't constantly update. You tell it a file, the file is added to your box. You can get a list of what is in your box, and read a file out. The dropbox becomes more like an upload/download protocol, where whatever you upload appears in the dropbox on your other computers, and you can download files from the box to your SD card. So for the mobile version, a progress bar would make a lot of sense.

Have I pushed 250MB? Yes, as I said originally, after dropbox was clearly unusable for this task I switched to the Picasa uploader. It worked great. I could select batches of files at once, it gave me constant progress updates, and it could stop and continue later; all of these features made it quite easy to move such a large amount of data off a mobile phone.

Dropbox works great on PC's, I'll agree with that. But their mobile client sucks if you want to do more than transfer the occasional small file.


Hmm, I'm not sure how Dropbox works on Android, but I assume that since Android is more "open" that you would be able to store files differently. On iOS, that's the case; you download a file and open it with an app; you can't download folders.
Author:  LR24 [ Thu Dec 16, 2010 4:59 am ]
Post subject:  Re: Dropbox
wms wrote:
I tried using dropbox but it worked really, really badly on my phone (which was mostly where I wanted to use it)


I always thought dropbox is great to have on the phone, but could not really use it due to the lack of wifi on my phone. (and i don't have enough free traffic to download/upload through 3G) Hearing there can be problems on the phone makes me want a new phone less. :mrgreen:
Author:  DrStraw [ Thu Dec 16, 2010 5:22 am ]
Post subject:  Re: Dropbox
goddess wrote:
I have been using Dropbox to keep all of my important files synced between my desktop and laptop for quite awhile. I really like it.

Terri


I have never heard of Dropbox and I cannot see any use for it in my case. But I have to wonder about this statement. I assume that it saves files on some server somewhere. Do you really want your important files stored on someone else's server? I store my really important files on an external drive and don't even connect to the internet when that drive is connected.
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