Dropbox Blog

Crowdbooster is lots of fun. I've been using it on my own piddly twitter account and a mega twitter account, @dropbox. Knowing which tweets resonate the most with the audience is great. Hint: people liked Dropquest. http://twitter.com/ikirigin http://twitter.com/dropbox http://blog.dropbox.com/?p=659

Better description here: https://blog.dropbox.com/index.php/now-announcing-the-great-dropbox-sp…

For new adopters, you might be right.. but for someone who's using Dropbox already, there is no way. Because it is all about the details. Gdrive doesn't have all the applications for each platform, and it will take them a while until they will get it right (even if they just emulate). And I think DB knows that and they're trying to acquire Android users (by offering free 3GB if you sync photos from your phone) before Google integrates gdrive in Android: http://blog.dropbox.com/?p=984

Dropbox had the same issue in 2011. Their TOS was very similar to Google Drive's, for the same reasons - lawyers putting CYA language in. http://blog.dropbox.com/?p=846 http://blog.dropbox.com/?p=867

"According to our records, there were fewer than a hundred affected users and neither account settings nor files were modified in any of these accounts." http://blog.dropbox.com/?p=821 Everyone was vulnerable for 4 hours.

s/clarified/fixed/ If you search the comment thread, the original wording is "we think it necessary" which should be "we think is necessary". http://blog.dropbox.com/?p=846&updated#comment-240678381 I'm surprised an editor didn't catch that.

hi all, we've been reading all the feedback carefully and made a change to licensing section to clarify what we meant. the change is highlighted on our blog: http://blog.dropbox.com/?p=846

Except that _wasn't_ the new TOS at the time the articles went up. They changed it _after_ the world exploded. See the bottom of their blog entry: http://blog.dropbox.com/?p=846

There's a blog post addressing this incident now on the dropbox blog: http://blog.dropbox.com/?p=821 It is very light on details of how exactly the problem occured other than saying it was due to a bug in a code update.

They actually say that they will hand over anything to the feds: "New TOS: Compliance with Laws and Law Enforcement Requests; Protection of Dropbox’s Rights. We may disclose to parties outside Dropbox files stored in your Dropbox and information about you that we collect when we have a good faith belief that disclosure is reasonably necessary to (a) comply with a law, regulation or compulsory legal request; (b) protect the safety of any person from death or serious bodily injury; (c) prevent fraud or abuse of Dropbox or its users; or (d) to protect Dropbox’s property rights. If we provide your Dropbox files to a law enforcement agency as set forth above, we will remove Dropbox’s encryption from the files before providing them to law enforcement. However, Dropbox will not be able to decrypt any files that you encrypted prior to storing them on Dropbox." http://blog.dropbox.com/?p=735

just so everyone knows, this complaint raises old issues that we addressed in our public blog post a few weeks ago: http://blog.dropbox.com/?p=735

You're not going to find accurate answers to questions about bottom-line numbers of a privately held company by asking in a public forum. What is publicly known is that Dropbox passed 4 million users a year ago (http://blog.dropbox.com/?p=339), and that according to Crunchbase they have not raised any outside funding since 2008. Infer from that what you will.

They already stated that they had 4 million users a month ago: http://blog.dropbox.com/?p=289

This is the part of the document that described the motivation: > The Problem Statement > Based on 177 like tech companies in Silicon Valley (market research and EOO-1 Diversity Statistics data), the percentage of diverse engineering talent is sparse. In short, 4.7% are latino, 2.1% are African American, and 19.2% are female. These candidates are being targeted with all of our top competitors with white gloves tactics, strategic outreach, and engagement strategies, while Dropbox has yet to systematically establish any of these practices to compete for this top talent and showcase our uniquely inclusive, dynamic, and thoughtful culture. > Opportunity to market DBX [Dropbox] more broadly: > Moreover, diverse engineers are the most sought after group of individuals on the market today. While the average response rate to engage is high (37%) the rate at which they are interested in moving forwards is quite low (11%). We interpret this in two ways: > First, due to the small pool and scarcity of diverse talent, companies are motivated to keep their diverse talent happy, well-compensated, and engaged; prospects are rarely on the market, and when they are, it is a highly calculated and careful search based on existing relationships. > Second, traditional sourcing engagement methods (email, LinkedIn) do not adequately showcase what makes Dropbox special, and because these candidates are so highly sought-after, it would serve us to highlight our culture early on, and to take a…

Having your PR rejected in a healthy environment means that your PR is radically far from the reviewer's expectation. Having your PR rejected in a toxic environment can mean a lot of things, and a company sought after doesn't mean that it MUST be not toxic. First, you have to make sure if both of YOU and YOU ENVIRONMENT is healthy. If both are healthy, proceed reading. > The challenge here is to deliver good quality code, while maintaining a decent speed of delivery. You made it sound like producing good quality code = slowness. FALSE. Seeming slow, good quality code boosts your team's velocity. BUT keep in mind: "quality" is "the standard of something as measured against other things of a similar kind; the degree of excellence of something". Your team has its standards, either is a derivative of other globally acknowledged standards such as https://blog.golang.org/go-fmt-your-code, https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/wiki/Coding-guidelines, https://twitter.com/dan_abramov, etc, or self-made standards. You go follow them, make them happy! Coding and design skill has a different definition than code quality. It is what punches up to the sky: the overall velocity, the success of the team, the balance of growth and culture retainment of the company, the development experience, the users' thumbs ups, amazements, and "this app is life changing" comments, the number of milestone celebration in All You Can Eat restaurants each years, the number of people rising up from…

It is a cliche, but the plural of anecdote is not data. I never had any problems with Dropbox, but had Office on OneDrive corrupt files. OneNote has also rendered some notes unreadable. The bottom line is that errors happen. You should prepare for that and make backups. Also, Dropbox are still among the very best when it comes to syncing. Many useful synchronization features are implemented by Dropbox, but not the competition. E.g., features that most competitors do not have: - Modifying a large file on Dropbox will only resync modified chunks. - DropBox avoids re-uploads, both when uploading identical files and moving files around: http://macography.net/2013/05/speed-test-dropbox-google-drive-box-skyd… - Dropbox does LAN sync. If a machine has to download a large file and another machine on the network has the same file, chunks are provided peer to peer. This makes using large files on multiple machines or in a team much faster. - Dropbox does streaming sync. A machine can already download chunks when another machine is still uploading: https://blog.dropbox.com/2014/07/introducing-streaming-sync-supercharg… Sure, OneDrive and Google Drive do have many useful functions that Dropbox does not have, such as including complete office suites. But for the original task, file syncing, Dropbox is still pretty much unbeaten.

Ubuntu One does have some extra features -- for one, more than twice the capacity on the free account (5GB), it can sync contacts, Tomboy notes, stream music (though as a paying option), and also comes as a default on an operating system (Ubuntu). Actually the only downside for me recently was not being able to share a DVD iso image recently due to the size limit on the free account, and looks like they fixed that problem now too. Contacts sync was a bit of a pain to get working but it works fine now. But to answer your question partially (from Wikipedia): > As of April 2011[update], Dropbox has more than 25 million users. [20] I would guess most are not Linux users. Also for more serious backup options people should probably use something like tarsnap. EDIT: Just found on their blog from February, they claim 2% Linux users. So around 0.5M I guess ... ( http://blog.dropbox.com/?p=339 )

It's often good to look at how other companies do things to see if it's out of the ordinary. Turns out this line is extremely common. Google, for example: You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional. http://www.google.com/accounts/TOS Also, Drew and Arash just posted an update to the blog with clarified language: http://blog.dropbox.com/?p=846

Dropbox is an AI-company, according to to Dropbox https://blog.dropbox.com/topics/product/introducing-AI-powered-tools The challenge in 2026 is finding the company that's not AI-powered (according to themself)

Not one-and-done, at least step 3 in a potential routine: 16% in 2023: https://blog.dropbox.com/topics/company/a-message-from-drew Or, before that, another 11%: https://dropbox.gcs-web.com/node/8916/html I wish them well, things look rough.

Dropbox introduced this feature in April 2024 [1]. The CCS deadline was just a couple of days later; there was no chance of analyzing it meaningfully before then. [1] https://blog.dropbox.com/topics/company/new-solutions-to-secure-organi…

Reminded me of their Command-E acquisition from a few years ago (https://blog.dropbox.com/topics/company/welcome-command-e-to-dropbox-)

Dropbox offers end-to-end encryption now (for business teams): https://blog.dropbox.com/topics/company/new-solutions-to-secure-organi…

The correct link: https://blog.dropbox.com/topics/product/introducing-AI-powered-tools

It's a bogeyman designed to shift the blame of Dropbox's bait and switch tactic to paying customers. Customers are guilty by association to the unpopular thing of the day, cryptocurrencies. The official blog post by Dropbox is interesting too. They also describe "individuals pooling storage for personal use cases" as "abusive." https://blog.dropbox.com/topics/product/updates-to-our-storage-policy-… More reason to drop Dropbox I guess. https://www.drop-dropbox.com/

Is there a template these companies are working from? > If you are among those impacted, you will receive a calendar invite to a 1:1 meeting with a manager in your department within the next 10 minutes. Dropbox also today: > If you've been impacted, you'll be sent a calendar invitation within the next 30 minutes for a 1:1 with a leader on your team https://blog.dropbox.com/topics/company/a-message-from-drew

You can still use FSEvents/kqueue and Finder APIs to implement a file synchronization daemon. But Dropbox hasn't done that for a while. A few years ago they moved to a kernel extension that exposes your Dropbox as virtual files that are downloaded on demand when you open them. They called this Project Infinite: https://blog.dropbox.com/topics/company/announcing-project-infinite

Another article https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/29/dropbox-acquires-boxcryptor-assets-t… Dropbox announcement: https://blog.dropbox.com/topics/company/dropbox-to-acquire-boxcryptor-… Looks like Dropbox plans to provide client side encryption, although somewhat belatedly.

Setting aside for the moment that we've shifted from talking about whether the behavior is morally OK, to whether it is legal, would you still not be sure if the tweets might pose a legal problem if she had said: Things I need more in my life: feminism, comedy, truth, and less Black people [..] I also care deeply about equity in hiring. Therefore, I choose to prioritize folks in our white communities Because whites are underrepresented at Dropbox in all categories except leadership (where they are 58%, exactly their current share of US population): https://blog.dropbox.com/topics/company/our-2021-diversity-report (scroll to the very bottom for the chart: https://aem.dropbox.com/cms/content/dam/dropbox/blog/company/2022/2021…