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Dropbox Now Limits Free Users To 3 Devices (venturebeat.com)

Dropbox has quietly removed unlimited device linking for free accounts, meaning that unless you upgrade to one of its paid plans, which start at $8.25 per month, you will be restricted to three devices for a single account. From a report: The change was rolled out earlier this month, though it's worth noting that those who had linked more than three devices prior to March 2019 won't be directly affected. However, anyone who already exceeds the new limit will be impacted at some point, as they won't be able to add any more devices to their account in the future, and if they upgrade to a new phone, tablet, or computer, the three device limit will catch up with them.

20 of 155 comments (clear)

  1. Bye bye by enriquevagu · · Score: 4, Insightful

    That was the exact same point I stopped using Evernote. Time to find an alternative cloud storage.

    1. Re:Bye bye by Anubis+IV · · Score: 2

      Between Google, Microsoft, and Apple, it's easy to find alternatives that offer free tiers with more storage than Dropbox. Alternatively, those of us around here should probably be switching to things like ownCloud or NextCloud*.

      *Without stepping into the politics and history of what's gone on between the two, the short version is that NextCloud is a fork of ownCloud after ownCloud decided to switch to offering a free, open source version for personal use and a closed, paid version with more features for enterprise. Some of the ownCloud people didn't like that, so they forked it and started NextCloud. Both are regularly updated, and I have yet to actually use either so I can't recommend one, but I'm guessing I'll eventually set up NextCloud for myself.

    2. Re:Bye bye by tepples · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Between Google, Microsoft, and Apple, it's easy to find alternatives that offer free tiers with more storage

      Among these three, how many offer a GNU/Linux client? Or are GNU/Linux users instead expected to either A. lease a VPS on which to run NextCloud or B. pay the ISP to upgrade to a plan that allows forwarding ports and leave a PC at home turned on all the time?

    3. Re:Bye bye by CruisinAdam · · Score: 3, Informative

      If you're interested in alternatives, I've been really happy with this OneDrive client for Linux. It even supports syncing SharePoint Sites and Office 365 groups. https://github.com/abraunegg/o...

    4. Re:Bye bye by Voyager529 · · Score: 3, Informative

      Or are GNU/Linux users instead expected to either A. lease a VPS on which to run NextCloud or B. pay the ISP to upgrade to a plan that allows forwarding ports and leave a PC at home turned on all the time?

      Privacy comes at a cost. This shouldn't be news. That being said, while I can't speak for every ISP, the consumer ISPs in my area only block 80 and 25; 443 is open even on consumer connections. You should be able to get it working that way. If not, Nextcloud does work over a custom port; I can speak from personal experience on that one.

      As for leaving a storage server at home turned on, I mean...if it's that much of an imposition, both Synology and QNAP have appliances which can handle this, and either run Nextcloud or their own first party plugins and applications which have Dropbox-like functions. If that's still too much and you're willing to put up with a performance dip, Nextcloud works on a Raspberry Pi; the DietPi distro has an auto installer for it. Or, Resilio Sync is pretty good and simply requires devices to be on at the same time to replicate data.

      Or, you could simply pony up for a paid Dropbox subscription, or pick which three devices you actually-need to have syncing regularly and use the WebUI to download/upload on subsequent ones.

      Or, there's Seafile, Pydio, S3/Wasabi buckets with rsync, or for the price of the higher tier Dropbox individual plan, seedboxes.cc will do a one-click install of Nextcloud with 2TB of storage *and* a VPN *and*...y'know...a seedbox.

      This is a solved problem, in several ways. Don't sit there being pedantic about calling it "GNU/Linux" twice in a one-line post and then try to argue that web-based folder syncing is so hard to do that you're reliant on a free service to do it for you.

    5. Re:Bye bye by Mal-2 · · Score: 2

      I dropped Dropbox when they put Condi on the board of directors, which was pretty much the biggest "We're in bed with the Feds" canary I've ever seen.

      --
      How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
    6. Re:Bye bye by Dragonslicer · · Score: 3, Informative

      Between Google, Microsoft, and Apple, it's easy to find alternatives that offer free tiers with more storage

      Among these three, how many offer a GNU/Linux client? Or are GNU/Linux users instead expected to either A. lease a VPS on which to run NextCloud or B. pay the ISP to upgrade to a plan that allows forwarding ports and leave a PC at home turned on all the time?

      I don't know if Google has a separate storage system besides Google Drive, but KDE's Dolphin file manager supports Google Drive.

    7. Re:Bye bye by Richard_at_work · · Score: 3, Informative

      You do realise that they didn't do what you suggested, right? The original claim was that the security dialog was fake, but it was quickly proven to be a proper OS supplied one - the issue was rather that OSX had something like 10 different styles for the same dialog, and people made the assumption that the one Dropbox used was faked.

    8. Re:Bye bye by jwhyche · · Score: 2

      Yes, It's time to bail. If they don't want people to take advantage of their free services they shouldn't offer them for free. I'll be moving all my crap over to OneDrive, I guess, since I have 1 TB of space there.

      The best option would be to set up my own cloud storage system. I think Window 10 has something like that built in but I think I would be better off going with something that runs on a penguin. Any suggestions?

      --
      I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
  2. Why use dropbox? by fred6666 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I understand it was one of the first of its kind (certainly not bringing any new feature to us being used to having our own FTP server for years). But why would someone use dropbox today?
    If I choose Google, I get the integration with Email and Google Docs/Sheets which allow easy editing of documents by multiple different people, and pictures get hosted for free on google photos. And the basic storage of 15 GB is much more than dropbox 2GB.
    If I choose Microsoft, I get the integration with Windows, office 365, and the 5TB plan cost less than dropbox' 2TB.

    Dropbox doesn't integrate well with anything, so it's one more account to manage, plus the pricing isn't very interesting.

    What's the advantage of Dropbox? Why are people still using it?

    1. Re:Why use dropbox? by Moskit · · Score: 2

      Dropbox was integrated as "remote/cloud drive" with Android phones. Samsung had promotions on extra storage. A number of applications support this integration (like KeyPass). It was used as a file-sharing service, not colaboration, while FTP could be great there, it doesn't handle gracefully variants of blocked ports and NAT (and no easy interface for shared file permissions). Short: people used it and got used to it.

      A (probably) more important reason would be that Dropbox is a single service company. Unlike Google or Microsoft they will not be able to easily corelate EVERYTHING you do with the additional file sharing/coediting activities, especially between users (as opposed to between devices of the same user).

    2. Re:Why use dropbox? by AntEater · · Score: 2

      Dropbox doesn't integrate well with anything,

      I use it precisely because it doesn't drag along integration with anyone else's cloud services.

      --
      Alex, I'll take keybindings not used by Emacs for $400....
    3. Re:Why use dropbox? by tepples · · Score: 2

      The Dropbox client is proprietary. Only the installer is free software, and its dependency on the proprietary software that it downloads is why it cannot be included in Debian main or in Fedora.

    4. Re:Why use dropbox? by Tom · · Score: 2

      Dropbox doesn't integrate well with anything,

      Yes, it does. It integrates well with all operating systems I'm running plus has a web interface. It doesn't try to be more than a cloud file storage, and that's wonderful. It does its job and does it well, but I guess we are again regressing backwards in development and the Unix philosophy of actually doing your fucking job instead of trying to be a kitchen sink isn't trendy anymore.

      I'll be setting up my own cloud service now, because using Dropbox was just the most convenient way, but damn it was convenient.

      --
      Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
  3. Neither Google Drive nor OneDrive runs on Linux by tepples · · Score: 3, Informative

    Dropbox doesn't integrate well with anything

    Dropbox integrates with GNU/Linux bettter than Google Drive and OneDrive do. Consider what happens when I visit each of three major cloud storage services' sync client download page using Firefox on Linux:

    Dropbox Success. The site offers a .deb file to install. Google Drive Failure. "There is no Drive app for Linux at this time. Please use Drive on the web and on your mobile devices." Microsoft OneDrive Failure. Firefox begins to download a Windows executable, and the program's page on AppDB rates it "Garbage".
    1. Re:Neither Google Drive nor OneDrive runs on Linux by Dragonslicer · · Score: 2

      It's much better to use whatever comes with your distro.

      Which Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive clients in the Debian or Ubuntu repository are any good?

      Dolphin (and other KDE applications) works well with Google Drive. There's a KIO slave for OneDrive here, but I haven't used it, nor do I know which distributions include it in their main repositories.

  4. Buh Bye Freeloader by SuperKendall · · Score: 2

    That was the exact same point I stopped using Evernote.

    And nothing of value was lost (to Dropbox).

    I stopped using Evernote because it sucked, not because of how much I could mooch off them for free (or not).

    I think a limit of three devices for free cloud syncing is pretty reasonable, to get a sense of if dropbox will work for what you are trying to do.

    The device limits seems especially reasonable given than number of connections are almost worse than amount of data stored...

    The thing is, Dropbox works really well. Good luck finding an alternative that does everything Dropbox does and works as well for free across more than three devices!!!

    Maybe it's worth a few dollars a month for reliability and sanity? Just sayin'

    --
    "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
  5. Re:Already moved on... by fred6666 · · Score: 2

    I agree it's interesting but it's not the same use case.
    There were many file transfer services similar to firefox send, such as wetransfer. But I agree I'd trust mozilla more than some random people.

  6. OwnCloud by bradley13 · · Score: 2

    I moved to OwnCloud when Dropbox screwed up their Linux support last Fall.

    Owncloud is not difficult to set up on your own server. Tedious, maybe, but not difficult. The worst of it is that you will probably need a dynamic DNS solution. Then you have your data on your own hardware - not someone else's. Combine with a sensible backup plan, and you're all set.

    --
    Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
  7. Re:Needs an easier on-ramp by LostMyAccount · · Score: 2

    My guess is they could keep the fee tier as-is, but add a cheap paid tier just above it, and then improve features in the tier above with a slight price increase.

    Say what you will, but I've been very happy with Dropbox as a paying customer. It's worked extremely reliably for me.