Update: Dropbox Dies, Resurrection Complete

[Redlin5_v1legacy]

Only time I've ever used it was for the Pubclub Christmas vid. I'm not overly effected but I can see how people would get reliant on it.

Hope they fix it ASAP.

 

[FalloutJack]

Well, this seems to be our week for Whack-A-Mole hacker moments, just waiting to see who gets pounded first. I can't wait.

 

[Something Amyss]

My Dropbox is working fine. Perhaps they fixed it?

There have been multiple notes in this thread that it's not fixed, and some people are reporting access.

 

[Lono Shrugged]

This fucked me over big time today. We use dropbox to deliver videos to our clients and it cut out halfway through an upload on a tight deadline. Managed to share it on using another system. Part of the reason people are so pissed is that so many people use it and rely on it because it is a great service. I would be lost without cloud file sharing. I sorted it easy enough anyway but all the lads on the other end shat themselves.

Always have a back up plan...

 

[Kargathia]

But last semester a study partner and i were forced to use it, because the rest of our project group was so dropbox horny and basically demanded us to use it because it was so awesome, fail safe, and much better than emailing each other the stuff (which we had been doing for the past 3 years).

What do you prefer to use? Just email? If so you're kind of missing the point in dropbox. To quote Roy from IT Crowd, "Are you from the past?"

I use a mix. Skydrive for personal stuff between my phone, PC, laptop and tablet. Dropbox for work stuff between my two work PCs, work laptop and home PC. Its a godsend, and I dont have to faff around sending updated copies of the same file all over the place when I make a change.

Either Email or an USB drive. Much easier.

Problem with dropbox, IMO, is that if you work with a group, person A uploads something, person B and C download it. They edit in their own stuff and reupload it with the same title. Something will go wrong somewhere. Just emailing it to the next in line, or emailing one guy that puts the finished document together is much easier.

Keep local folders, and just work in the goddamn shared file. It excludes people simultaneously working on stuff (and definitely could see some improvement by actually locking it out), but as first-year ICT student that's about a gazillion times preferable to combining significantly branched code projects.
First-year being relevant because that's when documentation discipline is still questionable at best.

 

[Drauger]

Jesus I almost crapped my pants but, I logged in without problems, and already started downloading info for a new back up for my backup........ °-°U

 

[Karloff]

The problem is still a problem, according to Dropbox.

"No files were lost in the outage, but some users continue to run into problems using various parts of dropbox.com and our mobile apps. We?re rapidly reducing the number of users experiencing these problems, and are making good progress."

Speaking as a mobile user, though my home machine works my iPad's been out since this thing started.. Dropbox_support's last Tweet was an hour ago, and it had nothing new to report.

 

[not_you]

I use Google Drive...

Sure, I do have a dropbox account because it was required for the uni degree I was doing... (Many collaborative projects with people unwilling to switch)

But yeah, I don't use it now, probably won't... Drive does all I need it to, so why use anything else?

 

[BeerTent]

But last semester a study partner and i were forced to use it, because the rest of our project group was so dropbox horny and basically demanded us to use it because it was so awesome, fail safe, and much better than emailing each other the stuff (which we had been doing for the past 3 years).

What do you prefer to use? Just email? If so you're kind of missing the point in dropbox. To quote Roy from IT Crowd, "Are you from the past?"

I use a mix. Skydrive for personal stuff between my phone, PC, laptop and tablet. Dropbox for work stuff between my two work PCs, work laptop and home PC. Its a godsend, and I dont have to faff around sending updated copies of the same file all over the place when I make a change.

Either Email or an USB drive. Much easier.

Problem with dropbox, IMO, is that if you work with a group, person A uploads something, person B and C download it. They edit in their own stuff and reupload it with the same title. Something will go wrong somewhere. Just emailing it to the next in line, or emailing one guy that puts the finished document together is much easier.

Keep local folders, and just work in the goddamn shared file. It excludes people simultaneously working on stuff (and definitely could see some improvement by actually locking it out), but as first-year ICT student that's about a gazillion times preferable to combining significantly branched code projects.
First-year being relevant because that's when documentation discipline is still questionable at best.

To fix the problem you're having, you'd want a SVN. Dropbox is not an SVN. Communication when working on it is an absolute must, or you're working on a project where person A, B, and C has their own files to work on, and neither of them has any reason to look into the other's files unless to look and not save.

SVN is still cloud, but they have that file check-in/check-out functionality you'd find more useful. If I check out character.cpp, and person B wants to do something, they can't access that file until I save and check in that file. Two people can't edit the same file. It's great, clean and tidy. I'm pretty sure tortoise and Dreamweaver have it.

The sneakernet's great, but in today's world, its obsolete unless you're working on this super secret project. Which you're not. You're just a goddamn collage student. Pick up a book and find a better system if you don't like something that's not even designed to do what you want to do.

 

[Karloff]

The problem is still a problem, and users are leaving Dropbox. Those leaving cite lack of communication as a major cause.

Allen G: "Well, guys, I've had about as much fun as I can have. I purchased 100G of Microsoft Skydrive for $50 and am going to spend the day (a) moving 75G worth of stuff over [thank goodness for gig ether at a major university] and (b) trying to figure out if I can keep it from replicating back down through the cloud to everything I have! From what I can tell, Skydrive checks an MD5 hash followed by timestamp--so if I just sneakernet the directory..... Yeah, we'll see

Instead of working on more important things, my staff and I also get to spend a good hunk of next week migrating faculty and students who want to ditch Dropbox (and we're going to advise them to). Oh joy.

Anyway: Dropbox, my decision to jump ship was about 20% on the outage and 80% on how communication/customer service has been handled during the outage. Your customers still have no idea whether Dropbox is safe and reliable moving forward. We absolutely know, from current events and empirical evidence, that Dropbox is not reliable now and our data has been at risk all along."

https://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=110222&page=24

 

[The Artificially Prolonged]

Well that explains why my dropbox folder has been stuck syncing all day. This is why it always better to keep your own backups elsewhere instead of just relying on cloud storage services just in case something does go wrong.

 

[Yopaz]

Well, one of the first thing you learn as an IT student is to have several backups for everything, so I'm not really devastated if my files vanish into the Warp, I only used it because people I was doing a project with pretty much demanded we use it, so all I have on there is a pile of files for a mobile app project that we already handed up and were graded on (78%! Pretty damn good considering we couldn't get a section of it to work properly).

Sound advice for anyone that. We should always remember that no technology is 100% reliable. Hard drives will fail cloud services might fail or your internet connection might act up. Even pens will fail you eventually with a much higher rate than the average hard drive.

While it's easy to distrust cloud services because of this we should keep in mind how many hard drives fail each day, how many pens run out of ink, how many flash drives that get lost, crushed or simply stop working. Caution should be taken regardless of where it's stored.

 

[MetalMagpie]

I can now log in to the site but desktop still isn't syncing, which is a shame.

I'm not greatly annoyed about the outage (I work as a developer - these things happen) but the lack of communication has been a bit irritating. I might have a look into what Google Drive offers.

 

[Kargathia]

Spoiler: snip snap

But last semester a study partner and i were forced to use it, because the rest of our project group was so dropbox horny and basically demanded us to use it because it was so awesome, fail safe, and much better than emailing each other the stuff (which we had been doing for the past 3 years).

What do you prefer to use? Just email? If so you're kind of missing the point in dropbox. To quote Roy from IT Crowd, "Are you from the past?"

I use a mix. Skydrive for personal stuff between my phone, PC, laptop and tablet. Dropbox for work stuff between my two work PCs, work laptop and home PC. Its a godsend, and I dont have to faff around sending updated copies of the same file all over the place when I make a change.

Either Email or an USB drive. Much easier.

Problem with dropbox, IMO, is that if you work with a group, person A uploads something, person B and C download it. They edit in their own stuff and reupload it with the same title. Something will go wrong somewhere. Just emailing it to the next in line, or emailing one guy that puts the finished document together is much easier.

Keep local folders, and just work in the goddamn shared file. It excludes people simultaneously working on stuff (and definitely could see some improvement by actually locking it out), but as first-year ICT student that's about a gazillion times preferable to combining significantly branched code projects.
First-year being relevant because that's when documentation discipline is still questionable at best.

To fix the problem you're having, you'd want a SVN. Dropbox is not an SVN. Communication when working on it is an absolute must, or you're working on a project where person A, B, and C has their own files to work on, and neither of them has any reason to look into the other's files unless to look and not save.

SVN is still cloud, but they have that file check-in/check-out functionality you'd find more useful. If I check out character.cpp, and person B wants to do something, they can't access that file until I save and check in that file. Two people can't edit the same file. It's great, clean and tidy. I'm pretty sure tortoise and Dreamweaver have it.

The sneakernet's great, but in today's world, its obsolete unless you're working on this super secret project. Which you're not. You're just a goddamn collage student. Pick up a book and find a better system if you don't like something that's not even designed to do what you want to do.

Heh, I'm not even sure whom you're addressing here, but I would like to point out that if you locally install dropbox, it will allow realtime sharing of updates, including a helpful display of last updated files. If the file you wanted to work in has been updated in the last 10-15 minutes, then chances are you'll have to wait your turn.

It's not a perfect system, but so far it sits nicely on the intersection of ease of use, general familiarity, and efficient file synchronisation.

 

[JoshuaMadoc]

This bullshit actually reminded me that having some extra USB keys will help.

So now I'm working on converting one of my keys into a dedicated Dropbox backup key.

 

[prpshrt]

But last semester a study partner and i were forced to use it, because the rest of our project group was so dropbox horny and basically demanded us to use it because it was so awesome, fail safe, and much better than emailing each other the stuff (which we had been doing for the past 3 years).

What do you prefer to use? Just email? If so you're kind of missing the point in dropbox. To quote Roy from IT Crowd, "Are you from the past?"

I use a mix. Skydrive for personal stuff between my phone, PC, laptop and tablet. Dropbox for work stuff between my two work PCs, work laptop and home PC. Its a godsend, and I dont have to faff around sending updated copies of the same file all over the place when I make a change.

Either Email or an USB drive. Much easier.

Problem with dropbox, IMO, is that if you work with a group, person A uploads something, person B and C download it. They edit in their own stuff and reupload it with the same title. Something will go wrong somewhere. Just emailing it to the next in line, or emailing one guy that puts the finished document together is much easier.

You are right in that it is a PAIN to use dropbox for collaborative work. No version controlling of the documents whatsoever. Either use github or google docs. Seems the rest of your group completely missed the point of using dropbox. It's just a simple cloud service that allows simple sharing and that's all it should be used for IMO

 

[Sarah Aston]

I've been hugely impressed with Tresorit, the highest security cloud ever!

They give you 6GB of free space, up to 16GB if you sign up via this link: https://register.tresorit.com/download?mode=1&ref=ix8kKG

The interface is clean, the program works wonderfully, very fast, supports Wifi Sync and patented AES256 End-to-End encryption on European servers and no storage for passwords!, They seem to have a client for just about everything (Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS and Android). It's exactly what Dropbox should have been.