We just realized some folks around here might be itching to see what's up, too. Have at it! (50 invites for folks here)<p><a href="http://getdropbox.com/beta/yc50" rel="nofollow">http://getdropbox.com/beta/yc50</a>
Congrats guys, I have 2 requests:<p>1) Get a Linux version out, it shouldn't take too long as you developed the thing using Python (not sure what OS specific bindings you have)<p>2) Add support for LAN connections, when two boxes sit on the same LAN there is no reason for them to wait for S3 to be updated, get the update done locally and then propagate to S3, this will save you bandwidth and shorten latency.
At the risk of getting grabbed by the MPAA...I want to use a system like this to globally access my media archive, which includes all my legitimately acquired games and music, but also a decent amount of pirated material. Obviously storing copyrighted material without a license on a server in other people's control is a very bad idea. This would be a very useful thing to do though; maybe in a different world where the copyright system has been reformed... I often find myself at a friend's house wanting to see some movie I have on my disk, but I never bother to bring my portable HD unless it's planned.<p>I have about..50 gigabytes of images of games that I own, i think? Having access to those anywhere would be really nice. I would run my private server to do this kind of thing anyway, but this networking solution would make things a lot easier. However, I wouldn't want anyone to instigate a raid based on what to the casual observer seems like a fat load of illegally acquired copyrighted material. This would be a problem even if I only uploaded what I own.<p>And then there's the problem of storage cost, 1.5$/10GB/month turns into a considerable number very quickly. So I suppose you intend this kind of thing for the small stuff; images, documents, small-to-medium music collections etc.?
we've got a new screencast up too, which isn't linked to from the tc article:<p><a href="http://getdropbox.com/screencast" rel="nofollow">http://getdropbox.com/screencast</a><p>shameless reddit/digg plug:<p><a href="http://reddit.com/info/6boh3/comments/" rel="nofollow">http://reddit.com/info/6boh3/comments/</a><p><a href="http://digg.com/software/Google_Drive_killer_coming_from_MIT_Startup" rel="nofollow">http://digg.com/software/Google_Drive_killer_coming_from_MIT...</a>
"Google Drive killer coming from MIT Startup"... awesome. Top in all topics on digg at the moment.<p>Update: Top of digg, top of news.yc... SECOND on reddit... can they complete the trifecta?
Wow, I forgot all about this after getting pumped about Dropbox (along with everyone else here) last spring:<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863</a>
Congrats! What's ironic is that I was lucky to record a video of Drew coding an early version of Dropbox last March, but as I didn't have a painless solution for backing up, I don't have a copy of it anymore. :)
Gave it a swirl just now. I have tested Wuala, AllMyData and a couple of other similar services before and DropBox does stand out in a general look&feel as well as the implementation details.<p>IMO it has two major problems at the moment -<p>* On Windows, if DropBox is <i>not</i> running, it causes Windows Explorer to lag like hell; entering a folder on a local disk takes seconds and the Explorer basically plays dead at this time<p>* There is no detailed description of the security model - what's encrypted/authenticated where and how exactly. While some (most ?) people don't care about this sort of thing and tend to take devs' word for it, the model needs to be disclosed to allow independent review and evaluation. Otherwise it's just a proprietary crypto, which should be assumed broken until proven otherwise.
Very interesting. I actually built something like this myself (I was going to call it satchl) and I eventually stopped after looking long and hard at the online storage market and deciding that it wasn't worth the effort.<p>What convinced dropbox that they could do better?
So, just curious, why haven't you guys bought dropbox.com from whoever owns it now? Seems like a smart move because if I tell people to "try dropbox", they'll go to dropbox.com first.
So I used dropbox as a beta user for close to a year now... the thing I really like about it is the "set it, forget it" feeling it affords me--it's there when I need it, and stays out of my way when I don't. What I would really like to (eventually) see is some kind of a dropbox server I could download to e.g. my SAN (external hard drive attached to my router) that would work the same it does now, i.e. over the internet.
Does the Windows version work with applications that don't understand shell extensions (e.g. DOS/Win16 apps, Cygwin &c)? For all the time that I've been searching through syncing programs, I haven't yet found one that presents as a drive/real folder (ala FUSE).
How well does this work with large binary files? (I'm not interested in using this to share DVD rips, I work with legacy blob databases at my day job at the salt mines which are usually several hundred MB in size)
Minuses: Tab order on the "Link your account" page is wrong.<p>Pluses: Just works!<p>Great job, you've solved a problem I've been fighting with for a long (long) time!
i haven't gotten a chance to test this yet, but how does dropbox do conflict resolution? ie: i'm offline at one place, make a change, offline at another place, make a change, go back online at both places.<p>for text files, i suppose this could potentially implement svn-like text merging. how would that feature feel, from a design perspective? unintuitive? error prone? or excelent?<p>edit: damn, this is a really cool app. goodbye emails to self.