How Dropbox Hacks Your Mac

Dropbox circumventing security restrictions (albeit for legit reasons) is particularly worrying because they have board members who support warrentless surveillance.

In my mind Dropbox became a company not worth supporting when Rice joined Dropbox's board (http://www.drop-dropbox.com/). Personally, with a board member who advocates warrentless surveillance it seems unlikely that we share similar views on the security of my data, and I wont be using their service.

Honestly they're pretty much the most expensive out of all of the storage solutions. Other than versioning they have less features than their competition as well. If they were born today I can't imagine they would have gone much of anywhere. Not sure how they're doing financially today but it seems each product they create flops.

So even outside of this surveillance stuff I don't get the point in using them.

Their client just works better at syncing quickly and reliably. A huge criteria for me is how much CPU it uses in the background compared to competing solutions from Google or MS and it was often an order of magnitude less (other clients may have improved in the last year or two, I haven't checked).

Another significant advantage is that they support a stable command line client for Linux.

I've had significant issues attempting to run dropbox headless on the server for file syncing. We needed to include files from another group that was used to primarily working in Dropbox in a daily report build, and so our first go at it was to just run dropbox on that machine and pull the files directly from there. Long story short, the Dropbox client crashed periodically and would stop syncing due to issues with its local state.

After setting up monitoring around the client to keep it running we wound up switching to a different, more reliable solution.

Dropbox works ok on the server but I wouldn't rely on it as a step in any important workflows unless the client has improved significantly in the past year.