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Ideas to Improve Dropbox Sync Visibility and Control

mgmead

In a world full of .git files, AIs running around touching things, and media/storage/blob files that are 100gb each, having a "single auto-fire" sync with no visibility is archaic.

Let us SEE our sync
Let us STOP our sync completely (not pause)
Let us TRUNCATE our sync (if I am stuck on letter "d" in the alphabet, surely you can handle me removing "m-z" before you get there at least)

It is fully evident that your "desktop app" is just a layered view on a legacy data-streaming tool that cannot handle today's infrastructure needs.

Give us visibility and tools.

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Comments

Keith

Hi @mgmead, thanks for sharing this idea. We’d definitely be interested in hearing more about the specific use cases and sync features you’d like to see added.

Let us know what would be most impactful for your workflow and why. I’ll open this idea up for voting too.

To the rest of the community, be sure to upvote if you’d like to see more sync features added to Dropbox, and let us know which ones would improve your workflows and how.

mgmead

Hi @Keith,

I'm an Enterprise Solutions Architect with 20+ years doing Fortune 100 project design. Your service offers zero visibility to people like me on sync status, job queue, or any account-centric server side process calls that we would need in order to develop/maintain against your datastore.

We develop, you have files, we can't see what you do, you fail - blackbox/dead.

Add .git management (a potential cross-fire), and the inclusion of single-run AI-based reads/writes to your file tree - and the inability to see status or work makes your product unusable. Let us see sync on the server side, let us interrupt sync, reset, etc.

Your 'desktop app' has zero professional usability features, and as you approach larger datastore size, it's damaging.

That, coupled with your 24-hour lag support on tickets makes this a tool that can't be used.

BACKSTORY:

My experience has run aground to the point that we will likely be evacuating Dropbox.

We have a (small) legacy file-tree on your service that's about 4Tb. We also have a contract for 15Tb of usable space.

We opted to point this data-store towards a development EC2 running in AWS, since it represents historic examples of data we would like to run models against.

As lead tech/CEO of our development company, I had a legacy sync to this store on my mac laptop, using the "old school" dropbox format. Deciding to move to CloudStorage (the MacOS mandated/suggested storage format) was a catastrophe.

2 weeks later, my laptop doesn't function, I have a ticket filled with "why don't you reinstall the software" answers and zero visibility, and have begun the process of leaving your service.

We have paid for 15Tb of usable space for years and just ignored it as a legacy space for the most part - but now as we use your limited desktop tool and speak to your limited support teams - your services and tools are breaking our systems.

No visibility = non-useful environment = danger/escape/leave.

You are the problem; that's fine - what large org isn't in some way. But no visibility for grownups to fix it from our side - that's the fail.

Introduce .git and ai reads/writes and well … time to run away.