Some time ago, Dropbox offered me up to 3GB more free storage if I just turned on "auto uploading" for photos from my Android phone to my Dropbox folder. "Hey, free storage? OK."
I don't use Dropbox consciously - not daily, not weekly, not monthly - but I upload my photos to it automatically in exchange for more storage in case I one day need it. Like a backup service I don't actually have to visit except in emergency.
Not sure there is a lot of value in me for Dropbox, but they do get to make outrageous claims about 1B daily uploads, which includes every photo I've ever taken with my cell phone.
I wonder how many files are uploaded where people consciously uploaded to Dropbox.
I'm curious about the accuracy of the statement. That implication is people intentionally upload/share over a billion files every day?
Given that dropbox is more of a sync service, I'm curious if that number more accurately reflects the number of files shared total or perhaps the number of sync events that occurred?
If people are actually uploading & sharing >1B files every day, Dropbox is immensely bigger than I had thought. Instagram, for example, sees 40M photo uploads per day.
That doesn't seem unreasonable at all. There are plenty of power users like myself who do pretty much everything in Dropbox, and there are also plenty of tiny little files created every day that can count towards that.
For example, deep down in my Dropbox I have a Code directory, which has plenty of other folders for most of the personal projects I work on. If I create a rails project, that puts in a bunch of basic files which can easily count for 100. I initialize a git repository on there and that can generate a few hundred more files. All of those add up quickly.
Here's the results of a few commands showcasing the size of my personal dropbox, and I'm sure there are other power users who are similar to me.
ls -aR Dropbox | wc -l
74397
du -sh Dropbox
32G (Just to note, .dropbox.cache accounts for 10G)
Well, people don't Instagram entire project directory trees with months or years of cruft, but they will stick those in their Dropbox. I would kind of expect Dropbox to boast much higher numbers.
The future should be a 'cloud' that is basically just storage with a bunch of specially handling for specific instances (e.g. DropBox is online storage, but you can use it to share your photos). Hopefully this will be standardized in a way that doesn't funnel everyone to a specific provider.
That's sort of what I'm working on with Trovebox [1]. It's specific to photos (and videos soon) but you can select upwards of 7 storage services. Anything from Dropbox and S3 to storing files at the Internet Archive.
The software is part of my fellowship with the Shuttleworth Foundation and everything is open sourced [2].
Yea I thought that was funny too. My guess is that a majority of these "memories and moments" are not even images. We use DB to store all of the files for our app and 90% of them are text files.
I kind of hate how soft they make it... "I upload all my moments to my cloud and then frolic through the fields because technology is so meaningful!" give me a break
Interesting copy. If you replaced "Dropbox" in that sentence with Facebook, it would work just as well.
Maybe that's Dropbox's endgame? An emphasis on "moments" rather than "files"?