Sunsetting Maestral

Whenever Syncthing is struggling to sync a file I need moved quickly, I drop a copy into my Dropbox folder because I know Maestral will take care of it instantly and provide a visual update (if I need one) while doing so. This is a shame. It'd be nice to use iCloud Drive more but I find the invisible interface and silent failures just maddening. At least Syncthing tells me why it's struggling whenever it does.

Wow. Apple really *have* succeeded in lowering everyone else to their own lamentable standards with the File Providers API, haven't they? Quite astonishing, really. And the perfect vindication of Steve Jobs from beyond the grave, sadly.

The only reason I can't use SyncThing is I want to sync stuff from several mirrors using NFC normalisation, and instead of just copying bytes of filenames as is, SyncThing throws a hissy-fit and just ignores the files entirely. Sigh. Maybe I'll fix my mirror scripts to work around this, but so far I've not got up the gumption. Otherwise, I definitely think SyncThing is the way to go, if you've got an always-on box somewhere.

Is there something about the Box service that it's not often (never?) mentioned when discussing Dropbox alternatives?

iCloud Drive has been a nightmare for me. I'm in the process of moving away from it because of some egregious bugs they've never been able to fix. The biggest one is constantly forcing the download of huge Logic & GarageBand files, to the point where it will fill up my drive and iCloud will stop syncing until I evict and restart

No matter how many times I evict these files, they will download them again. Usually immediately after I evict them. Apple support, even when escalated to their engineers was no help at all

Right now I'm moving to Infomaniak which is a pretty cool company that values privacy. I'm hoping it'll work better. So far it's been fine

There seems to be a meme in the Mac pundit community that the Dropbox Mac client is terrible, but it's not clear to me whether the people who make statements about it actually use the client. Best I can find, Gruber didn't like changes to the client [back in 2019](https://daringfireball.net/linked/2019/06/13/dropbox-sucks). That is ancient history in tech terms. For reference, in 2019 Macs still were 100% on x86 CPUs and 10.15 Catalina was the OS of the day.

There are certainly things to not like about Dropbox, particularly the pushy upsells, but the desktop client isn't something I really think about at all. I use it for folder sync, mobile access to my files, camera uploads from my phone, and shared folders with my spouse. It just works.

For disclosure, I worked as a software engineer at Dropbox about 10 years ago, but haven't had any inside details with the company in years.

@Nick Are you disagreeing that it was bad in 2019, or are you saying that there was some point in the interim (when?) where it got good again? I continue to occasionally use it on family members’ Macs, and my impression is that the annoyances that turned people aware are still there.

Transmit 6 supports Dropbox and can mount drives in the Finder.

Or just fork Maestral. It already exists, and I don't think Dropbox is known for intentionally breaking third-party clients, are they? Doesn't look like there was much activity to keep it running. Maintenance efforts should be feasible.

@mmjtsai I think the biggest problem with the client over the years has been resource hogging and I think that was worst before 2020. Maybe I just don't understand what annoyance people actually have because they don't actually articulate it and just say the client is bad. You didn't name any specific annoyances either. What is actually so bad about this client?

I listed my main annoyance as the pushy upsell. I'm also not a big fan of the visual appearance of the menubar dropdown (it's kind of a chunky mess). But In day-to-day usage of the client I don't see either of these things. Generally the client just syncs.

@Nick Weird spikes in resource usage, doesn’t reliably keep files offline (both forgets the setting and doesn’t always follow it), non-native controls, strange fonts, list of folders that’s too narrow to read the names, scrolling interface with non-resizable window, Command-W doesn’t always work.

@mjtsai - I understand the non-native look and feel (though not "strange fonts"). I believe you, but it's not my experiment. I interact with my Dropbox folder using the Finder, Spotlight, and Terminal. The client mainly is just an icon in my menu bar. It's a folder that syncs.

I miss the old Dropbox. It was so effortless and in contrast to many other services at the time (probably still), it supported binary diffing, where changing a large file wouldn't reupload the full file. When the official client went of the rails, I used Maestral, which was very similar to the old Dropbox client in its minimalism. I would still get upsell attempts the very few times I logged into the web interface (even though we had a family subscription).

After the orange guy revoked O365 access from ICC judges and threatened to attack one of our fellow European Union countries, we decided it becomes too risky to store data in the US and moved to Proton Drive. The client is still much worse than the old Dropbox client (or Maestral), but at least our data is safe and E2E encypted.

Thanks to Sam Schott for making the client that made Dropbox usable again!

The new version of Proton Drive (starting with v3, I think) has been working very reliably for me so far. Proton now provides an open-source SDK for Drive, so if someone wanted to build a client that works like the old Dropbox (just a synchronized folder without OS integration), they could do so in a fully supported way. One-way syncing (such as backups) can be done via the CLI.

Proton Drive is also supported by rclone, although I haven't used it myself, and that implementation still relies on a reverse-engineered API, not the official SDK.

I'm not sure if binary diffing is technically possible with Proton, though. The files are end-to-end encrypted, so what's actually stored amounts to random bits.

I am a heavy Dropbox user, though I only use it for sync services and file sharing. On the one hand, it can demand significant resources on Intel machines, often tripping the fans and taking a long time to do whatever it is doing, especially at startup. I haven't run into that at all on Apple Silicon, even on my M1 MacBook Air. In business, I am continually surprised by how often Dropbox is used, even by companies that have OneDrive or Google Drive.

All that said, pretty much the only thing I directly use the client for is as a shortcut to get to my account settings on the web. Aside from checking my account settings, I only interact with Dropbox via the Finder integration.

None of that should be taken to mean that I think the client software is great. I can agree that it may be bigger than it needs to be, at least if sync operations is what you use it for.

@NaOH - In my experience, Box has been rock solid, but it is squarely targeted at enterprise users instead of personal users. For example, for the same price, personal plans include an order of magnitude less storage than Dropbox and others. Box's CEO also is a huge advocate of AI in the product. For some enterprises, this can be useful, but it's not something I want in my personal account at all.

@josehill Thanks. So Box makes a good product, but what they're offering (and how they're pricing things) is aimed at the enterprise market. Makes sense how that wouldn't be attractive to a basic personal user.