{"id":34238,"date":"2021-11-23T11:29:09","date_gmt":"2021-11-23T16:29:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=34238"},"modified":"2022-01-27T16:15:22","modified_gmt":"2022-01-27T21:15:22","slug":"dropbox-and-maestral","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2021\/11\/23\/dropbox-and-maestral\/","title":{"rendered":"Dropbox and Maestral"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hartley Charlton<\/a>:<\/p>\n

An official Dropbox support thread<\/a>, shared by Mitchell Hashimoto<\/a> on Twitter, reveals a fiasco around native support for Apple silicon Macs. Dropbox is seemingly insisting that a significant number of community members will have to vote for native Apple silicon support for it to be implemented. There are also multiple repetitious requests with different phrasing, fragmenting users’ votes for support.<\/p>

[…]<\/p>

In a reply on Twitter<\/a>, Dropbox founder and CEO Drew Houston apologized for the confusion sparked by the “not ideal” support responses and said that Dropbox is “certainly supporting Apple silicon” with a native Apple silicon build planned for release in the first half of next year.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Steve Troughton-Smith<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Not the full story, at all. There are technical issues & negotiations at play. It shouldn’t surprise anybody that Apple doesn’t really want companies making kexts anymore<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Apple wants apps to use the new File Provider extension API instead, but from what I’ve heard it’s limited and unreliable.<\/p>\n\n

Ryan Jones<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Exploring Dropbox alternatives?<\/p>\n

I did ~6 months ago. Fully installed Box, G Drive, One Drive, and tried iCloud Drive.<\/p>\n

I ran<\/em> back to Dropbox and paid for Plus. For speed, simplicity, and less bullshit.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Marco Arment<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Had enough with the Dropbox Mac app? Me too.<\/p>\n

I switched to maestral.app<\/a> a few weeks back and couldn’t be happier. ~7x less RAM, ~10x less disk space, doesn’t burn 100% CPU during Xcode unzips.<\/p>\n

Only drawback is it doesn’t sync xattrs, which doesn’t affect my usage.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Maestral<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Maestral is an open-source Dropbox client written in Python. The project’s main goal is to provide a client for platforms and file systems that are no longer directly supported by Dropbox.<\/p>

Maestral currently does not support Dropbox Paper, the management of Dropbox teams, and the management of shared folder settings.<\/p>

[…]<\/p>

The focus on “simple” file syncing does come with advantages: on macOS, the Maestral App bundle is significantly smaller than the official Dropbox app and uses less memory.<\/p>

Maestral uses the public Dropbox API which, unlike the official client, does not support transferring only those parts of a file which changed (“binary diff”). Maestral may therefore use more bandwidth that the official client.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Max Seelemann<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

🏎 Ulysses clean build on M1 Max: ~65s.<\/p>\n

🚀 Same but with Dropbox app NOT running: ~55s.<\/p>\n

Quitting Dropbox saves 10s or ~15% for me! Reproduced multiple times.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

See also: Accidental Tech Podcast<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n