takyon writes:
The Dropbox cloud storage service has migrated away from Amazon Web Services:
We've grown enormously since launching in 2008, surpassing 500 million signups and 500 petabytes (i.e., 5 followed by 17 zeroes!) of user data. That's almost 14,000 times the text of all the books in the Library of Congress. To give you a sense of the incredible growth we've experienced, we had only about 40 petabytes of user data when I joined in 2012. In the 4 years since, we've seen over 12x growth.
Dropbox stores two kinds of data: file content and metadata about files and users. We've always had a hybrid cloud architecture, hosting metadata and our web servers in data centers we manage, and storing file content on Amazon. We were an early adopter of Amazon S3, which provided us with the ability to scale our operations rapidly and reliably. Amazon Web Services has, and continues to be, an invaluable partner—we couldn't have grown as fast as we did without a service like AWS.
As the needs of our users and customers kept growing, we decided to invest seriously in building our own in-house storage system. There were a couple reasons behind this decision. First, one of our key product differentiators is performance. Bringing storage in-house allows us to customize the entire stack end-to-end and improve performance for our particular use case. Second, as one of the world's leading providers of cloud services, our use case for block storage is unique. We can leverage our scale and particular use case to customize both the hardware and software, resulting in better unit economics.
Reported at The Register.
Other coverage:
Dropbox blog,
Computerworld ,
Wired (from original submission; may be paywalled).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 15 2016, @01:56AM
Finally an organization which knows how to correctly use the information volume unit.
Not that those storing on Dropbox would derive anything meaningful from it, but it makes a nice PR.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Tuesday March 15 2016, @02:53PM
A 1 GB video is equivalent to how many books? Dropbox's use is still not correct : P
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(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday March 15 2016, @06:37PM
Well, a picture is worth a thousand words. Assuming 30fps, an hour of video has 108,000 frames. Each frame is a picture, therefore an hour of video is worth 108 million words.
Now the median number of words per book is about 64,000 words, [huffingtonpost.com] therefore an hour of video is worth slightly less than 1700 books.
How many books correspond to 1GB of video obviously depends on the video resolution (lower resolution = higher worth) and compression (higher compression = higher worth).
SCNR ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 15 2016, @01:59AM
But that's probably before de-duplication. When they take into account how many copies there are of that Paris Hilton sex tape, and similar, then they're down to 28 TB.
(Score: 4, Funny) by c0lo on Tuesday March 15 2016, @02:02AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Open4D on Wednesday March 16 2016, @06:20PM
Regarding the 500PB thing, actually my first thought was that it sounded a bit low. Consumers can buy drives that are about 10TB. So the whole of Drop Box is equivalent to just 50,000 times as much as one of those.
But of course, when you think about it, the average Drop Box user's quota usage is going to be a minuscule proportion of 10TB.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday March 15 2016, @02:00AM
The cloud leaves the cloud.
And now, the weather report: cloudy days ahead, which chances of a thunderstorm or two - may lead to service interruption.
Better backup those files.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by SrLnclt on Tuesday March 15 2016, @02:20AM
Better backup those files.
To the cloud?
(Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday March 15 2016, @09:28AM
From the blackjack & hookers dept.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bitstream on Tuesday March 15 2016, @02:01AM
Dropbox is a US based data siphon with deep .gov connections. All your data is backed up by trust us(tm) ;-)
(Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Tuesday March 15 2016, @02:06AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday March 15 2016, @03:23AM
Seriously, they couldn't be any worse than anyone else's cloud storage.
Like all these so called zero knowledge, we have to assume that the client side encryption only uses ONE key.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday March 15 2016, @12:10PM
I hear the new datacenter is in the Utah desert. I also heard the move was pretty easy since an image of the Dropbox data was already on site.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by anubi on Tuesday March 15 2016, @04:06AM
Dropbox is trying to make a business model of offering storage space on the web.... as I see it, like "Extra Space" offers people storage for their stuff.
Its reasonable, but not top security. I do not know if I would like to keep a million dollar collection of Krugerrands there.
They do come in handy for storing tools and family "treasures" ( you know, the stuff that means a lot to me, but I probably would not get more than $10 for at a garage sale ).
Know these businesses may come and go, so you probably do not want to single source any of them to hold really critical stuff, just as you would not want to put all your critical stuff on just one backup. Save the same stuff off on different clouds. You never know what might happen to your local copy - fire, theft, act of God, disgruntled person determined to mess up your business big-time, or just a viral prankster.
I know there are others like me, people who have spent a lifetime acquiring digital tools ( and the proficiency to use them ), and would be quite at a loss should that particular set of files disappear forever. Its reassuring to have backups. Somewhere else, physically, so that if misfortune falls on your physical location, you can go somewhere else and at least still access your files.
I used to provide a similar "service" to some of my clients. I would keep backups of their corporate stuff at my house. I can't do anything with it. I could not even read it - I did not have the hardware to do so. But, it was assurance that if something happened at the business or at the business owner's house, there was another copy that supposedly no-one but me and the business owner knew existed. It was mostly his insurance against an "inside job" causing him a lot of problems, by making it yet more difficult for someone to mess up his business big-time by monkeying with his files.
If its critical stuff, by all means, distribute redundant copies to multiple locations. We all know, stuff comes and stuff goes. Everyday.
And if its confidential, by all means, encrypt it yourself.... and my advice has been to encrypt your secret stuff, then stego it into family video shoots, then save off the whole mess to the cloud, as that would give anyone seeing it as terribly boring family memories taken by a really camera-happy dad, and won't arouse suspicion. If single, stego it into porn, so it gives good credence as to why it is kept in the cloud instead of the company machine.
Fer cryin' out loud, don't store raw encrypted files in the cloud! They stand out like a guy wearing a ski mask at the mall... what's he up to? Use a little modesty here, and cover 'em up with something else that doesn't turn everyone's head. That is what stego is for. It covers up your privates when you are in public.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday March 15 2016, @07:45AM
All the negativity?
At the moment I see:
1 post being positive about the correct use of units.
2 posts joking about the real amount of data when you consider redundancy; I'd consider them neutral.
2 posts being slightly negative of the cloud in general
1 reply to one of those posts being joking about where to backup; that one I'd count as neutral
1 post being negative about dropbox in particular
1 reply to that which I'd consider neutral
1 post complaining about negativity (yours)
So 3 out of 9 posts are negative, with only one of them being negative specifically about dropbox. I'd not consider that a lot of negativity.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Tuesday March 15 2016, @12:34PM
I'd not not NOT consider that a lot of negativity.
Yeah, seems like a lot of douch*s from slashdot and the rest of 'society' are on lately.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 15 2016, @09:44AM
Last time I checked, Dropbox was offering storage at about 5x the price of google drive and more expensive than all the other offerings. Just checked again and as of 2/2016 this is still the case. How is that possible?
http://www.cnet.com/how-to/onedrive-dropbox-google-drive-and-box-which-cloud-storage-service-is-right-for-you/ [cnet.com]
(Score: 1) by tedd on Tuesday March 15 2016, @11:45AM
What are you smoking?
The very same link you just posted there shows Dropbox at $10/1TB. Same as Google, same as Copy (Which is apparently shutting down). Box wants $10/100GB, which equates to $100/1TB and OneDrive wants $2/50GB, which equates to $40/1TB.
(Score: 1) by purple_cobra on Tuesday March 15 2016, @06:58PM
(Score: 1) by ibennetch on Tuesday March 15 2016, @01:44PM
Someone else responded about the rates involved, but from the people side of things it's easy: it works well, and everyone's heard of it.
My (not very technically savvy) supervisor at work has a corporate account where the company provides him with an unlimited Dropbox plan. If he wants to share a document, his first thought is to put it on Dropbox and send a shared folder. He can transfer files to his underlings or other people on his team as easy as saving a file locally. Need to transfer a large file to your grandmother? Dropbox it; do you really expect her to download a client, figure out how to connect to your SFTP server, and then transfer the file to her local machine?
One thing Dropbox has right is that it basically just works, and the files magically appear in the Documents folder without any real user action. One of the client sites I visit blocks BTSync, syncthing, and the like, but Dropbox works fine behind pretty much any kind of content filtering I've come across.
I'm not saying I think it's a good value to pay for the extra plan (I don't have a strong opinion either way about that), but Dropbox has found a way to make sharing files easy enough that anyone can figure it out and now they've established themselves as the giant in that market. Sure, someone could come along and do it better, or for less cost, or better in any other way, but for now I look at it a lot like Facebook. It's the de facto standard; it's popular because everyone uses it, despite some shortcomings. It works well for most people, and most people don't care about the cost value because most people I know aren't even paying for it.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 15 2016, @04:56PM
They're not a big corporation disliked in some circles. So if you don't trust Microsoft, or Google, or Amazon, they're an option.
It works with Linux. None of the others in that chart explicitly say so.
They have the name recognition. People explain such storage services by saying that the others are "like Dropbox."
(Score: 2) by Open4D on Wednesday March 16 2016, @06:32PM
Yes, and I'm pretty happy with the Linux client. By contrast, Google Drive has an official Windows client, but only unofficial Linux client(s). I'm willing to pay more for a service that supports my OS than one that doesn't.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday March 16 2016, @08:09PM
...then SURELY you trust your data in the hands of George Bush's former National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice! ;)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 15 2016, @10:51AM
Makes me wonder more on why Netflix moved _to_ Amazon: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/02/netflix-finishes-its-massive-migration-to-the-amazon-cloud/ [arstechnica.com]
(and they took 7 years to do it too)
(Score: 2) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Tuesday March 15 2016, @11:19AM
Isn't Netflix bleeding money? They probably want to get attention from Amazon, who is moving into vod and needs content/contracts/industry contacts. Get bought out or cash infusions.
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