Too many users abused unlimited Dropbox plans, so they’re getting limits::Some people have taken “as much space as you need” too literally.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
This was intended to free business users from needing to worry about quotas.
The company said in a blog post yesterday that it was retiring its unlimited storage policy specifically because people were buying Dropbox Advanced accounts “for purposes like crypto and Chia mining, unrelated individuals pooling storage for personal use cases, or even instances of reselling storage.”
Dropbox also says that this behavior has been getting worse recently because other services have also been placing caps on their storage plans—at some point within the last year, Google also removed similar “as much as you need” language from its Google Workspace plans.
Rather than attempting to police behavior or play whack-a-mole with the people abusing the service, Dropbox has imposed a 15TB cap on organizations with three or fewer users.
An additional 5TB per user can be added on top of that, with a maximum cap of 1,000TB per organization.
New customers will be affected by this policy change immediately, as you’ll see if you check the current pricing for Dropbox Advanced plans.
The original article contains 354 words, the summary contains 173 words. Saved 51%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Makes sense, and their implemented solution also seems reasonable to me.
Honestly they’re giving existing users at least a year with their current storage capacity and plan.
Google gave like 60 days. Dropbox are handling this much better.
Uhu, exactly. I get that it’s frustrating, but the simple fact of the matter is that offering unlimited storage capacity (or unlimited anything for that matter) will inevitably attract people who will abuse it. Their new plans are functionally unlimited for most people, while also curbing that abuse.
That’s not to praise Dropbox too much (they shouldn’t have offered unlimited in the first place, but it’s an easy way to draw people in), but I still can’t fault them too much for how they handled this.
I always hated the term unlimited when it’s not really unlimited. Is it really abuse if you’re using it as intended?
Edit: I eat my words. People are assholes. I thought this was referring to providers of unlimited storage or bandwidth, only to say “oh, you’ve using it too much, so we’re going to throttle you.”
I think you are right the first time.
“Unlimited “ only ever an advertising term, to garner attention. No one ever intends to deliver on it .
I just want to add a surprising fact. My mobile carrier does actually deliver on the promise of unlimited data, and an ISP is the last company that I would trust.
Eh… If you offer unlimited you have to live with unlimited.
Fuck these people but thats also on Dropbox.
My only concern about throttling it as 5TB for small organizations is that I could see that being a problem for freelance video editors. 8K video can take up a lot of space.
At some point though I feel like if someone would be using Dropbox for 8k videos, they should be wondering if they are using the right solution for their needs. I would say absolutely not.
Temporary storage of, say, a documentary with hundreds of hours of video so it can be transferred from the cameras to the editor who is working remotely seems like exactly the sort of thing Dropbox is for.
Maybe I’m applying too much of my own personal use case for how I use tools like Dropbox then. I’m using it for documents I actually want synchronized between devices, with a cloud backup and history. I suppose if you’re looking at it for a cloud storage solution, ignoring the desktop sync aspect then I can see where that makes more sense.
I just have a hard time wrapping my head around using cloud storage for such large files being an optimal solution but then again if storage cost is the biggest objection, unlimited storage sounds like it’s removing said objection and you don’t have much choice if you’re working as a remote team so great point, I hadn’t thought about it like that.
If you have hundreds of hours of 8k footage, no one is going to edit it off of Dropbox.
If you have the storage capacity to hold all that footage elsewhere, you also have the capability to enable uploading directly to that storage.
No one is using public cloud storage for these kinds of use cases, unless they’re extremely foolish.
That being said, offering “unlimited” and then reneging on it is also, IMHO, foolish.
