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Dropbox
Original author(s)Drew Houston, Arash Ferdowsi
Developer(s)Dropbox, Inc.
Initial releaseSeptember 2008
Stable release
Windows, macOS, Linux197.4.7629 / April 25, 2024; 6 months ago (2024-04-25)[1]
Windows (Windows Store version)5.0 / March 27, 2017; 7 years ago (2017-03-27)[2]
Android374.2.4 / April 30, 2024; 6 months ago (2024-04-30)[3]
iOS374.2 / April 22, 2024; 6 months ago (2024-04-22)[4]
Preview release
Windows, macOS, Linux198.3.7576 / April 29, 2024; 6 months ago (2024-04-29)[5]
Android375.1.4 / April 30, 2024; 6 months ago (2024-04-30)[6]
Written inPython[7]
Operating systemMicrosoft Windows
Mac OS 10.4 and later
Linux
iOS
Android
BlackBerry OS
Available inEnglish,
Japanese (beta),
German (beta),
Spanish (beta),
French (beta)[8]
TypeOnline backup service
LicenseClosed source (Windows & Mac clients and Linux dropbox daemon), GPLv2 open source (Linux nautilus)
Websitewww.dropbox.com

Dropbox is a Web-based file hosting service operated by Dropbox, Inc. that uses cloud storage to enable users to store and share files and folders with others across the Internet using file synchronization. It was founded in 2007 by MIT graduates Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi as a Y Combinator startup.[9]

There are both free and paid services, each with varying options.[10] In comparison to similar services, Dropbox offers a relatively large number of user clients across a variety of desktop and mobile operating systems. There are a number of versions across many operating systems, including versions for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux (official and unofficial),[11] as well as versions for mobile devices, such as Android, Windows Phone 7, iPhone, iPad and BlackBerry, and a web-based client for when no local client is installed. Dropbox uses the freemium financial model and its free service provides 2 GB of free online storage. Users who refer Dropbox to others can gain up to 8 GB of additional free storage.[12] The service's major competitors include Box.net, FilesAnywhere, CloudMe, CrashPlan, Egnyte, iCloud, Mozy, SpiderOak, SugarSync, TitanFile, Ubuntu One, Windows Live SkyDrive, Wuala and ZumoDrive.[13][14]

History

According to Dropbox, founder Drew Houston conceived the idea after repeatedly forgetting his USB drive while he was a student at MIT. He says that existing services at the time "suffered problems with Internet latency, large files, bugs, or just made me think too much." He began making something for himself, but then realized that it could benefit others with the same problem.[15] Houston founded Dropbox, Inc. in 2007, and shortly thereafter secured seed funding from Y Combinator.[9] Dropbox officially launched at 2008's TechCrunch50, an annual technology conference.[16]

Due to trademark disputes between Evenflow (Dropbox's parent company) and Proxy, Inc., Dropbox's official domain name was actually "getdropbox.com" until October 2009, when they acquired their current domain, "dropbox.com".[16]

OPSWAT reported in their December 2010 Market Share report that Dropbox held 10.41% of the worldwide Backup Client market, based on number of installations.[17]

In May 2011, Dropbox struck deals with Japanese mobile service providers Softbank and Sony Ericsson. As per the terms of the deal Dropbox will come preloaded on their mobile phones.[18] As of April 2011, Dropbox has more than 25 million users.[19]

In May 2010 Dropbox users in China were unable to access Dropbox. Later, Dropbox confirmed they had been blocked by China. Due to the fact that the censorship usually focuses on popular services only, many considered this evidence of Dropbox's rapidly rising popularity and international user base. Up to Nov 2011, the website is still blocked in China, but locally installed applications are usable with some ISPs.[20][21][22][23][24]

Financials

Dropbox has received a total venture capital funding of $7.2 million from several investors, including Y Combinator, Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners.[25]

According to speculation, Dropbox's valuation is more than $1 billion.[26] TechCrunch, VentureBeat, Business Insider and Financial Post have also speculated that Dropbox's valuation could be as high as $5 to $10 billion.[27]

Dropbox's annual revenue is expected to reach $240 million in 2011.[28]

Dropbox is based in San Francisco, and is funded by Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners, and Amidzad.[9] Starting in mid-2009, they began releasing new features gradually to help measure customer interest, a Lean Startup technique.[29]

Business model

Dropbox operates on the Freemium financial model.[30]

Dropbox offers a free account of 2 GB and a paid account of 50 GB, 100 GB, and a team account of 1 TB or more. The free account and the paid account are identical in all aspects except for the amount of storage space offered. Providing the free account to users costs a lot of money to Dropbox but nevertheless Dropbox continues to provide the free accounts because it benefits Dropbox in several ways. Drew Houston, the CEO of Dropbox has pointed out that:

"Most of our growth is word of mouth/viral, so free users are still valuable: we grow faster, and they refer people who might pay"
"Picking the right duration is tricky, and people add files to their Dropboxes at different rates. Many pay eventually after using the free service for a long time."[31]

In October 2011, Forbes published that Dropbox has 50 million users, of which 96% are using a free account.[28]

For a brief period of time, Dropbox operated an affiliate program whereby third parties which referred customers to Dropbox would get a small cut out of Dropbox's revenue. But this affiliate program was shut down indefinitely on November 5, 2009 because it was not providing good returns. Dropbox provided the following official explanation:

"We believe that our efforts as a company are better spent improving the Dropbox product for our customers and delivering the features that they have been asking for."
"Because we are a small company, we have to be very selective about which projects we work on, and the affiliate program didn't seem like a wise use of our resources."[32]

Technology

Both the Dropbox server and desktop client software are primarily written in Python. The desktop client uses GUI toolkits such as wxWidgets and Cocoa. Other notable Python libraries include Twisted, ctypes, and pywin32. The software does not use any third-party file sync or version control libraries and was built from scratch.[33]

The Dropbox client enables users to drop any file into a designated folder that is then synced with Dropbox's Internet service and to any other of the user's computers and devices with the Dropbox client.[34] Users may also upload files manually through a web browser.[35] Through these usages, it can be an alternative to sneakernet (physical transportation of removable media), and other traditional forms of file transfer, such as FTP and e-mail attachments.[36]

While Dropbox functions as a storage service, its focus is on synchronization and sharing. It supports revision history, so files deleted from the Dropbox folder may be recovered from any of the synced computers.[37][38] Dropbox's version control also helps users know the history of a file they may be currently working on, enabling more than one person to edit and re-post files without complications of losing its previous form.[39] The version history is limited to 30 days. A paid option for unlimited version history called "Pack-Rat" is available.[40]

The version history is paired with the use of delta encoding technology. To conserve bandwidth and time, if a file in a user's Dropbox folder is changed, Dropbox only uploads the pieces of the file that are changed when syncing.[41] Though the desktop client has no restriction on individual file size, files uploaded via the web site are limited to a maximum of 300 MB per file.[42] To prevent free users (who get 2 GB of free storage) from creating multiple free accounts, Dropbox includes the content of shared folders when totaling the amount of space used on the account.[43]

Dropbox uses Amazon's S3 storage system to store the files[44]; though Houston has stated that Dropbox may switch to a different storage provider at some point in the future.[45] It also uses SSL transfers for synchronization and stores the data via AES-256 encryption.[46]

Power users have devised a number of innovative uses for and mash-ups of the technology that expand Dropbox' functionality. These include: sending files to a Dropbox via Gmail; using Dropbox to sync IM chat logs; BitTorrent management; password management; remote application launching and system monitoring; and as a free Web hosting service.[47][48][49][50][51][52]

Functionality

Add-ons

There are a large number of official and unofficial Dropbox addons that are available, mostly created by the Dropbox community. These addons are both in the form of web services such as SendToDropbox[53] (which allows users to email files to their Dropboxes) and desktop applications such as MacDropAny[54] (which allows users to sync any folder on their computer with Dropbox). There is also a web services and browser extensions called cloudHQ for Dropbox[55] which allows Dropbox users to synchronize Google Docs with files in Dropbox storage and also to edit Dropbox documents in the browser.

There are also a number of client applications for operating systems that Dropbox does not officially support, such as Maemo, Symbian, and webOS.

An open source tool called Dropship provides unauthenticated access to Dropbox-hosted files by using the Dropbox API to access files by their hash. Dropbox has attempted to squash this project by requesting its suspension where it was being hosted, and by inadvertently issuing a fake DMCA takedown notice.[56]

Dropbox user demographics

A plurality of Dropbox users ie 32.7% are from the United States, with 6.7% and 6.5% from the United Kingdom and Germany respectively. 66.1% of Dropbox users use Windows only, 20.9% use Mac OS only, 2.0% use Linux only, and the remainder use some combination of the three.[57]

Dropbox has agreed to abide by the DMCA copyright guidelines and therefore it has dissuaded its users from uploading copyrighted content to Dropbox's servers. Dropbox has reserved the right to delete or remove any file from users' accounts if it violates the DMCA.[58]

Reception

Dropbox has been praised by many publications—including The Economist, The New York Times, PC Magazine, and The Washington Post—for its simple design and ease of use.[59][60][61][62] It has also received several awards, including the Crunchie Award in 2009 for Best Internet Application; Macworld's 2009 Editor's Choice Award; and it has been nominated for a 2010 Webby Award, and for the 2010 Mac Design Awards by Ars Technica.[63][64][65][66]

Dropbox has been named as the world's fifth most valuable web startup after Facebook, Twitter, Zynga and Groupon[67][68][69], has been touted as Y Combinator's most successful investment to date[70], and is among the top 10 iPhone most popular apps of all time, according to TechCrunch.[71]

Other accolades include being voted among the top 10 Android apps of all time, according to ZDNet[72], being recognized as one of the top 50 emerging companies by TIEcon.[73], and called one of the 20 best startups of Silicon Valley.[74]

Drew Houston was called the best young tech entrepreneur by Business Week[75], and he and co-founder Arash Ferdowsi were named among the top 30 under 30 enterpreneurs by inc.com.[76]

Criticism

Dropbox has been criticized by independent security researcher Derek Newton, who has argued that Dropbox's authentication architecture is inherently insecure[77], and by software expert Miguel de Icaza who claims that Dropbox's terms of service contradicts its privacy policy and that the company's famous claim "Dropbox employees aren’t able to access user files" is a lie.[78]

The service has also been criticized for not supporting the ability for users to use their own AES-256 keys and for automatically signing in.[79]

In May 2011, a complaint was filed with the US FTC alleging Dropbox misled users about the privacy and security of their files. At the heart of the complaint was the policy of "deduplication", where the system checks if a file has been uploaded before by any other user, and links to the existing copy if so; and the policy of using a single AES-256 key for every file on the system so Dropbox can (and does, for deduplication) look at encrypted files stored on the system, with the consequence that any intruder who gets the key (as well as Dropbox employees) could decrypt any file if they had access to Dropbox's backend storage infrastructure.[80]

On 20 June 2011, all Dropbox accounts could be accessed without password for 4 hours as reported by TechCrunch. The error was caused by a code update made at 1:54 pm Pacific Time. The error was detected at 5:41 pm and immediately fixed. Less than 1 percent of Dropbox's users were logged in at that time. All logged in sessions were ended since then. All users with compromised accounts were notified by emails.[81][82] Dropbox could potentially face a class action lawsuit over this incident. The lawsuit is being initiated by Cristina Wong of Los Angeles and claims violation of the California Unfair Competition Law. The suit has been filed as Wong et al. v. Dropbox Inc., No. 11-CV-3092-LB, (N.D. Cal. June 22, 2011). The suit is scheduled to be heard by U.S. Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler.[83]

See also

References

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  2. ^ "Dropbox". Windows Store. Retrieved March 27, 2017.
  3. ^ "Dropbox". APKMirror. Retrieved April 30, 2024.
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  8. ^ Web Beta for Japanese, German, Spanish, French
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  10. ^ "Official Dropbox Pricing Page". Retrieved April 22, 2010.
  11. ^ Official clients include 32- and 64-bit builds, and unofficial include the open source KDropbox, for the KDE desktop environment.
  12. ^ "How do I earn bonus space for referring friends to Dropbox?". The Dropbox Blog. Retrieved March 3, 2011.
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  14. ^ Chartier, David (February 5, 2009). "Box.net takes online file storage collaborative, social". Ars Technica. Retrieved April 22, 2010. As a quick primer, Box.net is fundamentally similar to Dropbox, Windows Live SkyDrive, Apple's iDisk, and a wealth of online file storage competitors.
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  40. ^ "What is Pack-Rat?". Dropbox. Retrieved October 24, 2009.
  41. ^ "Does Dropbox always upload/download the entire file any time a change is made?". Dropbox FAQ. Retrieved February 9, 2010. Before transferring a file, we compare the new file to the previous version and only send the piece of the file that changed.
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  45. ^ Drager, Dave (March 17, 2010). "DropBox : Review, Invites, and 7 Questions with the Founder". MakeUseOf.com. Retrieved May 7, 2010. We may not be on s3 forever, and will build our own store in addition, but for now this lets us focus on both the client software and the performance of the layer we've developed on top of s3.
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