Dropbox support

[ShadowChemosh]

Originally Posted by LazarX

ICloud is presumably a non-starter for it's relative unpopularity and expensive price for the capacity you get. It doesn't have that much of an appeal to Windows users.

Really? I use iCloud on Windows without issues. Seems to be smoother than Dropbox actually.

I really don't pay much attention to cost so that could be a thing. I think I am pay $1 per month for 50 gigs. Which includes a backup of my iPad and iPhone. Plus I store every Paizo PDF (30+ gigs) on the iCloud. This makes getting to Pathfinder really easy on any device (Windows, or an i device).

Shrug works for me...

[LazarX]

Originally Posted by ShadowChemosh

Really? I use iCloud on Windows without issues. Seems to be smoother than Dropbox actually.

I really don't pay much attention to cost so that could be a thing. I think I am pay $1 per month for 50 gigs. Which includes a backup of my iPad and iPhone. Plus I store every Paizo PDF (30+ gigs) on the iCloud. This makes getting to Pathfinder really easy on any device (Windows, or an i device).

Shrug works for me...

It's pretty much acknowledged though that ICloud does give you the less bang for the buck of all the cloud services there. Given that Herolab is operating on IOS devices and Macs (are they still relevant if you're not working in a creative studio?), ICloud support is sort of mandatory. Dropbox, however, has a far better cross-platform implementation. on a 50 gig data budget you're either running pretty full or not storing that many photos. I have the same allocation and I don't have 30 gigs free to store PDFS on it.

[ShadowChemosh]

Originally Posted by LazarX

It's pretty much acknowledged though that ICloud does give you the less bang for the buck of all the cloud services there. Given that Herolab is operating on IOS devices and Macs (are they still relevant if you're not working in a creative studio?), ICloud support is sort of mandatory. Dropbox, however, has a far better cross-platform implementation. on a 50 gig data budget you're either running pretty full or not storing that many photos. I have the same allocation and I don't have 30 gigs free to store PDFS on it.

True I am not a music or photo person so 50gigs easily works for me. I have more word documents than photos. LOL half my pictures I do have are of whiteboards.

I do have a full dropbox pro account also which gives me a 1tb which is nice for some of my "bigger" files I have to store. Looking at those prices seems your right that you get more space out of Dropbox for the cost.

Just was pointing out that you can get access to iCloud files from windows without issue. Cost is subjective to each person.....

[Azhrei]

<rant>

Originally Posted by LazarX

[...] and Macs (are they still relevant if you're not working in a creative studio?) [...]

You've not been in a modern corporate America data center in awhile, have you? Many of the companies that I provide training for (I can't name them, but let's just say "Fortune 100 firms") are no longer distributing Windows-based machines to employees but are instead providing MacBook Pros. Primarily, I think it's because of the Unix-based operating system, more than anything else, but I guess you'd have to ask their CIOs to be certain.

I use a MBP because I can get commercial apps for it (Adobe Acrobat Pro, TurboTax) that I can't get for Linux, otherwise my entire office would be Linux. Long live KDE!

Dropbox, however, has a far better cross-platform implementation.

They have a better implementation? And how do you know that? Have you seen their code?

What you probably meant is that they are more prevalent because they provide implementations for a wide range of operating systems. I remember SugarSync from way back when, and thinking that they were going to be great for me because they had a Linux implementation. Hah, what a joke that turned out to be!

Box.com has become popular within some enterprise environments as they are business-friendly with their server side encryption tools in which the customer keeps the key and Box can't see your data. (Think legal or financial firms. When a lawyer crosses the U.S. border, their laptop is subject to being confiscated by Customs just like yours. Now consider what kinds of information could be on that lawyer's laptop! So most of those companies recommend that employees store stuff in the cloud and clear local laptop caches before passing through Customs. But where can you store it that it's actually safe?)

on a 50 gig data budget you're either running pretty full or not storing that many photos. I have the same allocation and I don't have 30 gigs free to store PDFS on it.

I don't store photos in the cloud. Photos are best viewed when there's some kind of management tool that organizes access to them. Whether that's Flickr or some other tool doesn't really matter, but dumping them in a directory in DropBox is kinda insane. My wife likes iCloud's "photo stream", but for me? Meh.

I use DB primarily for things that I will want to share with others.

I could use Google Drive but I don't like Google's data invasion policies so I use them for very little nowadays. Their slogan used to be "do no evil", but I think now they're more in the "do no evil -- that you can't get away with!" camp. Unfortunately, I really like Waze. I wish there was another crowd-sourced GPS-based navigation app available now that Google owns Waze.

My own web hosting provider supports WebDAV (as I mentioned early in this thread) and I really should be taking advantage of that!

Anyway, I wanted to clarify my take on some of your assertions. Your mileage may vary. Standard disclaimers apply. A rolling stone gathers no moss. And so on...
</rant>

[LazarX]

I don't store drop photos in a Icloud directory, It's just that I take a lot of photos with my iPhone which will as a consequence archive them on ICloud. It not surprisingly is still the cloud service that works best with my IPhone. It's also the most expensive per gig by far.

[Azhrei]

Originally Posted by LazarX

It's also the most expensive per gig by far.

Edit:

I just checked. Apple charges $10/month for 2TB of storage (in the US). Dropbox charges $10/month for 1TB of storage (and $15/month for 2TB using their "Dropbox for Business" plan). Dropbox has discounts for yearly payments ($8.25/month and $12.50/month, respectively).

Apple has clearly revised their pricing downward recently. Dropbox includes a few features that iCloud does not (like versioned files going back 30 days, or 120 days for their Business tier).

Originally Posted by My previous post

+1

Amen to that!!

(Although IIRC, they've come to realize that and there's supposed to be a price drop coming. Or not. )

[Weissrolf]

The Dropbox desktop application is somewhat more advanced than the other popular cloud storage solutions. It offer:

- Block level (delta) synchronization methods, while the likes of iCloud, Onedrive and Google Drive transfer full files even when only a single byte has changed.
- Local synchronization over LAN, which is useful if you are using the same cloud files on multiple local computers, especially many small ones.
- Multiple upload threads, which can make more use of your full upload bandwidth and thus gets data quicker to the cloud server.
- File hashes that identify files that are already on Dropbox servers and thus do not need to be re-uploaded. I mean to remember that this even works for identical files that other users already uploaded from different locations.
- Somewhat better optimized CPU usage for indexing files, also likely to index (and upload) many small files quicker than the other options when I last tested them against each other.

All that being said, Hero Lab only needs a few MB of storage, roughly 100 kb per Hero Lab profile. So it will fit into any free cloud storage plan anyway.

[Ualaa]

I've been using the 1TB Dropbox option.

I have all of my Hero Lab files and everything D&D related in their respective folders. Being able to open something on the laptop (which I take with me to our host's house) for the playing of the games, while working on the adventure at home on the desktop, and having everything stay in sync is great.

Exclusively for HL purposes, 1 TB is overkill, but the price is decent for the storage and my total data use is about 75% of the TB. My D&D folder is only 52.9 GB of that TB though.

[Yerdiss]

Originally Posted by BJ

It is just something we can no longer make use of due to their changes. Square peg, round hole.

I don't know any details of why this is a case of "square peg, round hole", but since I highly value the Dropbox functionality in Hero Lab, I would like to try to assist where I can.

If (one of the) problem(s) is the change from Objective-C to Swift, maybe this might help: Tim Johnsen wrote an Objective-C library for Dropbox api v2 interaction, that he has made open-source. (Licence is BSD 3-clause "New" or "Revised" License, so commercial use is allowed.)

Here are links to a blog covering the issue, and to the library download page.

Should other technical issues exist that make migration from v1 to v2 difficult for you, I'd be interested in the more technical details of what the issues are. Provided that's information you can publish publicly.

[Colen]

The problem is that the old Dropbox SDK was too good. You asked it "Give me file X" and it would check to see if it had the newest version of file X already downloaded - if not, it would download and cache it, unless you had no internet connection, in which case it would just give you the version it had cached previously. If two files were edited in different places at the same time, it would do conflict resolution to the best of its ability; if you made changes to a file, it would upload those changes to the right place as soon as it could. It's essentially a "black box" that you can put files into and take files out of, and everything Just Works, whether you're online or offline.

The new Dropbox API, on the other hand, has much simpler methods like:

* Upload file
* Download file
* Get list of files

And that's it. All of the "smarts" that made the old SDK so easy to use are gone. To migrate to the new API, we'd need to re-implement all the clever things the old SDK did. We'd need to add our own caching, for example, because the new API doesn't do any of that - it just lets you upload and download files, and you're responsible for any caching yourself.

The old and new versions operate at very different levels of granularity - I'm sure the new version is much more powerful and can do X, Y and Z specific things the old version couldn't, but it doesn't implement the critical stuff that most dropbox users need - that is, seamless sync and file use, whether you're online or offline. If they don't implement that, then we have to, and that's code that is writable, but time-consuming and tricky to get correct.

Now, obviously it would be possible for us to re-implement what the old SDK does, or work on an alternate solution - for example, iOS now has various other ways of accessing files stored by cloud providers that didn't exist when we added the dropbox sync capabilities (the "document picker", for example, and I believe there's something new being added in iOS 11 as well).

However, we have various major projects (*cough* Hero Lab Online *cough*) that are taking up 100% of my coding time, and so we just don't have the time we need to spend adding a new sync solution at the moment - that time is 100% booked on other projects which mustn't fall behind.

Hope this helps explain things!