Now you can share links to individual files from any folder, so it’s redundant. To add to the complication, Dropbox users used to have a folder called Public, where they put files they wanted to share, but no longer. You can invite people to join a folder and you can also kick them off the folder or they can leave of their own accord (and choose to keep their copy of the folder’s data). Once you have understood it, you understand the model that sharing happens at the folder level. The fact that changes you make on your local machine change files and folders on someone else’s local machine an odd mental model to get your head around. Most people get this straight away, but tend to make the not-a-server mistake above when they first share folders with people. Move something out of Dropbox, and it’s not synced anymore. Or Is It?ĭropbox does not work like a server, but as a folder synced from the cloud version locally with your machine. It’s A Shared Folder, Locally Stored and Synced. As many people found out the hard way, this is not how Dropbox works. Drag a file from the server to your own folders and a local copy is made. In that model, the server content is the master. That’s the mental model many people have from either working in development teams or simply working in corporate environments or sharing files across a network. Most new Dropbox users, using it on a desktop machine, immediately think it is like a shared server. The biggest problem they have is that they keep shifting their mental models of how their service works and it has broken Dropbox and exposed many Dropbox Teams users to real privacy problems. As Dropbox develops and expands, decisions they have made early on are tying them, and their users, in knots.
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