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Dropbox Pro Increases Storage Capacity, Leaves Price Alone

By - Source: Tom's Hardware US | B 13 comments

What's great about Dropbox is that users can quickly share files with smartphones, tablets, notebooks and desktop PCs. Gone is the need to whip out a USB cable to pass a file from one device to another. Now we have a number of services that will gladly store our family photos and documents, including Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Box and Dropbox.

Up until today, Dropbox provided Dropbox Pro users with 100 GB for $9.99 per month. That may sound like plenty of storage in theory, but it's really not when you're backing up loads of videos and/or images -- never mind a complete system backup. Perhaps this is why Dropbox -- and other storage services for that matter -- has decided to increase the storage capacity while leaving the price of the service unchanged, offering subscribers 1 TB of storage for $9.99 per month.

"We don't want you to worry about choosing the right plan or having enough space," the Dropbox blog said. "So today, we're simplifying Dropbox Pro to a single plan that stays at $9.99/month, but now comes with 1 TB (1,000 GB) of space."

The news shouldn't be surprising given that Google offers the same price tag for 1 TB of storage. Microsoft's OneDrive for Business charges $2.50 per user per month for 1 TB of space, whereas the consumer version charges $3.99 per month for 200 GB. Those with an Office 365 subscription also receive 1 TB per person up to 5 TB per household. What Microsoft doesn't provide consumers is a $9.99 subscription plan for 1 TB, but that will likely change.

In addition to the new subscription plan, Dropbox Pro now features new sharing controls. These include passwords for shared links, expirations for shared links, and view-only permissions for shared folders. The company has also introduced Remote Wipe, a feature that will let you remove Dropbox files on a device that is lost or stolen.

Dropbox offers three plans: Basic, Pro and Business. The Basic plan starts customers off with 2 GB, and it's up to their referred friends to jack up the storage capacity by signing up. Dropbox for Business has all the features of the Pro service, plus a few extra features for $15 per user per month.

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  • 0 Hide
    DelightfulDucklings , August 27, 2014 7:06 PM
    Good to see them being competitive. My problem with Dropbox is that I always get terrible upload speeds to it so I barely use it aside from stuff I really need to backup
  • 0 Hide
    crumpet , August 27, 2014 10:05 PM
    Quote:
    Good to see them being competitive. My problem with Dropbox is that I always get terrible upload speeds to it so I barely use it aside from stuff I really need to backup


    Agreed, on an average connection it can take hours for a few videos.
    Still great service and perfect for anything pictures and below
  • 1 Hide
    icemunk , August 28, 2014 3:47 AM
    $10 a month is too pricey. Dropbox should offer something like $1 or $2 a month for 100 or 200GB.
  • Add your comment Display all 13 comments.
  • 2 Hide
    teddy1234 , August 28, 2014 3:50 AM
    cloud storage is and will be useless until american broadband stops selling 1998 speeds... My timewarner cable still only offers a max of 1 meg uploads, which means uploads of videos/picture backups can take hours/days.

    As for mobile use, the limited data plans just about every carrier sells now a days leaves what you put in the cloud there as downloading something like a video would put you over your data limit in no time.....
  • 0 Hide
    ET3D , August 28, 2014 6:32 AM
    "What Microsoft doesn't provide consumers is a $9.99 subscription plan for 1 TB, but that will likely change."

    Why would Microsoft provide a $9.99 1TB subscription plan when it offers for that price Office for up to 5 users plus 1TB each? Plus it offers Office + 1TB for one user for $6.99.
  • 0 Hide
    icemunk , August 28, 2014 8:04 AM
    Quote:
    cloud storage is and will be useless until american broadband stops selling 1998 speeds... My timewarner cable still only offers a max of 1 meg uploads, which means uploads of videos/picture backups can take hours/days.

    As for mobile use, the limited data plans just about every carrier sells now a days leaves what you put in the cloud there as downloading something like a video would put you over your data limit in no time.....


    Yeah, mobile data is a racket and carriers charge far too much for it.The real use I find for my dropbox is the simple ability to take pictures on my smartphone, and have them auto-upload to my dropbox. The 10GB I have for free at the moment is plenty fine for that. If they offered a dirt cheap plan for $1 or $2 a month for 200 gigabytes or something, I may consider it, but at the moment I see no use for huge amounts of cloud storage.
  • 0 Hide
    rohitbaran , August 28, 2014 10:19 AM
    Dropbox is much behind in terms of free space compared to copy. I switched to copy a while back and have 55 GB free space.
  • 0 Hide
    fmaxwell , August 30, 2014 10:53 PM
    One terabyte is far too small to do a system backup for my primary workstation (even if the speed magically became fast enough, say gigabit per second or higher) and far bigger than I need to share files, photos, music, documents, etc. between systems and devices. I'm just not seeing the appeal.

  • 1 Hide
    christinebcw , August 31, 2014 11:29 AM
    They need to pave Rural America with greater broadband speeds. Or ANY broadband speeds, first.
  • 0 Hide
    fmaxwell , August 31, 2014 12:51 PM
    Quote:
    They need to pave Rural America with greater broadband speeds. Or ANY broadband speeds, first.

    Similar to the the Rural Electrification Act of 1935, which provided federal loans for the installation of electrical distribution systems to serve rural areas of the United States? But that was in the days before the Tea Party and the Ayn Rand libertarians who fight any government effort to improve the lives of U.S. citizens. Were there be a Rural Broadband Act of 2014, many on the right would fight it tooth and nail, claiming that the Founding Fathers never intended for the federal government to be involved in broadband initiatives and that if we just got rid of all government regulation of cable and telephone companies, the free market would magically fix everything.
  • 0 Hide
    christinebcw , August 31, 2014 1:00 PM
    Fiber has been stretched all across the USA already - that was 1996-1999. "Every school, law enforcement office, courthouse, hospital or clinic that receives a federal dollar has access to the national fiber network." So all those bar ditches were dug up and colorful cables were spread all over. Of course, Congress kept from doing connections, however, divvying those up to the broadband providers. We've paid for the greatest part and get little or no service. The monopolies will spend little and rake it all in.
  • 0 Hide
    fmaxwell , August 31, 2014 1:18 PM
    Quote:
    Fiber has been stretched all across the USA already - that was 1996-1999.

    Most of it is "dark fiber," left dormant because it's not viewed as profitable by the oligopolies to light it up.

    Quote:
    Of course, Congress kept from doing connections, however, divvying those up to the broadband providers. We've paid for the greatest part and get little or no service. The monopolies will spend little and rake it all in.

    Welcome to the wonderful effects of lobbying. We've even seen big broadband Internet providers sue communities that try to provide free WiFi. We need to start electing people who view the role of government as improving the lives of U.S. citizens rather than enriching large corporations. That's what the Rural Electrification Act of 1935 did -- improve the lives of U.S. citizens.
  • 0 Hide
    christinebcw , August 31, 2014 4:53 PM
    Here, here. And there's a need for getting rid of the lobbyists and bribe-ists who've been so successful in buying all of these. What's so odd is to read something like Tuchman's THE PROUD TOWER (1870s to 1914) and see so many of today's afflictions were common then, too. It just never goes away. Where's a nuclear winter when we really need one?!!

    Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

    Do people believe that DropBox is now THE cloud-drive provider of the future? (We've been hearing that for at least a decade from other companies, too.) These indie entrants (like DropBox instead of Microsoft or Google or Apple) may not have the offset revenues for any tidal fluctuations in publicity, popularity or actual sign-up revenue.

    But I suspect these are attractive simply because they're not part of the monopolies, as if Microsoft could steal our files and refuse to give them back ("What did you expect? To get something for free? WHY?!!").
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