I have shifted to mostly using Mega instead of Dropbox. It is a similar service, but gives you 20gb free instead of the 2gb that Dropbox gives. I just now tried a team collection on it, and it seems to work for that. Has anyone else tried Mega? You can sign up for a free account at mega.io
I have been using Mega for a while now, but am just now trying it with Bloom team collections.
–Loren Hawthorne
Hi,
Bloom Team Collections only works with Dropbox and LAN. You will run into problems with any other service.
Sorry about that!
I can understand you have limited time to support different platforms, but has anyone actually tried Mega? It works much like Dropbox.
The thing is, it doesn’t matter how close Mega is. Bloom has 4 places in its code that looks for Dropbox files and processes, by name. If you have remnants of Dropbox around on your machine, it may be that this is why Mega appears to work.
Thanks, Jon. I suppose it is best to go mainstream and not try to push into the almost works zone.
In the long run, we either need Bloom to have its own invisible cloud-sync service, or be able to say “bring your own cloud-sync service”. We have an idea of how we might be able to get to that point by augmenting generic cloud sync services with a data-integrity layer that we would build.
When you say “works much like Dropbox” do you mean for the user of the website and apps, or a developer using an API to talk to the cloud service? I have used rclone to move personal data around, and I found it informative how many differences in cloud storage systems it has to deal with.
Just works about the same for the end user. I’m not much of a programmer.
That would be great. With only 2GB of free storage, it is easy to max out the free account with Dropbox, and their beginning paid level is kind of pricey. They don’t have a 100GB for $2 a month option, like some of the other service. The 20GB that I get from Mega is so far being enough, and I use it quite a lot, especially for passing files between my Windows machine and my Ubuntu computer.
By the way, the Bloom dev team pays around US$200/year for a Dropbox six-person “family” plan that gets you 2TB. We have found no wording that limits you to a certain set of relationships or activities; rather, they don’t offer all the same features that a business would want. Bloom doesn’t use those features. We aren’t an actual book-producing team, so this isn’t exactly an endorsement from experience.
Funny no one mentions spending $100 per year to Microsoft to get 6 licenses of Office 365, plus 6 TB of online storage on OneDrive.
Any reason that this is not a good option? (Not for Bloom at this point, but if Bloom ever goes with an abstraction layer so the online storage location is separated from the internal code.)
Actually Bloom has at least one abstraction layer designed to make it possible to support different backends for team collections. This helps but doesn’t make it trivial to implement a new backend. Each file sharing system has slightly different capabilities.
I used Office 365 for a year on their family plan that allows 6 seats, but it looked to me like it was supposed to be for personal use only, not business use, so it seemed like what I needed if for did not qualify, so I did not renew. I now pay $2 per month for 100gb to not have to fight them wanting to put a lot of my Windows documents in OneDrive.