I’m working on a consulting project for Dropbox to evaluate their developer platform and APIs. As a long time Roon user I’d love to hear from the Roon development team on any feedback they have on creating & maintaining the Dropbox integration.
Also I’d love to hear from Roon users. What would you like out of the Dropbox // Roon integration that you don’t get today?
I would like it wrapped up in a sack with a brick and dropped in the middle of the lake. And because of Dropbox, not Roon.
I installed Dropbox on a Windows machine just to facilitate some Roon support question. Now Dropbox pops up a modal dialog box every time I plug in she external storage, like a camera SD card, asking me if I want to upload the contents to Dropbox (NO, I’ve got terabytes of photos, I’ll take care of my own storage thank you). I never asked it to do that. The user interface for telling it not to do that doesn’t work. I uninstalled Dropbox, but the pop up still comes up. I’m going to have to do troubleshooting to reclaim my computer from a minor utility. Gaah!
I used the application for backup from my PC to a NUC with the Rock Install and it worked seamlessly. I was anxious because of the warnings noted in the Rock installation guide but it was a breeze. I also use Dropbox as a cloud storage option for day to day stuff. I think it is excellent application which has features that makes my life easier compared to the old USB sticks.
I haven’t had a single problem with using Dropbox as a backup destination for my Roon database.
Beyond Roon, I’ve used Dropbox pretty extensively for backup/sync/file transfer, and it’s never caused any problems for me. I’ve recently been through an episode where Apple had to completely rebuild my iCloud Drive because of an Apple server-side problem. Diagnosing and resolving the issue took weeks of calendar time and hours of phone calls to resolve. Apple support was attentive and astute, once I was “escalated” to the appropriate level, but I’ve never experienced anything remotely like that with Dropbox (knock on wood).
I’ve had problems with the Dropbox integration where I had a album cover that was backed up and could not be restored due to copyright violation! When asked, they said it was only via the Dropbox API that they did this check and the Dropbox app would have no issue with retrieving this file. Lame and makes the Dropbox integration unreliable.
Also if you had less then 1tb music, I would have loved to upload it to Dropbox and create a personal streaming service. Given the copyright issue above, I’m sure this isn’t going to fly.
We’ve thought about automatically obfuscating the files, but haven’t gotten to solving that problem yet.
Thanks for the feedback!
@danny - one thing I’m curious about is why Roon uses a “Full Dropbox” permission level instead of an “App Folder”? An “App Folder” level permission would be more secure (a code bug couldn’t affect any non-Roon files). It seems most app integrations do use “Full Dropbox” permissions, so you guys aren’t alone!
Thanks
Generally Dropbox is solid for me, i use it for file sharing. From Roon it was pretty seamless for me as I already had in installed (mac). Some programs I had in the past, maybe a to do list or something, Dropbox sync would corrupt the files. You had to close the app and then manually sync, but that was an isolated case.
From a business perspective, we don’t use Dropbox because there is no way of “check out” to reserve a file for editing by one user to prevent collisions. (or no co-editing which would be even better!).