Dropbox has no plans to improve reliability on cloud VMs

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Over the past several months I have observed that Dropbox periodically “forgets its identity” on cloud VMs, probably because of changing hardware signatures. I told them about this:

William Gross, Aug 14 04:34 AM:

For the past several months I’ve been running the Dropbox Windows client on Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure virtual machines. Sometimes, when I shut down and later restart one of these, Dropbox “forgets its identity” and asks me to log in again. After I do this, I get an email saying I’ve linked a “new” computer to my Dropbox account, and when I look at my account page (security tab), I see the VM’s computer name listed twice (once from before the restart and once from after). This is a bit annoying, but the major problem is that sometimes files that I’ve deleted while the VM was shut down end up reappearing in my Dropbox after the VM restarts and I log in again.

I suspect this problem has something to do with the “hardware signatures” of these VMs changing across restarts. Is there any way I can configure the Dropbox Windows client to keep the same computer identity even if a machine’s hardware signature changes?

Dropbox support told me they have no plans to address this:

Thanks for your e-mail. Sorry to hear about the difficulty you’ve been experiencing when running Dropbox on VMware. Unfortunately, if the machine’s hardware signature continuously changes, Dropbox will recognize this as a different device and therefore register this as a new linked computer. At this time, there’s not a workaround for this.

Disappointing. Does anybody know if any of the other file-sync services (OneDrive, Google Drive, etc.) have a solution for this?

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Well, Box is a no-go. Max file size per-file is 25MB. Our packages are about 24 MB.

I think we can get away with the $7 solution for MyGet. It’s absolutely the cleanest solution regarding the NuGet feed. I haven’t been able to find anything that would be even close to the level of ease as that.

Bill, for your desire to just drop a folder into NuGet and automatically distribute so the servers, I do have one idea. If you don’t mind the requirements, I think it’s very easy.

TL;DR: Install the Amazon Web Services CLI on your computer and the servers. Then, it’s a very simple command to sync a folder with Amazon S3.

Python is required to run the CLI program. When you want to update your folder, you can run the sync command once via a batch file. It’ll sync your folder to S3: files on S3 come down to your computer, files not on S3 go up to S3, newer files get updated. On the servers, we could install a scheduled task to run the sync command every X minutes.

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Ok, let’s go with MyGet for the package feed. As for the other files, having to set up Python and CLI and a scheduled task on every server seems like too much work, so I’m going to keep exploring.

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Are you just talking about a free version of Box? Box does like… video syncing for Healthcare. There’s no way they can have a 25MB limit.

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The blog post I read was stale: it used to be. Now it’s 250MB, for the free