ubuntuone-users team mailing list archive

[Natan Yellin <aantny@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Oct 2, 2009 at 3:23 PM, HAORANSKY <haoransky@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Sorry to interrupt and squeeze in here,[?]:
> As of what I think about the issue, just keep most recent revisions is
> fine, and as Elliot state above, sharing folder could work, and it's
> actually better than a group account(it can keep track of which group member
> changed which file).

Out of curiosity, do you think that there is any value to letting users mark
revisions which they care about and want to be saved forever? I'd also be
curious to know how many people would like documents to /always/ be
autosaved across the desktop.

>
> Can you show us what to expect in the near future or what is on the
> todo-list so we can avoid giving out redundant ideas?[?]
>
Sorry, you'll have to ask Eliot about that. I'm just a student who isn't
affiliated with Ubuntu One or Canonical in any way.

Regards,
Natan

>
> On Fri, Oct 2, 2009 at 8:47 AM, Natan Yellin <aantny@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Oct 2, 2009 at 2:32 PM, Steve Alexander <steve@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>  Yes, implementing a "Human" DCVS isn't easy. Dropbox, Apple's Time
>>>> Machine, and several other projects have all /tried/ to to do so, but as far
>>>> as I can tell they haven't succeeded. (It's gotten to the point where
>>>> Dropbox decided that it just wasn't worth keeping file-revisions and now
>>>> deletes revisions more than one month old. I haven't heard anyone complain,
>>>> so I doubt that the feature was at all popular.) Both Dropbox and Time
>>>> Machine remember small one-line edits that no one cares about. Its been
>>>> impossible to create a "Human" GUI for viewing revisions because there are
>>>> just too darn many revisions to be viewed.
>>>>
>>>
>>> I'm sure that Dropbox want to keep their user interfaces simple and
>>> intuitive, and this will be part of why their system works like this.
>>> There's an economic driver for this too, and I think this is very
>>> significant.
>>>
>>> Dropbox wants to sell 50GB of file storage at $10 per month.  That's a
>>> flat rate for a bunch of storage.
>>>
>>> They will be banking on most of their customers using only a fraction of
>>> the full amount of available storage, because Dropbox is a cloud-based
>>> service using Amazon S3, and so they will pay for only what users use, not
>>> the full amount they are offering to users.
>>>
>>> There's a problem with this approach if they are also offering to keep
>>> revisions indefinitely, or just remove revisions when the quota gets full.
>>>  The problem is, over time, most users will be using the full 50GB. part for
>>> "live" data and the rest for historical revisions.
>>>
>>> It costs Dropbox about the same amount to store a historical revision as
>>> it costs to store current revision of some files.  But the value to the user
>>> is totally different.  So, they will want keep only the most valuable
>>> revisions, and remove the rest.  I guess that's why they've come up with
>>> this particular policy of removing older revisions automatically.
>>>
>> Exactly. My point wasn't that it makes economic sense to keep all
>> revisions (it doesn't, as you pointed out) but rather that users don't even
>> /want/ to keep all revisions. However, by contrast, keeping specific
>> revisions (marked by users) is both cheep and useful.
>>
>> You have a good point that it also makes sense to keep recent revisions.
>> People can use those in case they accidentally delete/change something they
>> need.
>>
>> Natan
>>
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>