On Fri, Oct 2, 2009 at 2:32 PM, Steve Alexander <[email protected]> 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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