A farewell to clones? China’s first Dropbox copycat closes

China’s first major Dropbox clone was created by Chinese web company Shanda back in 2010. Shanda was previously best known for its e-book store and online gaming, but with the Shanda Everbox file storage service the company started to push into cloud-oriented apps. But Shanda has now announced that Everbox is shutting down, effective March 1st.

A notice on the Everbox site suggests that users migrate their data this month before the closure deadline. New registrations, as well as new uploads for current users, have been ceased. The announcement says that the cloud storage capabilities will be “incorporated into the company’s other products.” So Shanda remains in the cloud business, but seems to have decided that a dedicated online file storage hub is not a good idea. That’s bad news for users of Everbox, who now have just a month to download and save their material.

Everbox has apps for Windows and Mac, plus iOS and Android. But its iPhone app lacked development, and was not updated after November 2011.

The past year saw a surge in competing consumer cloud services, with a major new service from top search engine Baidu joining the fray last March, and that now has 30-million users. Plus there are rival file backup and sync services from Tencent, Kingsoft, Huawei, as well as startup offerings from Kanbox and Yun.io.

Shanda also runs an Evernote-esque service called Mknote, which is China’s largest notes syncing app in terms of users. Shanda is looking to spin off its e-book and cloud service division with a separate US IPO, called Shanda Cloudary, which is thought to be on track for an investor roadshow this Spring.

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This article by Steven Millward originally appeared on Tech in Asia, a Burn Media publishing partner.