Best cloud app for Mac and Windows

[GhostriderTC]

Hi have a Mac M1 (Ventura) which is my main development machine. I also have a Windows 11 desktop at home which I use as a backup and for all my windows dev. I am struggling to find a good fast cloud application (like iCloud or OneDrive) what works well on both platforms. I use iCloud for Mac which works really well, on Windows iCloud for Windows is really really slow (and I have a decent machine, i5 12-600k, 32GB RAM, 2TB NVME) and its taking days just to sync my library without even downloading the files. I tried OneDrive but has opposite results. On Windows it works really well, running on Mac its just a dog show (3 days to download the files (without the actual data before you click on Keep on Device) where on Windows took a few hours). I get that the platform it was mainly designed for is faster but which one can work well across both platforms? Maybe Dropbox or Google Drive or any other secure platforms?

 

[sgtaylor5]

Try filen.io. German and e2ee from the start. 10 GB for free, next step up is 200 GB. Pricing is reasonable. Sync is fast (block level) and provides many types of sync and backup including selective sync. Only downside is the service is a few years old.

 

[gilby101]

The "problem" as I see it is that the big providers (OneDrive, Dropbox and iCloud) all attempt to do some deep integration with operating system. And that is where the problems start. I don't know about Google.

You are more likely to get consistent cross platform results with other providers who don't attempt the deep integration and just synchronise a local folder with the cloud storage. Syncing a folder is all most of us want and can build workflows around that.

You need to decide what features are important for you and assess providers against that.

Try filen.io. German and e2ee from the start

Didn't know about Filen. Looks promising with e2ee and fast sync with a local folder. And relatively low price. I need to investigate how it goes with package files (e.g. Pages documents).

 

[johnkree]

I had the same problem and also asked this question some months ago. I was using iCloud for Windows and was very happy with it till it started to use 20% of CPU in idle and I couldn't stop it by anything else but killing the iCloud processes.
So I switched to Google Drive and it works mediocre at best.
The most annoying thing was, that Drive didn't sync to Windows from time to time. I had to manually stop and start the app to initiate syncing.

Onedrive is not usable on Mac with constant sync hickups. So there are two services left I will try now: pCloud and if this doesn't work, Dropbox.
I don't like Dropbox but it seems to be the best cloud for syncing.
Or maybe I will just switch to Syncthing.