Dropbox to OneDrive

[MarketingGuy]

Hi Everyone! I'm considering moving my advertising agency from Dropbox to OneDrive and I'm looking for advice.

Currently, we use Office 365, Dropbox for Business, and hosted Exchange 2016 through Sherweb. Everything is working well, so no complaints.

We all use Macs (I just got my M1 Max MacBook Pro) and work with large Adobe Creative Cloud (InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop) and video files in Dropbox as well as the typical MS Office files which are shared with everyone in the agency. So, one designer will open up an InDesign file, make edits, save and then later another designer will do the same if needed.

Not worried about cost -- genuinely looking to offer my team the best tools I can. I'm curious if moving to Microsoft 365, specifically OneDrive, would offer equal or better syncing performance and productivity tools. Since Dropbox doesn't have an Apple Silicon app (I know they made an announcement, but I read that Microsoft committed to releasing a universal OneDrive app by end of this year), that could also be a deciding factor (Dropbox uses 1GB of RAM regularly).

Any advice, experience, and insights is appreciated!

 

[Darth.Titan]

My company tried to move to OneDrive on a Microsoft 365 Business plan and I'll warn you, OneDrive works nothing like DropBox. OneDrive for Business doesn't even work anything like OneDrive Personal.

Make sure you try OneDrive out between a few employees for a while before making any final decisions.

Unless you have a Sharepoint expert on staff you're gonna have a bad time.

Of course that's just my experience.

 

[Tagbert]

OneDrive is also still not Apple Silicon native. It uses Rosetta II.

 

[MarketingGuy]

Thank you, I didn't realize it was different from personal OneDrive (which we do use for some clients). Sharepoint is definitely something I don't want to get involved in.

Yeah, I realize OneDrive uses Rosetta II, but I know they committed much earlier to move to Apple Silicon. Where Dropbox only now made the commitment. But, given Darth.Titan's experience, I'm going to stay away for now and just stick to what works.

 

[MacGizmo]

If it means anything in the decision process, both appear to work just fine under Rosetta on M1 Macs. That being said, Dropbox uses an abnormally high amount of CPU resources for what it is - but that goes back before the M1 was even released, and it has gotten a little better in the last year.

I like the way MS OneNote works with OneDrive, but that's easily replaceable on Dropbox with other apps as well. The one big thing in this arena is that Dropbox is familiar to an awful lot of people and businesses, where even enterprise-level companies with Office 365 subscriptions use Dropbox over OneDrive.

 

[MarketingGuy]

Thank you, MacGizmo. The reason we were considering switching is actually because all of our clients have moved away from Dropbox and we weren't sure if there was any benefit to a different service.

When we adopted Dropbox years ago, none of our clients had any type of cloud-based platform (they used internal network storage mounted as a drive when they used a VPN). However, over the past two or three years, clients have adopted Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, and Box. But, everyone was happy to share files in whichever platform we used (them and us).

In the past year, all of our Dropbox clients migrated to one of the other platforms and more than half of our clients now block any platform that they don't use. So, even moving to OneDrive would be an issue for many of the clients who don't currently use it.

Since Dropbox is working well for us internally, I think we'll just stick with it for now. Because, even sharing files outside of the agency, we just log into whichever platform they use from a browser and upload to that platform. Heck, we even have some clients that block all cloud storage platforms and we have to use whichever file transfer service they allow (e.g. WeTransfer). We can't even use our own sFTP servers because our clients won't allow their files to be placed on one (no idea why, most of what we work on is public facing advertising).

My only motivation is to provide the best tools for our internal team -- external sharing is a nightmare at this point that won't be resolved by switching platforms.

Unrelated to Cloud storage, we also had internal discussions about moving from Zoom to Teams. Most of our clients have migrated to Teams in the past few months. Let me tell you, our Zoom meetings work perfectly. With Teams, there are constant headaches (app crashes, audio issues, video freezes, etc.) -- not just on our side with Macs, but even with clients that use Windows. So, we're sticking with Zoom and if a client can't use Zoom anymore, then they setup the Teams call and we just have to deal with whatever happens in the first few minutes.

 

[styymy]

Also be aware that OneDrive will rename files and folders if they have any special (invalid) characters in the file name. So take note with how your file naming and project assignment naming might be affected.

See here:

OneDrive can rename files with invalid characters - Microsoft Support

Learn about when OneDrive renames files for you, when you'll need to rename files yourself, and how to avoid invalid characters errors in the future.

bit.ly

 

[Tagbert]

If it means anything in the decision process, both appear to work just fine under Rosetta on M1 Macs. That being said, Dropbox uses an abnormally high amount of CPU resources for what it is - but that goes back before the M1 was even released, and it has gotten a little better in the last year.

I like the way MS OneNote works with OneDrive, but that's easily replaceable on Dropbox with other apps as well. The one big thing in this arena is that Dropbox is familiar to an awful lot of people and businesses, where even enterprise-level companies with Office 365 subscriptions use Dropbox over OneDrive.

I wonder about why some report high CPU for Dropbox. I only see about 5% CPU. Of course it could be less but that doesn’t seem high enough to be a problem.

 

[frenetic]

In my experience, One Drive is pretty buggy. I have had to redownload and install it again several times, especially after system updates. But my laptop did not have the high CPU loads (might be because it is an intel one).

 

[Tagbert]

In my experience, One Drive is pretty buggy. I have had to redownload and install it again several times, especially after system updates. But my laptop did not have the high CPU loads (might be because it is an intel one).

I have trouble with OneDrive not wanting to sync some files. I sometimes have to fiddle with it to get it do do it. Dropbox has always been very stable.

All the same, I only use OneDrive at work as that is what we all use. At home I always used DropBox but will probably transition to iCloud more over time. ICloud isn’t necessarily better but it is just part of the OS. Right now, the main reason I keep dropbox is that 2 apps I need use some Dropbox APIs for dif-syncing of content content within files.

 

[MarketingGuy]

I really appreciate the feedback. It sounds like Dropbox is rock solid for most and that's been our experience as well. We have used OneDrive to share documents with clients and allow for all of us to edit at the same time. But, that's the extent of it. Not having files sync would be a huge issue for our workflow. Often times we have a tight deadline and one of the designers will make an update in InDesign, export a PDF and then let me know to grab it from Dropbox. Clearly, if it doesn't sync and I think it's updated, that would be a problem.

 

[styymy]

I've also used Box.com for mostly transferring large files and compressed archived production files to print and trade show vendors. I can't speak to file sync capabilities though since I have not used Box it in that way.

 

[Euroamerican]

Things are working great on on Dropbox? People happy?

You have nothing to gain from moving to OneDrive, IMHO, and a lot to lose.

 

[circatee]

I know this is an 'old' topic. But, I wanted to chime in.
From my experience of using DropBox, OneDrive and even Box, they all have their pros and cons.

A few years back, I purchased an E3 license from Microsoft 365 (formally Office 365), and thus wanted to move around 1TB of data, to OneDrive. Since I am already paying for the service via my E3 license. But, in my testing, prior to switching I felt that the upload to OneDrive was s l o w. No matter where I was connecting from (Office, Home, Pub, etc).

Even more so, I tested DropBox, OneDrive, Box and Google Drive. Currently all my data is with Google Drive. I know, I know...But, the sheer speed of upload and download is vasily superior to the others. A close second is Box. But, they are PRICEY!

Not that my post helped. Merely giving my experience...

 

[MarketingGuy]

Thanks everyone for providing your insights! The more I look into it, the more I'm convinced staying with Dropbox for now makes the most sense. I'm definitely not keen on moving to Google for anything. I have ready some good reviews about their speed, but their service lacks block-level syncing which would make it suboptimal for our usage.

We are going to let the cloud wars play out and revaluate in a few months or a year.