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Had It With the Dropbox App? Here Are Five Alternative Dropbox Clients
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I do not consider OneDrive a good alternative to Dropbox. I do have OneDrive, but decided to move to iCloud (from Dropbox). I do use OneDrive on my Business laptop (no other choice there), and am very happy that I do not have to use it personally.
I switched to using AWS S3's "Glacier Deep Archive" a couple of years ago as a "failsafe" backup solution. I pretty much just dump my stuff into it and let it sit there "forever". I store about 340GB of data (important files, documents, photos, and videos) in there and it costs me about £0.85/month. All of this data is mirrored on an external drive I have at home which I use for quick access. I use Nova (Panic's text editor which pretty much has the Transmit functionality built-in) to interface with the AWS service, then a lifecycle rule moves it to the cheapest storage class.
Sure, no fancy-pants interfaces or file previewing, and it requires some setup time, but it works an absolute treat. If I ever needed to recover the data (like if my house burned down and I lost my machines and disks) I would have that to fall back on.
If anyone is interested, I have a guide on how I did it on my website: Dropbox to AWS S3 guide
Sure, no fancy-pants interfaces or file previewing, and it requires some setup time, but it works an absolute treat. If I ever needed to recover the data (like if my house burned down and I lost my machines and disks) I would have that to fall back on.
If anyone is interested, I have a guide on how I did it on my website: Dropbox to AWS S3 guide
Many people don't need most of the dropbox features. I hung on to dropbox for the last couple of years because of the features I do use. Dropbox is still significantly more powerful than iCloud and OneDrive. But the impact of the client on my machines has finally pushed me away. In the end I didn't have enough of an advantage of the features because I didn't have the client installed everywhere anymore.
what makes pCloud special or different from DropBox or Box or GDrive or OneDrive and the rest
OneDrive is almost as good as iCloud is on macOS. Beats Google Drive, Deopbox, Box or any other client by miles. Been using it for 6 years now, before that I used GDrive and hated the experience as GDrive treats itself as an external drive on your Mac… yuck. Just do yourself a favour ppl and grab either OneDrive or Mega, they are both extremely good and run native on macOS with a deep Finder integration.
On Mac The Office 1tb can’t automatically sync your desktop + documents folder like it can on pc.
So you would have to manually manage every file and folder.
£1 per month is a nice price for online backup but how much storage you get?
plus there is this whole other issue of security, is it just sitting there online where any one can access or what? and why claier deep archive speifically?
I would love to drop Dropbox and use something else to save the money, but I'm with you - the features are too important to part with. Plus its a bit more OS agnostic, instead of being OneDrive or Google Drive. With the online only sync features, Transfer.... I just can't find anything that matches it.
OneDrive compared to Dropbox is a gigantic system hog, not sure why people are trying to recommend that over Dropbox.
Is Dropbox the best price? Heck no.
It theoretically has infinite storage, and I get billed get billed per gigabyte of storage used (something like £0.0018 per GB) on a monthly basis. So if I double the amount of storage utilised, I'll get billed for it accordingly. This is in stark contrast to Dropbox's 2TB for £9.99/month regardless of amount used up to 2TB.
The storage bucket is totally locked down to my own account and can't be accessed publicly. It can only be access through my AWS account, or through a specific API user I have set up for Nova / SFTP access.
Glacier Deep Archive is a storage "class" offered in the S3 system. I use it because it's the cheapest class on the service, and fits my needs perfectly. There are other classes available that have faster access times, but I don't need instant access to it, so I use the cheapest "cold storage" available.
This.
I've yet to find the client that does file versioning, online only sync and fast client-independent file sharing better than Dropbox.
Maybe it's few bucks more than others, but this is really not of concern when using it 24/7 for business purposes.
Probably there are people who are confused why you would pay for Office 365. I do, I use Office. But I would never bother with OneDrive on a Mac. Sync is poor, and it imposes Windows filename conventions.
I highly suggest sync.com. It’s 100% zero knowledge encrypted, and has unlimited storage options available. It’s also M1 optimized, as of 2.0.15. It works almost identical to Dropbox, but it actually works haha. (All the file synchronization features, versioning, integrations, etc that Dropbox has).
The other I’d recommend is syncthing. It’s M1 optimized as well. It’s not a cloud storage per-say, (but then again neither is half the list that MR provided……) but instead it syncs folders across two or more computers. Open sourced, encrypted, and as fast as your upload speed will allow. It continually mirrors the files and folded across both computers. I love it. Oh and it’s free.
The other I’d recommend is syncthing. It’s M1 optimized as well. It’s not a cloud storage per-say, (but then again neither is half the list that MR provided……) but instead it syncs folders across two or more computers. Open sourced, encrypted, and as fast as your upload speed will allow. It continually mirrors the files and folded across both computers. I love it. Oh and it’s free.
Dropbox refusing to allow me to pay for less than 1TB of cloud storage made them irrelevant to me. Even Apple offered a tier (priced-accordingly) for those who need less than 1TB. I'm starting to do a lot more backups now thankfully and am going to need 1TB soon (or more) anyway but Dropbox stubborn pricing tactics (I couldn't believe they kept that same pricing model for so many years) pushed me away. Also their web interface got significantly worse over the years and I had stopped using the app years ago for the aforementioned reasons.
It's weird when leadership and management of a company seemingly refuses to play nicely with a major OS/ecosystem. I get that they don't owe Apple anything but to not even try to make it easier?
It's weird when leadership and management of a company seemingly refuses to play nicely with a major OS/ecosystem. I get that they don't owe Apple anything but to not even try to make it easier?
I think it's matter of months for a M1 native app to be out. Keep in mind that % of Apple M1 users is way below significant considering entire base of Dropbox users.
There is no app needed?
Was not aware of that I can have a shared folder with someone outside my network.
First off thanks for doing this article @MacRumors - I was previously a DropBox Professional customer for over 7 years and I just quit along with my entire development team due to the M1 debacle. The CEOs ignorance has drove them directly into the dirt. Customers having to beg for features that should be standard, its a mess. If they would of put the effort in when the M1 developer kits were sent out over 2 years ago they would have M1 chip support already.. If I was on the board of this company I would be calling for the CEO to step down.
After some odd 15 years with Dropbox their awful attitude towards M1/modern finder integration made me ditch them for iCloud Drive. Could not be happier!
I originally had the app with the synced folder on my MBP where I kept a bunch of files I wanted both on my device and on the cloud (i.e: on Dropbox). That way if my MBP SSD was fried, everything in the dropbox folder would still be available there?
Of course I know this isn't enough (what if Dropbox is compromised; what if someone gets onto my MBP and deletes everything which syncs to the app; etc) but I figured these cloud services were one part of a sound data backup plan?