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Had It With the Dropbox App? Here Are Five Alternative Dropbox Clients
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I literally have it installed on my Mac but I disabled it from running automatically because it hogs way too many resources, and it does take forever to sync up files to the cloud or to other devices. With SyncThing it's automatic and very fast, as fast as my upload speed allows. (The other computer is physically located in another state, so not on my local wifi). And again, like in the article, it bugs me that the devs didn't put Apple Silicon (aka the literal future of Macs) a priority. They almost didn't even do it at all until the internet pressured them into doing it. Now it's "on their radar" to get implemented.
Why are you defending dropbox so hard? haha what blackmail do they have against you forcing you to be in their corner this hard?
I’m surprised so many people think Dropbox is slow at syncing. Last night I put 5 gigs of video in a folder and it uploaded much faster than I expected. I do recall at least twice when it didn’t sync requiring me to restart the app, but otherwise it has been stable. My only gripe is that I have to purge a folder manually when I do selective uploading to save space on my hard drive.
I remember reading somewhere when Steve Jobs dropped by DropBox offices to negotiate a sale and the founders were adamant about not bending to Steve's reality distortion field. Steve apparently tried to talk them down with "What you have is not a product, but just a feature".
Sure enough, time passes by and we have that feature called iCloud Drive. I use it and love it.
Sure enough, time passes by and we have that feature called iCloud Drive. I use it and love it.
I think if I was to restore the full amount (assuming 320GB and 50,000 objects), it would be around £8.75. Retrieval time is specified as "within 12 hours" so they should be available within half a day of being requested. There are expedited requests available but they'll cost more money.
I really use the service as a disaster recovery option, like in the worst case where my live machine and local backup disks lost. If you want to quickly access individual files, or store files with short lifetimes (like less than 180 days), my solution won't be appropriate for you.
I hate them as much I hate every greedy major company, be it Apple, Google, Microsoft, Dropbox or whatever. I'm really platform/client agnostic and just want to have job done and work with tools that meet my demands. I'm using Dropbox from the day one, and it's been working without major glitches all the time. Maybe it depends on particular configuration and/or bandwidth, but I've never seen it get in the way as major resource hog or having slow speeds.
Like others have already posted, Dropbox have options which other clients simply lack. Versioning, selective sync, reliability, simple sharing even with people who don't have DB account, OS independent seamless syncing across the devices...
I've tried iCloud but their transfer speeds are beyond pathetic, clumsy web interface, poor syncing. Tried Google Drive and had to wait everytime for a few gigs file to be zipped for download, had to manually delete every file from account because they don't allow deleting all at once (! - support told me it's for my own security lol), tried now defunct Copy.com, advertised as safe and reliable because it's from Barracuda Networks, and it went down after several years... the only major thing that I didn't tried is OneDrive, but it doesn't look promising according to many folks over here.
Bottom line:
1. Dropbox have features other clients lack, and is reliable
2. I've never had problems with its transfer speeds or app behavior systemwise.
3. It falls within common price range, maybe buck or two more for the monthly plan I use.
Your screenshot shows the client using nearly 500mb of RAM... Microsoft Teams on my machine is using 750MB, and it's a nasty, bloated PWA client. A good quality native app (in this case, Nova) is using 175MB with a few documents open.
You can configure iCloud Drive to do a similar selective sync thing, but it would be limited to a directory rather than an individual object. OneDrive (which I use for work) works fine for me, it's lightweight and quick, even for large >1GB objects.
So far, Dropbox has had the least problems for me. iCloud drive would randomly stop working and lose files sometimes, and it’s waaaay slower than Dropbox, several hours for large files that dropbox finishes in minutes. OneDrive would replace files with older versions and I had a lot of sync issues with the larger >1GB files. Creative Cloud would lose files and also replace files with older versions of themselves. Sometimes it would just stop working and need to be reinstalled. PeeCloud was just awful and unreliable.
For me, Dropbox has been the only robust and reliable cloud service out there. Yes, their attitude is questionable at times, but it gets the job done.
Of course, your mileage will vary depending on your distance to a given service’s servers.
For me, Dropbox has been the only robust and reliable cloud service out there. Yes, their attitude is questionable at times, but it gets the job done.
Of course, your mileage will vary depending on your distance to a given service’s servers.
I left dropbox due to its troublesome client (resource hog) in Mac few years ago, move to pCloud (lifetime). Couldn’t be happier. It has its own “block level” sync patent - similar with Dropbox’s one which increase sync time significantly. Just check again its memory footprint, which is less than 100mb
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Fair enough, if it works for you it works for you. If you weren’t on Linux I would say you should try checking out sync.com (Like in my original post) but they’re on windows and Mac only at the moment. If you think 500MB of RAM is lightweight then I probably won’t be able to convince you otherwise anyways haha. If you’re fine with Dropbox then you’re fine with Dropbox. Have a good rest of your day
nice work around I am impressed. £24 a year for 1TB surely beats $10 a month
Fair enough, if it works for you it works for you. If you weren’t on Linux I would say you should try checking out sync.com (Like in my original post) but they’re on windows and Mac only at the moment. If you think 500MB of RAM is lightweight then I probably won’t be able to convince you otherwise anyways haha. If you’re fine with Dropbox then you’re fine with Dropbox. Have a good rest of your day
No problem. I know sync.com, but as I said, I've had it with Copy.com. Bigger free storage, better referrals, better pricing options, reliable company... and suddenly it went out of business. So no playing around with new stuff (and there are plenty) for me, at least until Dropbox becomes utter ****, or some of the competitors suddenly get features I need.
500MB od RAM is only a relative number, I usually fire up PS, AI and some other stuff in addition, and it very rarely swaps. Maybe there would be an issue with 4 gigs, but today machines usually have it much more.
Dropbox is very fast per file. It is very slow with many files. The system overhead is also big with many files, much bigger than with iCloud at least. OneDrive is worse than Dropbox with many files.
Another massive feature - sharing a file, and having the client comment on it - for example sending a video for a project and they can recommend edits as they are watching and it attaches to the timeline.
I’ve got literally thousands of files in Dropbox. Are you referring to moving hundreds of files at once being slow? I would think that would be a rare scenario for most users. I’m often moving 10-20 files that are large video files, and they upload quickly. iCloud doesn’t support streaming, so it’s not an option for me (also my employer blocks iCloud Drive on our work phones, which I use for a large portion of the day).
I had over 1 million files in Dropbox. Moving 10-20 files was very fast, even with the over 1 million files I had. But moving a folder with hundreds of files took significant time to resynchronise. It did not matter if I made the changes in the website or in a client. The clients on my various machines took significant time to resync the changed locations. When making the changes using a client, dropbox on that client had a significant impact on that machine's performance until the changes were synced. It did not appear that moves caused new uploads, it appeared to be catalog updates.
When I started with Dropbox, it seemed to work significantly better. It appears to me that, as new functions were introduced, the client took a hit because of having to do more work. But I could be wrong. On one of my laptops (a Windows laptop) my laptop felt faster right after uninstalling Dropbox. This does make sense as the Dropbox client seems to always use CPU.