Had It With the Dropbox App? Here Are Five Alternative Dropbox Clients

[luckman212]

I have about 600 GB in Dropbox, near 400.000 files. A couple of days ago I tested some of those:

• Maestral: Used 100% one CPU, selected only two folders to sync, only one was synchronised.
• CloudMounter: a mess with file dates, plus a lot of sync issues when uploading heavy files.
• Strongsync: Evaluated, never got a full sync.
• Mountain Duck behave similar as Maestral. I don't remember what did wrong, but failed to do some operations losing the file changes.

I think Dropbox is bad, but other those third party tools are worse when you want real hard job done. Any cloud can manage 10.000 files. Problems happens when you have it tens of thousands, even iCloud Drive.

Nice mini-review. I agree about the performance problems with 1000's of files. It's almost like the companies build these apps hoping people will never really use them to store much of anything.

 

[polyphenol]

Am currently trying Maestral.

But am perplexed by Dropbox's latest update - to terms and conditions - which includes this:

We’re constantly looking for ways to improve the Dropbox experience and to ensure that our policies explain how our services work. So we’re letting you know about a few updates to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Here’s a summary of the key changes:

Terms of Service. We’ve clarified that Dropbox may only be used by those over 13 in the United States, and 16 outside of the United States. We’ve also made updates to our dispute resolution terms.

Can anyone explain how this improves the Dropbox experience? Most particularly the split age limit depending on location?

And does this cover people using shared links to download from Dropbox?

 

[Spectrum]

This article is weird...

I've been using Dropbox for a decade across 3-4 Macs. I find it indispensable. 1.5 TB of data. I have a team that all use it to sync and share. I am not aware of any complaints/issues from any user.

Yes, initial syncing can take quite a bit of CPU time (if a lot of files). But once done, iterative syncs are fast and painless.

The idea of trusting/using a third-party app to access/handle file syncs seems like an absolutely crazy proposition!

 

[swealpha]

Can someone please recommend a good working syncapp for Dropbox that is FAST and works with MacOS El Capitan?
(Ofcourse the app-creator need to be trustwhorthy).

I have 100.000 files and over 70GB.

My connection speed is rated to 500Mbit (Europe)!!

Thank you!

 

[Alan Wynn]

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 do not think that cost includes the transfer cost with is about $0.09 per GB, so about $28.80 with U.S. pricing. I would look at Wasabi ($0.0059 a GB per month, no transfer cost and the same speed as fast S3) or IDrive e2 ($0.0044 a GB per month with no transfer costs). Both have some other restrictions, but are pretty interesting.

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.

IDrive e2 might work in that case, probably a bit better than Wasabi.

 

[rfog]

Well, after some testing, I'm surprised about the solution that is working to me: if you have a Synology NAS, Synology Drive works perfect with millions of files and on-demand files. No issues opening cloud-only files, no issues copying, moving, deleting, adding (and it is fast adding files and giving priority to just-modified files).

The only handicap is you must have a Synology NAS with enough memory to handle your amount of files, and normally a cache SSD disk. My current NAS is a DS1019+ with 8GB of RAM and 1TB of SSD cache and I have about 1 million shared files, apart of some millions not shared.

 

[Solve4X]

I move a tiny file from my Macbook to the cloud and it might not be visible by Files on my iPhone for, literally, hours!

Same problem here. I do not understand what triggers sync in iCloud or what prevents files from syncing. Worse, no indicator to show what is being transferred, no option to pause transfers. Those are dealbreakers.