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Is Dropbox still the best for cloud storage?

adam9c1 said:
Dropbox is NOT a backup solution.
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Keep seeing and hearing this but why so adamant?

At the end of the day it is a remote copy of your data, you can choose to turn syncing off for some files/folders to prevent further changes and if you lose a device, configuring the app and account on a new device syncs the data down....so why so adamant it isn't a backup solution?
 
simonsi said:
Keep seeing and hearing this but why so adamant?

At the end of the day it is a remote copy of your data, you can choose to turn syncing off for some files/folders to prevent further changes and if you lose a device, configuring the app and account on a new device syncs the data down....so why so adamant it isn't a backup solution?
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What happens lets say where someone comes to your computer and clicks DEL and all of your dropbox is replicated to delete those files.
You could go to the web interface and click show deleted files, and restore, but the interface for that is klunky at best.
 
adam9c1 said:
What happens lets say where someone comes to your computer and clicks DEL and all of your dropbox is replicated to delete those files.
You could go to the web interface and click show deleted files, and restore, but the interface for that is klunky at best.
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True (human error causes most disasters), I have TM to cover that but given on any replacement device I would setup Dropbox, in most cases that will be enough to restore the files, it will just sync down and voila!
 
NativeTxn said:
This may be a dumb question, but is there a way to get Dropbox to automatically update when you change a file or a folder that is synced? For example, if I have my documents folder synced and I create and save a new file in it, is there a way to get Dropbox to automatically update to now include the new file?

I have a SugarSync account and it continuously stays updated in that regard, but I have not been able to figure out to do it with Dropbox (if it is in fact a possibility).

Thanks.
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Yes you can. You just have to make a symlink from the original folder and then add that to your dropbox and it will sync any changes made from your desktop to the cloud
 
Dokk said:
I've been a big advocate of Dropbox for a long time, but I've recently made the switch over to Copy for multiple reasons.

First, there's a lot more permanent free space. If you sign up with a referral link, you get an extra 5GB -- which gives you 20GB to start. You get another 5GB at the moment for each friend you get to signup, as well. The web interface is a bit more intuitive and useful than Dropbox's. And -- and this is key for me -- you have more control over *how* you share files, including the ability to specify read/write permissions. The finder integration is good (I'd say on par with Dropbox). On the downside, not as many apps have made use of Copy as do Dropbox (but I suspect that'll change). They're run by a good company with a strong security record (Barracuda) and I've had zero problems with the service or the apps (on my Macs and my iPhone). You can signup at http://copy.com for the standard 15GB of space.
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Good to know, I'm strongly considering this as well because I'm a Pro subscriber. Nothing against Dropbox, i love it, but the pricing structure sucks, its hard to justify using dropbox wen i can get more that twice the storage for the same price with copy. I've emailed them numerous times about this issue, and they just don't seem to listen. So I can't have sympathy when they start to lose users.
 
Hookemfins said:
As far as I know the answer is no. SugarSync and Dropbox work differently. Dropbox, Google drive, SkyDrive..etc, work as their own drives. You have to physically place the folders or files into the drive (in your case Dropbox folder) that you want synced. Any updates must be made within the Dropbox folder.

SS on the other hand allows you to sync individual folders or files.

My preference is SS but they are going to a paid service so I am no longer using them. The cost is too much for my needs.

I am experimenting with the Box, Google drive and SkyDrive with a lean towards GD.

If SS ever returns to to free or decent rate for a small amount of space I will return to them.
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But OTOH using a file within the Dropbox folder (or an alias to it sitting elsewhere) is no big deal, and then it syncs with every change.
 
I use 10 Gig of Dropbox as my main method of sharing files and moving them to other computers of my own, 50 Gig of Box which is for my own redundancy and stuff in progress and a Google Drive for some extra. My place of work has 100 Gig of Skydrive and 100 Gig of Google Drive, so I use both of those regularly. But it also has 10 Gig of Dropbox purely for sending and getting, and Dropbox currently still reigns for people getting your files or links to your files in the simplest, least confusing way for them with zero undesirable roadblocks. Google is the worst there.

For me, nothing beats Dropbox for just doing what it should do without extra layers of actions, though now Box is pretty much all the same in that regard. But as others mention, Dropbox's integration into so many apps is a plus (though really you can set it up with Box too for most of them). Skydrive has been very reliable and probably the fastest upload but it's way too Windows-y in the UI on the site. Ugly and un-Mac-like way of managing files. Syncing has worked well. Google Drive, though, I really dislike to use. Hate the interface and the steps needed to perform some single actions, and at one point last year the syncing went out of whack. It's not the smooth 15 seconds of use to make it happen that the rest are.

Nothing of confidential nature goes on any of these.
 
rboy505 said:
I use 10 Gig of Dropbox as my main method of sharing files and moving them to other computers of my own, 50 Gig of Box which is for my own redundancy and stuff in progress and a Google Drive for some extra. My place of work has 100 Gig of Skydrive and 100 Gig of Google Drive, so I use both of those regularly. But it also has 10 Gig of Dropbox purely for sending and getting, and Dropbox currently still reigns for people getting your files or links to your files in the simplest, least confusing way for them with zero undesirable roadblocks. Google is the worst there.

For me, nothing beats Dropbox for just doing what it should do without extra layers of actions, though now Box is pretty much all the same in that regard. But as others mention, Dropbox's integration into so many apps is a plus (though really you can set it up with Box too for most of them). Skydrive has been very reliable and probably the fastest upload but it's way too Windows-y in the UI on the site. Ugly and un-Mac-like way of managing files. Syncing has worked well. Google Drive, though, I really dislike to use. Hate the interface and the steps needed to perform some single actions, and at one point last year the syncing went out of whack. It's not the smooth 15 seconds of use to make it happen that the rest are.

Nothing of confidential nature goes on any of these.
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I see that you use Box, I recently downloaded Box and went to upload some pictures on my phone, and once this was done i looked in my storage and noticed that it seems like they are being stored locally as well which seems pointless for a cloud app. I was just wondering if you or anyone else was experiencing this as well and if there is something to do to fix this issue?
 
I use SkyDrive because it works well with Outlook.com and all the Office products, and also is wayyy cheaper than the other services. 50GB for $25 a YEAR.. plus the 7gb you already have free so total of 57GB. There are other tiers but that's what I have.
 
I use Dropbox, Box and Copy. Free amounts on all.

Have tried Amazon Cloud Drive, Skydrive and Google Drive but discarded them as they make things hard and/or slow and/or are missing OS integration.

Other winner is they can all be accessed via Cloud Commander too.
 
For Box, the personal account upload limit is 250MB per file. They sometimes offer free 50GB promo accounts.
 
I use Dropbox for 142GB (I pay for 100GB), SkyDrive for 25GB, Google for 25GB (temporary then goes back to 15GB), I've managed to get 40GB in Copy and I just signed up for Box for 50GB. I also have Mega for 50GB.

I wanted to have all my stuff in one place, so that's why I paid for Dropbox. But at their prices, I find it's too high. For $100, I can go for Google, SkyDrive, or Copy and get 2x the space. After my Dropbox subscription expires, I won't renew, unless they do something about their absurd prices.

Adding salt to the wound is the fact, every other news story about Amazon cloud storage (which Dropbox is tied to) says their prices keep falling, another 50% reduction just last week, yet Dropbox can't be bothered to double the space they provide. It's the principal of how they do business is why I'm not renewing with them.

I'll continue to use their app for camera uploads of my iPhone photos, and app integration if iCloud isn't implemented.

With all the online storage available to me, I don't see the need to pay for these services anymore. The hard part is figuring out what to put where. But documents (pdf, excel, word, powerpoint files) don't take up much space. I use Dropbox to "backup" my Amazon mp3 purchases (even though Amazon has a copy for me to re-download and iTunes makes a Match AAC file for me), but I don't trust those services enough to NOT have a local copy.

Is there a service that allows me to combine all of my cloud storage in JBOD like system?

edit: nevermind, just found Jolicloud.
 
pear21 said:
I see that you use Box, I recently downloaded Box and went to upload some pictures on my phone, and once this was done i looked in my storage and noticed that it seems like they are being stored locally as well which seems pointless for a cloud app. I was just wondering if you or anyone else was experiencing this as well and if there is something to do to fix this issue?
Click to expand...

Hi pear21,

Well, you *can* select to sync or not sync certain folders on Box, but it's a pretty terrible way, limited and nothing like the simple unchecking of a button in your local Dropbox prefs menu.

You have to go to the site and take the folder and change it from sync to unsync. This only has a global effect, so it's useless if you want to have a full sync on one Mac and a partial one on another. In this and a whole assortment of other ways, Box is far from a "the only cloud you'll ever need" solution. Just too many things it can't do, or do simply. Some it did and they removed it with V4!

At first I was pleased to see that it seemed to be an alternative universe Dropbox, but it hardly is. But for another place to park 50 Gig it hasn't been horrible : ) Yet another reason to be impressed with how Dropbox has managed to get so much right about the experience. Some people will rag on Dropbox just because it's so ubiquitous, but what're you gonna do? : )
 
Just found the Box dealkiller

Oy. Unlike the two other Clouds I use frequently, Dropbox and Skydrive, Box does not preserve file date data. If you ever sort a folder of files by date this is huge. Everything just gets stamped as created at the time it was uploaded. What's especially not good about this is that if you drag a file into your local synced folder, dated 2011, and it synced up, the file in your local folder remains dated 2011 and the one on Box is dated with the upload date, and subsequently if you sync THAT to another computer the file has today's date, even though it has not been revised. Thus your two local synced folders do not match as far as file dates.

Dropbox and Skydrive retain file creation and modification info across the board.

Not a big deal in some circumstances, a major one in others.
 
rboy505 said:
Hi pear21,

Well, you *can* select to sync or not sync certain folders on Box, but it's a pretty terrible way, limited and nothing like the simple unchecking of a button in your local Dropbox prefs menu.

You have to go to the site and take the folder and change it from sync to unsync. This only has a global effect, so it's useless if you want to have a full sync on one Mac and a partial one on another. In this and a whole assortment of other ways, Box is far from a "the only cloud you'll ever need" solution. Just too many things it can't do, or do simply. Some it did and they removed it with V4!

At first I was pleased to see that it seemed to be an alternative universe Dropbox, but it hardly is. But for another place to park 50 Gig it hasn't been horrible : ) Yet another reason to be impressed with how Dropbox has managed to get so much right about the experience. Some people will rag on Dropbox just because it's so ubiquitous, but what're you gonna do? : )
Click to expand...

Thanks for the help, I got excited when I found out about the 50 free gigs and thought this would be an excellent way to store photos from my phone and not have to use the storage on my phone. I really like Dropbox the best, but thought Box would be really nice since its 50gigs and I roughly have 8 gigs on Dropbox so it was just the total amount of storage that really got me. I also agree Dropbox has done a really nice job, especially the automatic photo sync, which I think is one of the best features someone with a 16 gig phone can have, I need any type of way to store the most things possible on my phone.
 
Re: Dropbox
Dropbox is very easy to use and sync across Mac, iPad and android phone.

One problem, though, is that the file names are truncated when viewed on the iPad. I have a number of "How-to" articles saved in PDF format (I think from the 9to5Mac web site). The file names all start with "How to ... ", so they all get truncated to that plus maybe a few characters more. So, all of the file names look the same.

Short of manually editing each file name, is there a solution to this? Do the other apps do this on the iPad?
 
Dropbox competitor Box is offering 50GB of free space.
10GB free signup and another 40GB if you install the free app.
Doesn't seem like such a bad deal but I'm not very happy with their service so far. Then again, I might be stressing it a bit.
 
Short answer, no, Dropbox is far from the best for cloud storage. Competitors offer better pricing, larger sizes, no file size limits, including for free.

My current choice is hubiC. 25GB free on signup, no install this and that and referral, works on the three major platforms. Paid-for plans are pretty much unmatched anywhere.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Commy1 said:
Dropbox competitor Box is offering 50GB of free space.
10GB free signup and another 40GB if you install the free app.
Doesn't seem like such a bad deal but I'm not very happy with their service so far. Then again, I might be stressing it a bit.
Click to expand...

Why aren't you happy with the service so far? I really like the Box interface and app and stuff but the 250mb file size limit is what's stopping me from using it.

I'm using SkyDrive (as I said earlier in this thread) because it's cheapest and integrated into Office products and Xbox One and stuff. The only downside to SkyDrive right now is shared folders do not sync to your local SkyDrive folder, you have to access shared content via the browser on skydrive.com. However, SkyDrive is being re-branded to 'One Drive' soon due to a legal issue with the SkyDrive brand (some german company had the name patented I think) and One Drive is supposedly going to have new features as well as the new name, so hopefully this will be 'fixed' in the next few weeks when One Drive is released.
 
DramaLLama said:
Why aren't you happy with the service so far? I really like the Box interface and app and stuff but the 250mb file size limit is what's stopping me from using it.

I'm using SkyDrive (as I said earlier in this thread) because it's cheapest and integrated into Office products and Xbox One and stuff. The only downside to SkyDrive right now is shared folders do not sync to your local SkyDrive folder, you have to access shared content via the browser on skydrive.com. However, SkyDrive is being re-branded to 'One Drive' soon due to a legal issue with the SkyDrive brand (some german company had the name patented I think) and One Drive is supposedly going to have new features as well as the new name, so hopefully this will be 'fixed' in the next few weeks when One Drive is released.
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I just seems kind of suspect when their site limits you. As you mentioned the 250MB per file max, and only 5GB if you buy into it. Also that having more than 10,000 files in the Box is liable to cause problems or something, maximum 40,000. Restricted file types. Example, out of curiosity I tried to create a Lightroom Catalogue inside Box and it failed because it can't "read it".
The upload/processing time of Box was extremely long. I tried to store some of my loose photos on it and after 4 continuous hours of uploads barely 100 photos of 900 had uploaded.
 
Thanks everyone for the commentary. I'm using DropBox myself currently but will check out some of the other options mentioned here.
 
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