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by bad_user 3035 days ago
SpiderOak has a high price, has been very slow in my tests and their client doesn't work well. There have been reports of throttling on large uploads. Plus they've been stagnating. All of this is a symptom of them not being popular enough I'm sure, but that's not a good sign.

pCloud doesn't do 2-factor authentication yet, which is freaking important for your non-encrypted files at least. I asked them about it because I could not believe it and they said it's "on their roadmap". But ALAS my trust in them dropped to zero. The chances of implementing reliable encryption while not getting basic security straight are next to none.

Plus you cannot trust encryption that is not peer reviewed ;-)

I haven't tried NextCloud, but ownCloud is shit. It's really slow, could not handle the several hundreds of GBs I have stored and there have been situations of users losing their data. Plus I'm not inclined to host my own stuff, because that would get very expensive.

Actually you haven't mentioned the only real alternatives ...

(1) Resilio Sync (https://resilio.com) which I use, in combination with a cheap VPS with 2 TB of storage on it (time4vps.eu in case you're wondering, not affiliated)

(2) Syncthing (https://syncthing.net), the open source alternative, which is OK, but hard to configure and Resilio does stuff out of the box, like encrypted folders

And I'm using Resilio Sync in addition to Dropbox. Well, I've actually migrated to Google Drive (on GSuite) this month, due to Dropbox Support pissing me off, but that's another story.

But the interesting part, which should be clear after a single day of usage, is that all Dropbox alternatives, except for Resilio and Syncthing, fail at the most basic task that users want, which is to reliably synchronize your files. Even the big guys, like GDrive or OneDrive, have an incredibly broken sync by comparison.

Just the other day I noticed for example how Google Drive can start deleting files from your local hard drive, only God knows why, in order to re-download them. And before that I dropped OneDrive because their client was freezing on my Mac, not to mention a couple of months back they weren't doing the one month file versioning thing, which is retarded in the age of ransomware.
1 comments
jest3r1 3035 days ago
So, between the two of us, we've now come up with a number of competitors working on similar products that include E2E encryption. We both agree that these competitors still have work to do, in terms of implementing features and fine tuning performance. But they're not standing still.

The fact that both of us are actively using at least one alternative, in addition to Dropbox, proves my point. That E2E encryption (alternatives that offer better privacy) could be a threat to Dropbox, if and when the alternatives become a viable total replacement.

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