[Fnoord]

I remember the first day I used Rsync (developed by famous reverse engineer Andrew Tridgell of Samba fame [1]) and the first day I used WebDAV and later on WebDAVFS. Nowadays, I use TransIP STACK (1 TB free) and Google Drive (15 GB) plus public key cryptography.

Dropbox might've been the first in the field, but it has no selling point above STACK for me since it doesn't implement public key cryptography just like the other providers. Google's sell point is that compressed photos are free storage (although -obviously- unencrypted).

Which suggests, to me, that they're accessing the data or perhaps saving a few GBs with say ZFS dedup (ultimately not a trade-off in the interest of the user). Because otherwise, the lag would be client-side only (after all, the clients employ the cryptography).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Tridgell