I use and am happy with Dropbox. I was an early adopter of Google Drive (to try to save costs) and it never really worked right. There were lots of bugs with the syncing of data. My entire digital world is on Dropbox. I use (and pay for) Google Drive too, but I use it differently.
It works for me because, in theory, all my data is on every HD in my house (which is really just two). So, I don't lose anything if Dropbox deletes my account; I've got it all locally.
That theory doesn't work anymore, however, because I have 399 GB of data in Dropbox and I don't duplicate it all to every machine anymore because of the size and the data transfer required to keep that much locally and in the cloud.
I really do need to start thinking about this again so that I can get it all duplicated locally.
As far as I know, if you just have the files as "Keep local" or whatever, Dropbox will still delete them locally if it's removed from Dropbox. The only exception is if you're also using the backup feature to backup certain folders on your machine that's not in the Dropbox folder.
I use and am happy with them too—although if Dropbox deletes files from your account, or deletes your account outright, doesn’t that reach out and delete the data from all of the synced devices too, regardless of the number of devices that happen to be local to you?
Do you use a second line of local backups/versioning to protect against that possibility?
700 million people use them, and 17 million are on a paid plan. I still use Dropbox, because I don't trust that I'd be able to reach a helpful human at Google should anything happen to my Google account.
we may have different account types but they started wiping inactive accounts a while back. I never installed the client on my computer though, so that probably didn't help.
I had pictures of an abroad internship from winter 2014-15 that I was able to find last year as I was aggregating all my pictures.
But I just checked their filings, the 700M figure is indeed "registered" users, not "active" ones. Which makes a lot more sense. There are not a lot of services with 700M monthly active users out there.
I have free OneDrive through my university, and I pay $99/year and I have it through work. With multiple TB available.
Yet I still use Dropbox because it’s way more usable.
Running the OneDrive agent is a hobby and it spikes my machine a few times a day. Running Dropbox is something that just works and has worked for 10 years without me ever noticing the sync app (a good thing).
I avoid Google because I wouldn’t want my gmail to turn off because of an event like this.
How do you never notice the sync app? I stopped using Dropbox because I got sick of the client (on Windows) constantly blaring about new features and corporate sharing tools.
I muted that stuff years ago and have it run on startup. I get no notifications and if I put a file in that folder it syncs up. And files I add to dropbox sync down.
Granted I haven’t run the windows client in a long time so I’m talking about my MacOS experience. But OneDrive on MacOS does all sorts of shenanigans. The funniest is when it logs me out and forces a hard resync. As a user, I never want that.
The more files you have, the more OneDrive tends to chew as a baseline. If you exceed those limits it'll just sit and chew without actually updating anymore. I want to say something like 200K files is the limit.
If you're using it for work to sync build dependencies or your build tree or similar, it's easy to accidentally end up exceeding those limits and watch it eat CPU time totally ineffectually. Ask me how I know!
It's the only solution still that "just works" on all OSs and mobile devices. I spent a year trying to use alternatives like Syncthing and Resilio and they all have pain points, especially on mobile. Gave up and just paid for Dropbox. I would gladly self host if there was an option that worked well on mobile.
I've been using Nextcloud and before that Owncloud for years. I recently switched to the native mobile client from a generic web DAV client. It supports one way sync for things like photos which is very handy. My home NC has around 1/2TB in use so far.
I also look after another one for a company with several 1000 users' safety docs on it. Nearly all the clients are mobiles and tablets using the native client. This NC is more of a one way thing where one dept uploads pdfs and the drivers and co read them on their tablets. Office staff point a browser at it.
Onedrive can't handle a ton of files without just breaking.. at least not up until a few years ago at best.
We have ~1 million files in our dropbox that we use for business. Lots of files change each day. And everything just works. It uses some CPU, but honestly for what it's doing it's not too bad. At least dropbox can handle it, other type of file syncing apps just stop working.
So for small-medium business I'm not sure what the alternative is to dropbox if you are file-system heavy unless it's just for throwing some random files here and there.
I ditched them for OneDrive which comes with an Office365 subscription. OneDrive is buggy, has file naming issues (on MacOS at least), is a memory hog, and has a host of other issues. So I tried iCloud+ which comes with AppleOne subscription, and it lacks some of the sharing/directory collab features I wanted.
So yes, there are alternatives, many of which are free or included in other subscriptions, but they lack the focus of Dropbox, which Dropbox itself nearly lost when it tried to become something beyond file storage, versioning, and sharing.
I only use it for one of my lesser used domains and it is the worst email/app experience I have had in ages.
For some reason the outlook app went blank and had to resync. Missed a really important email. It gets like 100 MS update emails which have zero relevance to me and then it sends random emails I am not sure how to unsub from. It shows notifications for all those random emails and actual important ones get lost.
I got it for the 1TB storage space and teams(let me not even start on that). But now I am seriously considering moving that domain to gmail and zoom.
I use it on Mac with the built-in email client. On Linux, Evolution (via Evolution Data Server) supports Exchange too. I find their proprietary HTTP-based protocol much more reliable than IMAP and it's the only way to get push email on iOS using the stock client (it doesn't support IMAP IDLE and their proprietary equivalent is only open to GMail and Fastmail, no way to self-host and no other providers are supported).
Dropbox supports block-level file sync. I'm not sure if Google Drive or OneDrive support that yet? It makes a big difference when working on large files.
Dropbox is afaik the only cross platform one with support for extended file attributes like tags, comments and custom icons in macOS, which I use extensively.
I've been using Dropbox for at least a decade and have no intention to jump ship (though summary execution of accounts does give me pause). The reason why I do so is...
* It works on absolutely everything. I have one foot in every major tech ecosystem and that immediately excludes anything platform-specific like iCloud. I also used to daily-drive Linux, which has no official OneDrive client, and the Google Drive client is notoriously bad on that platform.
* Mobile photo upload was extremely convenient when I first discovered it and it still works very well. If I need to take a picture of something I can use my phone and then grab the file on my desktop or laptop.
* The option to store everything locally still exists and is the default. If I get banned from Dropbox I will still have my entire Dropbox folder contents as they were present on my desktop's massive hard drive array. Backing up Google Drive in this way can be done, but only if you aren't using anything like Docs or Sheets, which can't be stored locally without a manual file export. Dropbox even tried to replicate this with Paper and I never touched it for exactly this reason.
I still have it because of inertia. I don't even add stuff to it anymore, I just haven't bothered to go through it and make sure everything's copied somewhere else easily-accessible, yet.
I suspect that's the case for a lot of folks. I'm not sure it'd even make the top-5 of such services I'd consider, if I had none of them and were signing up for one today.
For their specific job, Dropbox is still the best. Which is really sad considering what they do. They are the only one delivering a sane client, working well on multiple platforms, without any quirks like filename-hiccups and such. Though, my requirement is also to work on linux, so I might be a bit special. Though, OneDrive seems to now be pretty good on Windows and mostly on pair with Dropbox featurewise.
But on the other side, it's easier to lose your account with google or microsoft, so this might be another reason people preferred dropbox, till now.
Dropbox has more enterprise features like data governance and DLP features like requiring MDM. Drive and one drive is fine for certain things but our legal and finance documents, we need certain features.
It works for me because, in theory, all my data is on every HD in my house (which is really just two). So, I don't lose anything if Dropbox deletes my account; I've got it all locally.
That theory doesn't work anymore, however, because I have 399 GB of data in Dropbox and I don't duplicate it all to every machine anymore because of the size and the data transfer required to keep that much locally and in the cloud.
I really do need to start thinking about this again so that I can get it all duplicated locally.