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by m_mueller 4450 days ago
I lost trust in Dropbox when it comes to the quality of their client and I would therefore not use it for business purposes.

* I've had two instances of near data loss where I could only recover data from the local hidden cache folder that gets deleted after a week. It had to do with a user error with moving out files from the Dropbox directory when the client was off - previous versions in the webapp can easily become corrupted this way.

* the Mac client is a total CPU hog since Mountain Lion.

2 comments

The business account comes with unlimited history of deleted/modified files, so you can recover anything that once was on Dropbox.

On my Macbook Pro, the "average battery impact" (last 8 hours) as reported by Activity Monitor is 1.2 (not sure what's the unit, but it's a low value compared to other apps), and we use it daily for work so it's kind of active the whole day. I wouldn't call it a CPU hog by far.

1) That's good to hear about unlimited history - however that wasn't the issue in my case - the files either didn't show up in in the history anymore, even though it clearly wasn't past the grace period, or the showed up and reported an error when trying to open them. So the last I checked, there were non recoverable states in Dropbox and I therefore would never trust it as the only backup (and neither should you).

2) The CPU hog thing is very inconsistent - it probably doesn't affect all OS version/hardware combinations or they would have solved it since long ago. All I know is that I regularly see the client go to 80-100% usage of one core for a rather long time, meanwhile taking forever to sync just a few files - which clearly shouldn't happen in an application that mostly does IO. There are probably certain file types it has some problems with, but I didn't have the patience to analyze it yet, I simply switched to SpiderOak.

So no, I just can't trust their code quality.

It's not just their Mac one. The one on Windows for me kills it, it just seems to make the machine really slow (only whilst it is syncing). Seems as if it is a bit of "the nature of the beast" as it's a similar story with other desktop clients. Great apps otherwise!
A lot depends on how many files you are syncing, and how often these files change and need re-syncing.