Dropbox

I like the new logo and some of the colour schemes make a refreshing change but that design site is messy and doesn’t do a good job of selling the whole thing.

How’s everyone feel about that Mozilla rebrand now?

I couldn’t give a shit about their rebrand because I’m so enraged they broke most addons.

Dropbox has addons?

No, no it doesn’t.

They’ve filed for an IPO.

Is there anything as reliable as dropbox? Or at least it was reliable a couple of years ago, when I started trying other options.

I have an O365 subscription so I tried OneDrive, but I have to use the OneDrive for Business client which sucks. Sync errors galor, unless it massively improved in the last year.

I tried Resilio, which so far outside of dropbox has been my favorite. Unfortunately it’s revision history sucks balls and frequently screws up. It balloons out the space usage on the individual client machines to sizes you actively have to monitor or they will run away from you, and recovering anything is very unintuitive.

Seafile. Pretty nice, except maintaining the server is an absolute pain in the arse. Old school opensource installation and upgrades - I am so over this. It just randomly stopped working again for the last time. After the previous upgrade, where i had to go in and drop columns and run the install script one line at a time… well no more of that.

Which leaves Dropbox from what I can tell. I know there are other solutions but they all look janky, whereas Dropbox was the only client that just worked consistently for me. So before I start dropping $100 a year (1TB is fine) is there anything better? Very tired of trying different sync solutions.

Google Drive works great these days. $10/month gets you unlimited storage with GSuite for Business. Their new Drive File Stream client lets you mount the drive on your computer, so if you have a fast internet connection it’s essentially infinite local storage. On linux you can use rclone to mount it, and transparently encrypt too.

When Crashplan shutdown I got an unlimited GDrive and now use Duplicati to securely backup all my computers to Google Drive. It has a little setting where you tell it to expire old backups after X days. I set it to 10 years.

I’m currently at 14.1 TB used and that’s nothing, I’ve seen screenshots of people with half a petabyte.

I don’t trust google not to pull the rug out from the deal, but then again 1TB is fine for me. I went with O365 because I hated dealing with Google and I really dislike the the idea of buying two Business Suite products but that Drive File System sounds interesting. Very interesting, will have to go research that now too, thanks!

Oh, have you tried using a git repo yet? That’s like my acid test for breaking a sync solution. I realize it’s a worst case don’t do that kind of thing, and you should really be push/pulling to a git server, but I likes what I likes.

And also I tried out Duplicati but ended up with Duplicacy instead. It was more technical to configure being command line only but it was just so fast and reliable I found it worth the effort.

If they do pull out the rug, then you’ll still get 1TB for your $10/month anyway.

If you already have GSuite for Business, you already have an unlimited GDrive. No need to buy a second one.

Rclone works great on Windows, Linux, and MacOS and will mount OneDrive too. Windows10 supports it directly but I can’t vouch for that method having not used it.

I don’t use github for storage, if that’s what you mean. I do use one to store static webpages and scripts I find useful.

I use git repos all the time for work and personal projects. They tend to break syncing solutions with version history like eggs. So what I really want is a dropbox like sync solution that doesn’t barf on a git repo.

DFS sounds like it might work just reading around on it.

Oh you want to store a git repo inside GDrive? Yeah I don’t think that would work. Why not just use github or bitbucket?

I don’t want to push to it like a hosted server or anything, but I do want to be able to go from my laptop to my desktop without having to do anything other than not work on the same file without saving my changes (aka quitting emacs). I definitely don’t want to have to do an add, commit, and push every time I want to switch.

Which probably says more about me and my git habits than anything else but the heart wants what the heart wants. Also some games with save files like minecraft break lesser sync solutions often as well. Dropbox worked with my github repos and everything else. Just reading around it sounds like Google’s solution will work though how well I don’t know.

Have they improved it in the past year? I’ve worked at two companies now who had it as part of the G Suite, but when used in the context of a team (i.e., several people having shared folders and whatnot, not just one user accessing his/her data across several devices), it was just utterly unreliable when it came to syncing. In some cases data got lost, in other cases data often didn’t get properly uploaded or downloaded until you manually shutdown and restarted the Drive app. People really disliked it due to it being so unreliable, and I’m still mystified as how this could be considered a business solution.

I don’t use that functionality so I can’t speak to it.

Did you try the new Drive File System or the old GDrive app? Your complaints are exactly what I want to avoid, and have experienced with everything except Dropbox.

Well actually Dropbox did screw up a couple of times for me, but it was fairly easily to fix and recover from. The other solutions you generally just restore from backup.

We use gdrive at work. It’s not bad, and it’s definitely improved, but I do run into random sync errors here and there. Dropbox is rock solid on both my PC and Mac at work.

Thanks, after some more research it doesn’t sound like I would be happy with DFS, I was able to find multiple other accounts of issues using git repos. Which isn’t surprising, it’s like putting a git repo in a git repo (and I don’t mean sub modules).

By all accounts you shouldn’t do this with dropbox either, but it works 99% of the time for me and when it does screw up I have backups and it’s never been hard to fix. So I don’t really want to pay for dropbox but after a couple of years trying to find a reliable alternative I am getting tired of all of the switching.

I got 50GB free from MediaFire several years ago, so mostly use that for large-ish files. It does not sync to my PC, however.

Free version of Dropbox now limits you to 3 devices.

If you are over 3 currently, you are fine, you just can’t add anymore devices.

Been using Dropbox for years but never paid for it. I already pay Apple and Microsoft for storage, so as much as I like it, I can’t justify subscribing to it. Despite Dropbox probably being one of the best storage services out there. Guess it’s time for me to move on completely.

Phew, only basic. I would expire if that were true if pro accounts too