Timely update. Currently am exploring cloud storage options for ALL my files. Anyone has experience with Bitcasa? How do Dropbox/Cloud Drive/Google Drive line up?
Right now it's not 100% cloud-ified, but my current favorite is AeroFS for syncing between machines. It works quite well. Here, the security risk is that someone gains access to your account and syncs all of your files to their system. I'm planning to work around the lack of a web client by installing a WebDAV server for myself, when I finally get around to it.
If you are a Microsoft Office user, Skydrive is pretty great, I use it to keep my documents and pictures in sync between my desktop and tablet, they even have Android and iOS apps. 7GB of free storage is also pretty great.
Been using Dropbox for all my files (I keep it under 100GB) for several years now. So far never had any problems, in fact they saved me from lots of tears when they recovered an accidentally deleted folder beyond the 30 day limit for me. The collaboration and sharing options are another huge plus. I frequently give out the link to a folder which results in a beautiful and intuitive website view of its contents for the recipient. I also have a shared folder with every member of my family which is much more convenient than sending file attachments around. These last two sentences are also why I wouldn't want to jump ship to Amazon despite the attractive price: At least in my case Dropbox has realized a network effect that more or less locks me in.
I did quite a bit of research into other options before and while using Dropbox: Tried GDrive and found the online interface (GDocs) not suitable for the amount of content I have, tried SkyDrive when it was still Live Mesh and had tons of problems with it (hour-long delays when syncing). At one point I tried a peer-to-peer type system (I remember their logo being red, forgot the name) and it was Java based which made it annoying to me. And I tried a system where files were encrypted before transfer (some Dutch company, again forgot the name) and the problem with that was that it was way too slow at dealing with all my files.
I want to stick with "reputable" and stable service providers since I plan to upload all my files. Feature wise Dropbox seems to be ahead of everyone. But want to consider Amazon as it fits my criteria mentioned above and the price is very attractive. Tried GDrive at work but not too happy with it.
Do you encrypt your files? Most of my sensitive documents are in PDF format, so I am adding passwords to them; but not sure if there is a better solution with Dropbox.
No, not using encryption, mostly because I haven't found a solution that doesn't get into my way inconveniently. I accept that any file stored on a network connected machine could become available to others through my own or somebody else's mistake. I select what I store and where I store it accordingly. Of course that doesn't stop me from doing what I can to secure my Dropbox account: strong unique password, non-obvious email address, and 2 factor auth.
edit: Just remembered, there is one encrypted file in my Dropbox, but that also only exists encrypted on my computer.
Bitcasa actually is pretty good, surprisingly, if you have lots of small files or good bandwidth. The clients are pretty buggy still though. I can stream mp3s from my home cable connection but videos and images are -pretty- delayed. It'd be impossible to use for something like storing a photo library. But it's a good place to dump all the legal media you've been torrenting over the years.
Dropbox is still the best in terms of experience and support in other apps. Price is quickly becoming not competitive.
Google Drive was crashing with folders with largish numbers of files in it (on OSX) so I couldn't test much after signing up and dropped it. It seemed fine, but Dropbox has more integration points.
Amazon Cloud was pretty useless until this announcement. But their cloud player is pretty awesome and if you sign up for their cloud drive, you get the cloud player premium.
Really, if Dropbox doesn't get something moving price-wise, this could be the end. But man, I love me some dropbox. It's just $$$$.
Switched from Dropbox to Google Drive a few months ago. the UIs are very similar, and Drive is much cheaper. My only complaint has been syncing:
1) After a week of repeated attempts, I gave up trying to get video from Dropbox to Drive. Maybe the files were too large?
2) Also, syncs are faster and more seamless across devices with Dropbox. There are noticeable lags for most syncs with Drive, even small, single files.
3) Event when Drive thinks it has synced, it hasn't and I have to restart the app.
There are other benefits to Drive, but I never had any sync issues with Dropbox.
I was pretty excited about Google Drive when it first came out due to its pricing and integration with my current Google account.
The syncing just isn't where Dropbox is right now and not where I need it to be. I would oftentimes get errors for small files that Google Drive couldn't sync but Drive would provide few cryptic descriptions as to why. I've switched back to Dropbox because I'm running multiple OSes and environments and I take their pricing as the cost of being able to use something that just works.
I'd be interested in a backup service directly from Amazon though...
I'll gladly pay more for something that works over paying less for something that doesn't. I tried actually using Google Drive for real for about 3 days and it was pathetic. Also no Linux client. Ponied up for a bigger Dropbox and haven't had a single glitch in a couple months.
I can't wait until Dropbox runs one of the largest deployments of Openstack Swift in the world. I'm sure they get very generous price discounts from AWS, but running it in house must make sense at this point.
"But if you walk into the right building and down the right aisle, you’ll run into a giant Dropbox logo. Clearly, the file-sharing upstart is proud of its data center gear. [...] Inside its cage, Dropbox is running servers equipped with solid-state drives, also known as SSDs — super-fast storage devices that could one day replace traditional hard drives. The company doesn’t use SSDs in all its servers, but it’s moving in that direction."
They could have plenty of servers for compute and still use S3 for storage. I don't know if they do but having a data center with computers doesn't mean they aren't using S3 for their primary block level storage.
I'm not sure it's a smart move from Amazon. Their offering seems pretty lame (no Linux client, JVM required, etc.) and even if the Amazon price is half of Dropbox it's hard to argue that Dropbox is expensive.
From my experience, Dropbox is perfect; it would take me much more than a discount to switch -- actually, there doesn't seem to be anything a competitor could do that would make me switch. The only reason I would leave Dropbox is if they did a major fuckup (like losing all my data).
Why would Amazon compete with Dropbox? Don't they have other priorities? (I love Amazon too, but I just don't get this).
Java as a plugin in the browser yes, I've been bit by that earlier this year (thank you MS Security Essentials!)
However Java on your system like the .net framework is no less secure than any other runtime. You are running an executable you are at that executable's mercy
The decision to use java was obviously made by a product manager that doesn't care about creating a competitive user experience. You want to compete with Dropbox then you'll have to make a native client for each of the platforms you choose to support. No silver bullet.
Does anyone know of a good service that does backups? I don't much need syncing, but I have a headless Linux server that currently backs up 50 GB of files to SpiderOak every night (they're usually the same files, so not much data transfer). Is there something like tarsnap for around $25/yr? SpiderOak is pretty good for backups like that, especially since I can check that it's working on any computer and restore files, but it costs four times that and doesn't have a decent headless client.
You have mentioned backup and not 'sync' so for backup there are some cheaper (and good options) - BackBlaze, CrashPlan, Amazon Glacier (dirt cheap). First two are not exactly 25/Yr but are cheaper than SpiderOak especially if you go for longer subscription. Have been using CP for an year now but BB's interface is a lot better.
See if you can setup your own OwnCloud on your Linux server(this is an open source Dropbox like service).
I install crashplan on everything. Cross platform (java I think) crashplan+ is 60 bucks a year for "unlimited" storage and I'm pretty sure you can set up the client to be headless. You can also have them generate the encryption keys or just provide them with your own and not upload the private keys to their servers.
Good to see some competition, even though it's not quite as advanced. I have been having grave doubts about Dropbox's management since they bought Mailbox and it will be good to get some depth into the field.
So does this mean that I would have a persistent JVM daemon running in the background monitoring file system events? I don't know why, but that gives me a nasty feeling in my gizzard. Besides, something tells me that I don't really need a ~100 MB process to do something like that.
It appeared to be syncing my entire Cloud Player music folder to my local machine. That's quite a few GB of data -- 12,000 songs or so out of a possible 250,000. So it's not going to be of much use to me until they add some kind of selective sync option.
Dropbox feels expensive when think about the storage space it provides, but maybe we should think more about the syncing side. Usage patterns may differ. In my case I have maybe just 20 gigs of stuff in my Dropbox, but probably I generate quite much traffic since I host all my software development projects there. That also means all the build results etc end up in the Dropbox folder.
And as everybody knows, the syncing mostly just works. And it is fast, almost real-time. I regularly work with the same projects (Java/Eclipse, .NET/Visual Studio, node.js) from three different computers and haven't seen any sync related problems.
I believe is easy to challenge Dropbox on the pricing side, but it will be much more difficult to replicate their syncing functionality.
Two things I would like to see from Dropbox is support for client side encryption and support for long path names. Currently I'm using Boxcryptor to do the client side encryption.
Totally agree. Dropbox is perfect. It's super fast, even when you make duplicate copies of huge files (like Lightroom catalogs!). I have a local backup using rsync, and it's much slower than Dropbox.
Dropbox also syncs over LAN, which is a big deal if you use several computers from the same location.
The setup fails for me (in Norway), timeout while downloading assets from CloudFront.
App seems to be using Jersey;
Downloading https://d29x207vrinatv.cloudfront.net/Sync/Windows/Application Files/AmazonCloudDrive_2_0_2013_0841/LocalServiceJars/jetty-servlet-8.1.0.v20120127.jar did not succeed.
51 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 111 ms ] threadRight now it's not 100% cloud-ified, but my current favorite is AeroFS for syncing between machines. It works quite well. Here, the security risk is that someone gains access to your account and syncs all of your files to their system. I'm planning to work around the lack of a web client by installing a WebDAV server for myself, when I finally get around to it.
MS's price breakdown http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/skydrive/compare
I did quite a bit of research into other options before and while using Dropbox: Tried GDrive and found the online interface (GDocs) not suitable for the amount of content I have, tried SkyDrive when it was still Live Mesh and had tons of problems with it (hour-long delays when syncing). At one point I tried a peer-to-peer type system (I remember their logo being red, forgot the name) and it was Java based which made it annoying to me. And I tried a system where files were encrypted before transfer (some Dutch company, again forgot the name) and the problem with that was that it was way too slow at dealing with all my files.
Wuala? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuala
Do you encrypt your files? Most of my sensitive documents are in PDF format, so I am adding passwords to them; but not sure if there is a better solution with Dropbox.
edit: Just remembered, there is one encrypted file in my Dropbox, but that also only exists encrypted on my computer.
Dropbox is still the best in terms of experience and support in other apps. Price is quickly becoming not competitive.
Google Drive was crashing with folders with largish numbers of files in it (on OSX) so I couldn't test much after signing up and dropped it. It seemed fine, but Dropbox has more integration points.
Amazon Cloud was pretty useless until this announcement. But their cloud player is pretty awesome and if you sign up for their cloud drive, you get the cloud player premium.
Really, if Dropbox doesn't get something moving price-wise, this could be the end. But man, I love me some dropbox. It's just $$$$.
1) After a week of repeated attempts, I gave up trying to get video from Dropbox to Drive. Maybe the files were too large?
2) Also, syncs are faster and more seamless across devices with Dropbox. There are noticeable lags for most syncs with Drive, even small, single files.
3) Event when Drive thinks it has synced, it hasn't and I have to restart the app.
There are other benefits to Drive, but I never had any sync issues with Dropbox.
The syncing just isn't where Dropbox is right now and not where I need it to be. I would oftentimes get errors for small files that Google Drive couldn't sync but Drive would provide few cryptic descriptions as to why. I've switched back to Dropbox because I'm running multiple OSes and environments and I take their pricing as the cost of being able to use something that just works.
I'd be interested in a backup service directly from Amazon though...
Their client was just the best (well still is)
"But if you walk into the right building and down the right aisle, you’ll run into a giant Dropbox logo. Clearly, the file-sharing upstart is proud of its data center gear. [...] Inside its cage, Dropbox is running servers equipped with solid-state drives, also known as SSDs — super-fast storage devices that could one day replace traditional hard drives. The company doesn’t use SSDs in all its servers, but it’s moving in that direction."
From my experience, Dropbox is perfect; it would take me much more than a discount to switch -- actually, there doesn't seem to be anything a competitor could do that would make me switch. The only reason I would leave Dropbox is if they did a major fuckup (like losing all my data).
Why would Amazon compete with Dropbox? Don't they have other priorities? (I love Amazon too, but I just don't get this).
However Java on your system like the .net framework is no less secure than any other runtime. You are running an executable you are at that executable's mercy
...
"Sorry, we only support Windows and Mac OSX at the moment"
I can't say I'm surprised, but that doesn't stop me from being disappointed.
I know they would probably claim puffery, but it's just as bad as companies peddling 'unlimited' usage, IMO.
Any recommendations?
See if you can setup your own OwnCloud on your Linux server(this is an open source Dropbox like service).
And as everybody knows, the syncing mostly just works. And it is fast, almost real-time. I regularly work with the same projects (Java/Eclipse, .NET/Visual Studio, node.js) from three different computers and haven't seen any sync related problems.
I believe is easy to challenge Dropbox on the pricing side, but it will be much more difficult to replicate their syncing functionality.
Two things I would like to see from Dropbox is support for client side encryption and support for long path names. Currently I'm using Boxcryptor to do the client side encryption.
It was dreadful: sync took hours for a single file, and once they fixed that it took five minutes. Dropbox took a few seconds.
Dropbox also syncs over LAN, which is a big deal if you use several computers from the same location.
I don't think $99/year is expensive.
(Search doesn't work too good, though).
App seems to be using Jersey;