dropbox has a better desktop client to share stuff. It makes the difference to end users. But it's slow sync outside US.
Dropbox Owns Cloud Storage on Mobile
31–40 of 82 posts
Re: Dropbox Owns Cloud Storage on Mobile
#32I'm struggling to understand why. It has a very poor business model, security issues and the storage for the price just doesn't add up. Google Drive or iCloud are far easier to set up, cheaper, and has oodles more space.
> It has a very poor business model, security issues and the storage for the price just doesn't add up. Google Drive or iCloud are far easier to set up, cheaper, and has oodles more space.
That's three major questions begged in a single sentence, followed by 3 more in the next. Perhaps if you tried to back up each of those claims, you'd have an easier time understanding.
“Poor business model” would be the first place to start since Dropbox has ton of users and they tend to be loyal: learning why would tell you whether you're making the right comparisons.
“Security” is a judgement call but it's certainly not true that this is accepted conventional wisdom. Sure, there's the occasional hyperbolic blog post which makes the rounds before someone looks into the details and debunks the conspiracy theories but Apple and Google certainly get those, too.
Continuing the trend, the pricing also does not support your claims:
Google:
1TB = $9.99/mo (https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2375123?hl=en)
Dropbox:
1TB = $9.99/mo (https://www.dropbox.com/plans)
Apple:
1TB = $9.99/mo (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201238)
Even if the pricing wasn't the same for all three services, that's a relatively small amount of money to pay for a service which many people rely on heavily and you couldn't say anything meaningful about pricing without talking about the different features. If you valued a particular feature or related service (e.g. Google Photos, Dropbox's cross-platform support & integration with a wide range of mobile apps, etc.) many people will consider it worth paying a small amount more per month to get their favorite choice – we're talking numbers well under what many people spend at Starbucks in the same time-period, after all.
One point in particular you should think about is the reason why I've heard so many non-IT people favor Dropbox: it's easy to setup, syncs reliably (as opposed to iCloud's same-week synchronization), and they always have a full copy of their data on every computer. It's really easy to forget how much people value the idea that they will never be in the case where a network error or billing screwup prevents them from accessing their files. That doesn't have to be a common event for people to want to avoid it.
Re: Dropbox Owns Cloud Storage on Mobile
#33I really don't understand Dropbox. For the average user that wants to store, say, a few tens of GBs Dropbox costs $9.99 a month. Nevermind it gives 1TB total, most people don't need that much. iCloud, for example, costs $0.99/month. That's an _order of magnitude_ more expensive. Whichever way you slice it, it seems like Dropbox's core user base, that pays but doesn't take full advantage of the 1TB is bank-rolling the…
I've lost files on iCloud. It's also harder to use.
Re: Dropbox Owns Cloud Storage on Mobile
#34I really don't understand Dropbox. For the average user that wants to store, say, a few tens of GBs Dropbox costs $9.99 a month. Nevermind it gives 1TB total, most people don't need that much. iCloud, for example, costs $0.99/month. That's an _order of magnitude_ more expensive. Whichever way you slice it, it seems like Dropbox's core user base, that pays but doesn't take full advantage of the 1TB is bank-rolling the…
I've lost files on iCloud. It's also harder to use.
Re: Dropbox Owns Cloud Storage on Mobile
#35I really don't understand Dropbox. For the average user that wants to store, say, a few tens of GBs Dropbox costs $9.99 a month. Nevermind it gives 1TB total, most people don't need that much. iCloud, for example, costs $0.99/month. That's an _order of magnitude_ more expensive. Whichever way you slice it, it seems like Dropbox's core user base, that pays but doesn't take full advantage of the 1TB is bank-rolling the…
iCloud is close to useless if you need platform-agnostic storage. I only use it for iOS backups and of course the apps that sync their data via iCloud. Does the service even offer a file browser?
Whenever I deal with data I want to access on a file level and not through apps, like documents, photos, etc. I use Dropbox. And since I have to backup my music library (500 GB) somewhere anyway, I'll gladly use Dropbox Pro tier. Yes, I could save 3 bucks by using Amazon Cloud Drive or other services, but Dropbox' user experience and thoughtful design is second to none.
Re: Dropbox Owns Cloud Storage on Mobile
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand your comparison. iCloud is only $0.99 for the 50GB option. I have over 300GB (and growing) worth of pictures and videos that I've been collecting since my first kid was born 6 years ago. It would be $9.99 on iCloud just as it is on Dropbox. Even cheaper on Dropbox, actually, because I buy by the year (and full disclosure, I get 2TB for the price of 1TB because I'm a long term customer, but I only u…
if you dont care about the best usability, and you dont collaborate, Amazon Cloud Drive is 60/year for unlimited storage. not that youll hit 2tb soon, but for someone looking for cheap and easy cloud storage, dropbox is kind of expensive. you pay for the featureset not the storage size.
I store my photos on Amazon cloud drive as a 2nd backup, already using OneDrive for the same purpose that came with office 365. The benefit of ACD is that it doesn't automatically sync, which is a plus in the age of ransomware (there's unofficial tools for automatic sync)
Re: Dropbox Owns Cloud Storage on Mobile
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
if you dont care about the best usability, and you dont collaborate, Amazon Cloud Drive is 60/year for unlimited storage. not that youll hit 2tb soon, but for someone looking for cheap and easy cloud storage, dropbox is kind of expensive. you pay for the featureset not the storage size.
Amazon Cloud drive is great for the price (I use it) but they also have filesize limits (anything over 5GB seems to simply error out without warning), so I end up RARing my larger drive backups. Also the software backing it is severely lacking, besides the auto-upload of photos from my iPhone.
They probably changed the limit cause I do have 20gb files on it. It did fail on a 60gb .tar.gz site backup file though.
Re: Dropbox Owns Cloud Storage on Mobile
#38I really don't understand Dropbox. For the average user that wants to store, say, a few tens of GBs Dropbox costs $9.99 a month. Nevermind it gives 1TB total, most people don't need that much. iCloud, for example, costs $0.99/month. That's an _order of magnitude_ more expensive. Whichever way you slice it, it seems like Dropbox's core user base, that pays but doesn't take full advantage of the 1TB is bank-rolling the…
Will echo what others said. Dropbox works - and it works cross-platform. I have linux, mac & windows desktops/laptops and iphones/ipads... dropbox has a complete cross-platform solution which integrates well with the native file browsing mechanism. I won't even consider icloud.
My use of dropbox has grown - but I primarily used it to store and retrieve a lot of data that I was analyzing when did my PhD. The data were several 100 GB in size. The 1 TB solution came quite handy. I also moved between my mac & linux during that time. I just had my files when I needed them.
Re: Dropbox Owns Cloud Storage on Mobile
#39I really don't understand Dropbox. For the average user that wants to store, say, a few tens of GBs Dropbox costs $9.99 a month. Nevermind it gives 1TB total, most people don't need that much. iCloud, for example, costs $0.99/month. That's an _order of magnitude_ more expensive. Whichever way you slice it, it seems like Dropbox's core user base, that pays but doesn't take full advantage of the 1TB is bank-rolling the…
Even though I have 3 Apple devices, I cannot use iCloud because I also use non-Apple devices, like Linux, Windows and Android. Yes, all of them. Dropbox has support for all, including Linux, which is a big deal.
Dropbox also does file versioning. You get an addon and it does versioning for a year. You cannot speak of having backups without this feature and iCloud doesn't. Get a ransomeware on your computer and you'll see what I'm talking about ;-)
And also, once you get in the habit of saving stuff, 1 TB is really not that much. My personal photo/video archive is 90 GB. I have another 20 GB of online presentations I gave to colleagues, archived just in case, about 10 GB of music, 30 GB of movies (mostly for my son, as he'd be really upset without his favorites), recovery stuff, project backups, all in all I exceed 200 GB. Actually at the rate I'm growing, 1 TB might soon be insufficient.
I also understand the reluctance to pay for stuff, but personally I think my data deserves the price of 2-3 coffees per month. My personal email deserves another coffee or two.
Re: Dropbox Owns Cloud Storage on Mobile
#40I really don't understand Dropbox. For the average user that wants to store, say, a few tens of GBs Dropbox costs $9.99 a month. Nevermind it gives 1TB total, most people don't need that much. iCloud, for example, costs $0.99/month. That's an _order of magnitude_ more expensive. Whichever way you slice it, it seems like Dropbox's core user base, that pays but doesn't take full advantage of the 1TB is bank-rolling the…
Dropbox works. Put aside all the concerns over War Crimes or Spying, or Security, Dropbox simply works. Every mobile platform is supported. Every desktop platform is supported. Sharing, Teams, direct links, all the core features are there. Anyone can safely recommend and share Dropbox files with their Grandma (with a PC still running XP), or their Mac loving parents, or their weird hipster friend running Gentoo GNU/L…
Agreed, it's just got to work.
We're working on an alternative: https://www.sync.com/your-privacy/