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Comment by peterbsmith | Hacker News Reader

Just putting this here so that the Dropbox employees who inevitably read this can be aware: I've used dropbox for 5+ years, and as a paid user at that. Today I deleted dropbox because of the recent shenanigans and bad press as well as because there is a lot of high quality competition in the synced file storage space that I can turn to.

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My experience is that file sync is all about edge cases, and there are so, so many. I believe Dropbox is the only one that has solved most of them (a function of time, energy, and large user base).

A colleague just had google drive not properly syncing for 2 weeks, and all of the sudden it started working except it overwrote a very active Sketch file with the two week old copy (and no duplicate "conflict" copy made as Dropbox does). Google around and you'll find many such stories across all services.

I would like to present a counter to this. I recently became a paid Dropbox user just because of the convenience I have experienced through the Finder integration.

Another thing the OP hasn't mentioned is which service he/she will move to. Dropbox is by far the best file sharing/storage product I have used. I don't think about sharing/storing files anymore - all the tools and convenience Dropbox offers (and Finder integration is a big part of that) take care of this itself!

What service did you end up with? Do they offer full rollback if files get encrypted by ransomware?

Out of curiosity, what did you switch to?

Not op, but SeaFile looks nice.

With a brief look at the alternatives, Tresorit [1] looks quite nice with their encryption features.

[1] https://tresorit.com

It doesn't look like you can install Tresorit on your own webserver.

it's also quite stable. We never had an issue in ~ 2 years with ~ 20 users.

Nextcloud is decent as well.

What solution did you turn to, if any?

Not parent, but Google Drive has always been great for me. It has much improved from the clunky offering that was the release version. the only trouble I've had was corporate proxies, but God knows what hackery makes Dropbox work in this case.

Now you have the ability to selected nested folders to sync, it does everything I need, and the storage is shared with Gmail, Photos, etc.

Unfortunately, Google Drive has quite serious issues for heavy users of file synchronization (the last time I tried it):

* It does not do chunked syncing. Change one bit of a 5GB file, it gets resynced completely.

* You cannot get a list of shared files/folders. You basically need to check sharing per file/folder by hand or write/use a Google Apps script (which is very slow).

* It does not support LAN sync. When I share large directories with colleagues on Dropbox, sync is very quick, because the transfers are just over the local network.

* The last time I tried, the Google Drive client regularly had problems syncing some files when syncing a very large set of files.

(* There is no first-party client for Linux.)

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