Comment by mrlala | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrlala | Hacker News Reader

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Dropbox can handle a LOT of files. I haven't seen any other service that doesn't just break.

OneDrive cannot handle tons of files. It just doesn't work. It ends up freezing, you have no idea what's going on. Can't speak to macOS related stuff.

We finally were able to migrate off of this.. but we had a VERY file hefty folder structure. Instead of databases we chose to keep things in individual files for various reasons. Needless to say this didn't scale well, and there were about 750k files on the structure. Most of this was archival, but we simply didn't have the time or care enough to reduce the number of files.. we just wanted to be able to sync this to cloud data as is. Many files were super small, so never an absolute size thing just a LOT of files. And a chunk would keep changing throughout the day.

Dropbox was able to handle this for years- never an issue. Yeah it was fairly CPU intensive, but it worked very well.

I tried OneDrive on this.. what a nightmare. I tried owncloud, bittorrent sync, some others I can't even recall. Granted this has been about 3-4 years since I really tried some other ones with lots of files, but I was so annoyed every time I did.

We just had to switch from Box to OneDrive at work, and it's caused massive headaches. Most days no one can log in, and some Excel sheets uploaded have been corrupted or have missing sheets - I don't know how that happens unless Microsoft is scanning our files.

OneDrive is an abomination. We use it at work and I have to manage it for everyone on top of my other duties (medium non-profit). It's not the panacea everyone thought it would be. I inherited it upon coming here. I've tried to see this as more or less a devops experiment. I try to control as much as I can with PowerShell, but some things don't lend themselves well to that method. Oddly enough, the lion's share of all end users are on Macs that are on a Windows domain. It proved interesting to get everything working.

What I've done is tell people to create documents from the "cloud" and edit them there within the Office365 ecosystem. Documentation needs where I work are fairly simple, with very few people needing much beyond the basic functionality. No one is doing amortization tables or complicated formulas. Word use is also fairly basic.

It seems that every week almost Microsoft changes the admin page for Office365 and adds or removes a feature or changes the way things look. Because of our basic Office needs, I'm seeing growing success with getting people to start and stay in the cloud. Prevents nonsense to a great degree. SharePoint to share between departments.

Oddly enough, I've had great success in "rescuing" Office files using LibreOffice running on Linux. Office files just add so much crufty proprietary stuff.

Yesterday OneDrive asked if I wanted to sync Documents. I replied 'yes', expecting to find my Documents folder appear in my OneDrive account.

When I came by a few minutes later, all my laptop's docs had been moved into `C:/Users/<user>/OneDrive - <company>/Documents` and the Documents library adjusted to point there. And then all my non-Windows applications stopped working.

I mean, backup up is one thing. Relocating them is totally different. WTF Microsoft!

Google File Stream (https://support.google.com/drive/answer/7329379?hl=en) is the bomb - many TBs of files in it, can not even count how many and it is fast and adaptive.

If you haven't tried it, you do not know what you are missing.

Gonna try it... tried OneDrive but oddly enough, Microsoft Office documents and files are a complete pain in the rear to open/save there because the microsoft apps treats it differently than just a storage device.

What's up with them? They now have three applications to do file syncing? Google Drive, Backup & Sync, and Drive File Stream?

I've kept using Dropbox for all these years because they never confused people like this. There was a single app that gave you a folder that synced.

Also, Dropbox is not going to drop file syncing; it is who they are.

Google might drop any of their file syncing solutions, possibly even all three!

Personally, I think rsync.net is the best if you're in IT, particularly if you're a *nix user. Nothing better yet unless you wanted to roll your own. And the fact they use ZFS makes it great. You can choose where your data resides and it's fairly inexpensive all things considered. And to the best of my knowledge, I don't recall them being involved in anything overtly political. I like tech companies doing what they do best. Tech.

Thank you for your kind words - appreciated.

I hope that it will be useful and interesting to note that we have added 'rclone'[1] to our platform[2] which means that your rsync.net account is truly a swiss army knife for cloud storage organization.

This is very much like our 'borg' support - we actually have the binary executable installed on our end so you can run it properly. There is also a discounted signup for these two use-cases.[3][4]

[1] https://rclone.org/

[2] https://github.com/ncw/rclone/issues/3254

[3] https://www.rsync.net/products/borg.html

[4] https://www.rsync.net/products/rclone.html

Just two, I think, the Drive applet was named Backup and Sync, while the Drive cloud-thing is still Drive. And DFS is a beefier, enterprisier, version of Backup and Sync.

I think?

Drive stream pretends to be a network drive and hides syncing. It locally caches files on demand and uploads and deleted local copies in the background. From my perspective it is just always up to date and let's me have tbs of files on a small computer.

It is a game changer because it is simple. It is a virtual drive in the cloud that is fast and seamless and behaves as if it is local.

I don't know. I had ten of thousands of files once and wanted to delete them. Dropbox client hangs and then gives an error. API doesn't work with that many files, web version doesn't work either. I ended up writing a script that uses API call for every separate file and it took like 3 days to delete them all. I really don't think they handle many files well after that experience and wouldn't trust them if I needed really a lot of files in the future.

We have over 1 million files in our dropbox and it's never been a problem..

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