That was 10 years ago. Yes, I also started using it because of that. These days the the more important feature (at least for me) is being able to offload rarely used files from my drive. SSDs in MacBooks are still crazy expensive.
That's exactly what the article author is saying.
There's a criticism in there that I share because I miss when things were more modular, but I also understand and appreciate the value and opportunities that modern tech is bringing to people.
The back and forth chaos of progress and foundation-building is important but frustrating.
> SSDs in MacBooks are still crazy expensive.
It sounds like an archival usage rather than syncing or sharing usage.
When you click to open such file or folder, it will immediately download back to your disk and you can use it again. You will lose maybe a few seconds once in a blue moon when you need one of them. But you easily gain hundreds of gigabytes of space on your SSD. Just yesterday I right-clicked some folders to mark them "online only" and immediately gained +300GB free space..
Plus of course you can access those files from your phone or ipad too, when needed. Basically I personally have all my work files in Dropbox and don't use additional backup (used Backblaze in the past).
Personally I tried using several different cloud backup solutions, but I gave up on them. A few encrypted external hard drives, updated every month or two in a repeatable way (e.g. a bash script), one at home, one at work ... and backup is a solved problem. Of course, to each their own.
The only drawback is that you have to carry it around anywhere you want to access it. A modern external drive is the size of a phone though, so that's hardly a dealbreaker even if you do want to carry it around. Although frankly, cloud storage is much better for filesharing.