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Comment by d--b | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one to find that dropbox is the only cloud drive that works?

Google Drive is _terrible_ with their "shortcuts", you can't have stuff that is shared with you on your local hard drive. It's been terrible for years.

OneDrive is mostly made for windows and iCloud for Mac.

I don't understand the hate.

I use DropBox a lot and quite like it.

I built a CMS for it and it automatically synced my markdown files on my mac with a linux box running on Vultr. I just save a file on my computer and bloop, my website is updated. It's been working flawlessly for several years.

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Dropbox is something we should celebrate. They mainly solve this one problem and do it well. Yes, it’s more expensive than others, but they are also a profitable company. It’s great to have these individual companies, instead of having to get everything from Google/Apple/Microsoft.

I’ve been using Dropbox for years with difficult stuff, like Node projects with tens of thousands file. The sync works and it’s really quick.

Yep, I've tried them all and Dropbox is the only one that I can say works.

- iCloud - simply does not work, trusting your files in here is a fools errand.

- Google Drive - They've change the name 6 times since I've started this comment, and each name changes requires a new download, and each download removes a feature I use. Need third party app for Linux.

- OneDrive - Not so bad, but need third party app for Linux.

I've tried many others like SyncThing (just terrible, people who tolerate this I give them my pity because it is not good software).

I wish Dropbox would just split of products into Dropbox Classic (A folder, that syncs!) and then this new fangled rubbish they keep building to diversify.

> I've tried many others like SyncThing (just terrible, people who tolerate this I give them my pity because it is not good software).

Maybe my use cases are too simple, but why did you find SyncThing a bad software? In my experience, understanding the setup was the difficult part, but that's to be expected when you're used to cloud providers managing that on their end. Apart from that, it doesn't work on iPhone or iPad, the syncs can take a couple of minutes, and that's all the cons I can think of.

The big pro for me is being able to sync files that an overzealous cloud provider might autosanitize without asking.

Regarding Google Drive on Linux, I've tried InSync and it worked so well with a combination of Dropbox+Google Drive+Google Workspaces that I bought the lifetime license. From time to time they do 50% offs, so it's even more attractive. Much better experience than the official Dropbox client.

> Apart from that, it doesn't work on iPhone or iPad

Mobius Sync seems to do a reasonable job for me given the limitations its working under.

The SyncThing FAQ states that due to iOS design decisions, a fully functional client is not possible. Last time I checked it, that answer didn't mention Mobius Sync, even if limited it's great to have an iOS client!

dropbox has a special place in my heart because it was the only one offering linux support for a good time.

I have been using it non stop since it was available, and the best thing is that I've completely forgotten about it for years. It's happily churning in the background doing its job, updating itself automatically and not letting me worry about its existence, not a single notification window, and seldomly sending me emails about new services.

Google forsake linux, they already went through a client deprecation on mac, they bug me about getting permissions for the downloads folder they don't need, and it breaks sometimes I boot with an external drive connected, it's a chore to use their software.

Same. I almost exclusively use Dropbox, despite having an Office365 subscription with 1TB OneDrive. I tried moving to OneDrive when Dropbox raised their prices, but gave up after a couple days when OneDrive still couldn’t sync my files. Dropbox just works, no matter the number or size of files I throw at them.

As Jobs said, DropBox is a feature not a product. For the same price as Dropbox, you can buy the entire Office 365 suite for 5 users with 1TB each.

To clarify, it is 1 TB for the whole tenant. The first user activates the free 1TB, and the rest may use it.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/buy/compare-al...

“Microsoft 365 Family $99.99/year

Best value: Save 16% with annual subscription

Perfect for up to 6 people Up to 6 TB of cloud storage, that's 1 TB per person Premium safety features in mobile app”

Ah, yes, that’s for OneDrive personal, but for most business applications people are probably using SharePoint which works differently (https://lazyadmin.nl/office-365/sharepoint-storage-limits/).

SharePoint syncs via OneDrive, but offers better categorisation and integration with Windows Explorer and Office (“sites”).

I don’t think that the family plans offer tenant management.

Fair enough.

Since the only way that DropBox makes sense as anything more than a “lifestyle business” is by focusing on the enterprise. The correct comparison would be what they both offer enterprise customers and not my comparison is on the personal side.

Except that Onedrive sync is sub-par. If you have one computer <-> cloud then it works reasonably well, ignoring file naming issues. If you have several computers that you want to keep in sync it gets hopelessly messy and out of sync real fast unless it's just few files.

I've tried to give OneDrive a chance several times but no more. Dropbox has been only reliable choice for three-four way sync for me.

The reason I stay with Dropbox is because I share my login with my partner. The benefit here is that we see exactly the same contents in the Dropbox folder, this is something that is simply not possible with iCloud (even the family account), Google Drive, OneDrive or Amazon.

We have Dropbox on our phone so photos are automatically uploaded to it, this is great because we love sharing out pictures. If we were to do this with one of the other services we would have to mess around with photo permissions and 'share' them with the other person constantly. I got iCloud family thinking it would behave like a single folder the family could access but found out it's really just a bunch of individual iCloud accounts with a shared quota.

She can scan a document at home on the Brother scanner that automatically places the file onto Dropbox. I can immediately fill it out or sign it from my iPad remotely, and she will have the modified document waiting for her. This came in very handy when moving houses and having a bunch of paperwork to complete. I can't even imagine how this process would be on another cloud storage provider.

There have been many times where I just want to cancel my Dropbox subscription because the pricing and storage tiers don't suit me but I can't find a suitable replacement.

Dropbox is also terrible toward people who don't want to use their service, in a way that paying users are conveniently unaware of. Someone shares a folder with your free account? That counts against your quota. Once it exceeds your quota, Dropbox will yell at you for exceeding your storage limit, when all you ever wanted to do was view files people have shared. Want to keep a folder available offline on your iPad? Better pay up.

I appreciate them for being an independent company that is doing its own thing in a gradual way. The internet needs more of those. But it would be miserable if they became a major player with their existing contempt towards end users.

This exists because otherwise someone could just create a bunch of alts and share folders with a main account to get infinite storage. If someone just wants to share content, they can share it as a downloadable folder. As in, users can download files or a Zip of the whole folder to their device. That does not count against quota.

This hit me years ago. I had 5 or 6 clients who were all raving about how great and free dropbox was. Each shared files with me, but it put me over my own limit. Each of them were only sharing a few hundred meg, but it put me well over the 1 (or 2?) gig limit, and I had to pay to continue using it to get their files (which was free for them). Left a bad taste in my mouth.

Dropbox sometimes get's stuck for us (very annoying). We pay for google so have free google drive. We pay for office so have one drive.

We use dropbox as a poor persons collaboration tool. About 100,000 files in 20,000 folders. My major complaint - when it gets stuck syncing a quit on the app and restart of the app solves things - so I wish they would do that internally to the app, just timeout and restart whatever is jamming things up.

I do like the app / folders scoped permissions. For apps that play well there is an apps folder, and the app just has access to its own folder in there. A nice integration point for apps to dump files to for users to look at.

If you pay for Google, how is Google drive free?

They probably mean "they have already paid Google for things other than Google Drive anyway".

Correct, Google Business Plus is 5,000 GB per user. It's pooled, so if you have 20 users, you have 100,000 GB of storage for the team.

Most users use almost nothing so for our use cases google drive has no marginal cost and I've been seeing what I consider positive changes to the google drive story (and maybe speed?)

> you can't have stuff that is shared with you on your local hard drive

What does this complaint mean? You mean Drive doesn't sync down shared files for you to use offline?

On my Chromebook the integration between local files, my Drive files, and Drive files shared by others with me is completely transparent, including local caching of files I've viewed so I can access them again offline, which furthermore includes the directory listings of "shared with me" with the cached and not cached files distinguished by bold or grey names. I can also explicitly mark Drive files as available offline, if I want to manage it manually.

Maybe chromebook does it differently but on macos, google won’t show the content of “shortcut” folders in the Finder app. You have to go on drive.google.com to see the files in shortcut folders (which is how shared folders show up nowadays).

I dread the day they'll finally kill the few grandfathered junctions I still have and make locally mounting the shared drive completely useless.

Same thing would work with Syncthing[1], for free and with more flexibility.

[1] https://syncthing.net/

I love Syncthing to bits but I wouldn't say it was comparable to Dropbox in terms of UX and flexibility for e.g. sharing with others or reliability (it gets stuck on syncing files way more often than Dropbox for me.)

How do I create a share link to deliver a commission to someone with SyncThing? Cloud storage has evolved beyond just syncing stuff. SyncThing is great for keeping two or more up to date copies on different computers, but it doesn't do most of the things people do with Dropbox et al.

I need more than the free tier, but I don't need as much as the lowest they offer. $2/month to Google covers all my needs and works perfectly for them. Dropbox is not in competition with the other services for people served well by those lower tiers. There's no hate, just a mismatch between offering and needs.

It's definitely the only cloud drive I haven't had to think about after setting sync up, but since they've added the device limit, and me not needing enough storage for a paid plan, I've moved off them.

If I wasnt already paying for the all in one iCloud feature set I'd reconsider Dropbox, although this shop thing seems interesting to me.

I've had good experiences on Linux with MEGA.

Ultimately, the alternatives are tolerable.

Most of the cloud drives work just fine.

The iOS client for OneDrive integrates quite well with macOS. A lot better than iCloud for Windows actually.

I use sync.com. I like it.

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