Going back to Dropbox from Google Drive | Hacker News Reader

Going back to Dropbox from Google Drive

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38 pointsari_elle66 comments

I've been testing Dropbox, box.net, Google Drive, and AeroFS head to head for the past month or so (I guess I should add SpiderOak, Wuala, Bitcasa, and maybe something else I don't know about)

They all do pretty well for small datasets (1-10GB of text files, office documents, mp3s, and sometimes 1-2GB video files and similar files) on OSX and Windows 7. I haven't tried them on Linux or mobile devices much. They all kind of suck with multi-user access (which I simulated by putting clients on all my machines and using them randomly), larger files, etc.

None have particularly good performance (fucking Comcast Business; reasonably good on the colo LAN but still not what I'd consider great). Even with the LAN Sync options turned on, adding a new large file with a few client devices on the same LAN causes pain (multiple trips up and down...). A per-client 1/10 of the link size throttle isn't really helpful with 10 clients. AeroFS is different (since it's peer to peer), but is a lot slower than the LAN speed in my experience to sync. Having clients on VPN sometimes makes the whole thing even weirder, since machines on the same LAN aren't on the same network, so syncing traffic goes over a (potentially remote) VPN. And then there's the lulz caused by sync-over-cellular, which admittedly isn't transparent to the client (mifi hotspot sometimes).

Looking forward to just getting an 8x4TB Synology or FreeNAS for home, syncing with some combination of physical drives and rsync to/from the colo, and using disk in the colo. iSCSI seems like the best solution.

In the long run, I think what's needed is a smarter client -- it should be smart about syncing based on what network I'm on (VPN, LTE, etc.), pre-caching some files and not others (either explicitly or predictively, and maybe different on different devices)

There's also the huge mess of security -- both confidentiality and versioning/availability. For multi-user, you can't just layer truecrypt on top. It's depressing that someone yesterday asked "what's the best way to manage corporate documents without putting a copy on every laptop..." (data room style) and the best answer in 2012 seems to be SharePoint :(

Another issue to consider is multiple accounts. For example I have 3 Google accounts (1 personal, 2 for work). I also have two Dropbox accounts (1 personal, 1 work).

You are essentially in for a world of hurt because all the services want to believe you only have one account, or at the very least a one to one mapping between their accounts and user accounts on your systems.

Thankfully I was able to get dropbox running with two different dropbox accounts but with one user account on my systems. This was because dropbox has command line tools (for Linux only) so you can fake them out with different $HOME settings.

But on Android etc I am SOL.

Why have two accounts if the work account is not more secure than the personal account (since both accounts are on your computers?) If you want some devices to only have the work account, you could still use a shared folder to sync between the work account and the personal account rather than actually using two clients.

I keep my personal content (eg photos, music, backups of my personal systems) in my personal dropbox. My work dropbox contains software builds, presentations, customer stuff etc. Both are paid accounts. I work from home and hence use the same system for work and home activities.

What I want is to be able to access both sets of content on many of my machines. For example I can read my work and home email on multiple devices. But dropbox for Android only allows for one account, as does dropbox for Windows and Mac.

Shared folders are a no go. First of all I don't want to mix personal and work stuff. Secondly dropbox penalises you. For example if two users each separately pay dropbox for a 100GB account and then user 1 shares 25GB of content with user 2, dropbox will subtract 25GB from user 2's allowance. ie what you pay for is the total amount of data you can access, not the amount of unique data.

Couldn't you create multiple user accounts on Mac OSX and then leave one dropbox account logged in in each account, and use local permissions to access files in one account from the other? You could probably do the same with Windows, although I'm not sure how permissions would work.

Having to have an entire extra user session logged in, just to keep dropbox running is way overkill. I did briefly experiment on Linux having two user accounts with different home directories but the same user id (numeric) but other bits of the system really didn't like that.

In any event my original point is that this sort of setup will increasingly happen, none of the existing products handle it well, and it is a factor to consider when choosing what products to use.

I have a similar issue so use different browsers for different accounts as my work around. So at any one time I will have Opera, Chrome, FF and Opera Next open.

I was a happy Dropbox user until Google Drive came out at half the cost, so I switched and bought 100GB of Google storage --- Big mistake! --- Google Drive is beta quality software at best. Many bugs, missing features and no support.

Google would not refund the extra storage I bought, so use Syncdocs to sync to it. Syncdocs works just like Dropbox (reliable) but uses Google Drive server as storage backend.

How does syncdocs add reliability on top of Drive? Can it force resync attempts that the Drive client doesn't?

You should check out Tonido Sync (http://www.tonido.com/). It will solve your security, sync, multi-user and LAN switch requirements.

I used Google Drive for about 5 minutes then went back to Dropbox and haven't looked back. Firstly, finding where the hell the Google drive folder was located was a pain - then discovering it's odd internal hierarchy and the fact that trying to open files in there launched Google Docs rather than the local application default drove me mad.

Dropbox gives me exactly what I want and need: a simple folder that does sync across all my devices and opens files using the local default application.

I'm not sure what you saw, but your Google Drive folder is just a subfolder under your user folder, similar to how Dropbox is, I believe, in your My Docs folder. You can also right click on the icon in the systray and browse to the Google Drive folder. Are you not on Windows?

I think when I installed Dropbox I was able to choose the folder, or it created a shortcut on my desktop. In truth the issue was not so much the location, but the internal structure that seemed obscure at the time (this was when GDrive first came out, might be different now).

Dropbox just appeared as a simple, normal folder. That's it. I put stuff in, it got synced. I clicked on stuff inside, and it opened like a normal file in any other folder. It just worked.

hmm not sure what you mean by internal structure that seemed obscure.

GDrive works just like you describe: a simple, normal folder. That's it. I put stuff in, it got synced

I'm pretty sure as skyhook_mockups described it's just a normal folder. GDrive is going to offer a lot once more applications start offering their services services based on what you store in GDrive which is what I see as the differentiating factor for things stored in GDrive. I imagine Dropbox will mimic it in time, but they're behind at the moment.

At some point I shut off google drive because every boot it would give me about 20 popups that it couldn't access a drive that didn't exist.

To make matters worse, I want to keep Google and Facebook inside Google Chrome, and use Safari for my normal life. But every time I clicked a document in Google Drive, it opened Safari and conveniently logged me into Google.

With all of the hate towards Microsoft here i'm not really surprised of no mention of SkyDrive. It's working quite well for me. I never had any technical issues with Dropbox. I don't like their pricing model. The free account offers less space than my Gmail. The pro account offers way too much space for my use to even consider upgrading.

My other concern about Dropbox is that it took them weeks to figure out whether or not their system was compromised not long ago with the help of "outside experts." I don't know what to think of a company which hires others to figure out what's going on with their systems. That worries me a little.

I don't think that HN particularly hates MS, it's just that few people here live inside the MS ecosystem. Google Drive is relevant to those who live in Google's cloud, Dropbox is relevant to all the Mac users I know. That's why these two will be mentioned a lot more often.

...and relevant to the Linux users, too.

Actually, Skydrive works pretty well on OS X too. I'm pleasantly impressed with it, to be honest.

All software companies need external security consultants when you go beyond a certain level of of forensic analysis; unless you dedicate completely to that field it's unlikely anyone has in-house staff for that.

That they hired outsiders is a sign of integrity to me. The cheap option would be a quick internal investigation and a statement of findings that people would be sceptical about. Outsiders bring new perspectives and experience.

Sky drive is not suitable for me because it currently lacks selective folder syncing. I actually have gigabytes of data in the service that I'd synced previously but I don't want/need all of it back on my laptop where I have limited storage.

Until this changes, the service is not particularly useful to me.

SkyDrive fails if you have certain characters in filenames. Characters that are perfectly valid on OS X. When I tried SkyDrive I got 50+ warnings that files hadn't been synced because of the filenames.

If I was Windows only then I'd probably use SkyDrive, apart from the filename issue it worked quite well, much better than Google Drive.

What a scary sight. They are having mechanical turks roam their support forums for support stars giving big-company-esque answers:

Sorry to hear your experience with Google Drive was troublesome PayamM. Google Drive is constantly improving and thank you for the feedback!

Google's community managers are an embarrassment. They are supposed to help, but they have no more knowledge and power than the users reporting bugs. It would be more effective and less annoying to just have a script that marks every thread "WONTFIX".

At least uploading into Google Drive did not created hundreds of thousands of duplicates [1] [2] [3]. I still did not get any official answer from Google support.

[1] http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/drive/Yjmkd4nbhw...

[2] https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3910363?start=0&tst...

[3] https://productforums.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/d...

I thought to throw in SugarSnc since it hasn't been mentioned. I also have Dropbox, Drive, Skydrive but Sugar is the one that seems to tick the most boxes for me. It is very easy to choose what folders you sync and to which devices as different devices font need all files. You can add passwords to public folders which is a nice touch. And pricing (at least when I compared 18 months back) was quite competitive.

I deleted Sugar when on Android it was taking up a significant amount of battery and cycle -- and it was basically doing nothing to do that.

Have they fixed that? Is it better on battery on Android now?

...not really. On Android I do find it burning CPU/battery quite often so I updated settings to only sync when plugged in and on WiFi. It is a minor limitation for me and can do a manual sync if happen to need something from my PC and am on the move.

My biggest bug bear is it asks to upload my photos every frickn time I log in despite having deselected in settings and pressing the 'never' option.

Google Drive does appear to have performance issues with big data sets. I too have a lot of data (20GB +) in the service and whenever I restart my machine, it does churn the CPU "scanning the web" for changes. Memory usage is also rather high at 600MB.

I have never really used dropbox so I don't know if that is really any better from a resource standpoint although from the author of this post indicates like that's the case.

I'm still sticking with Google Drive since I only restart my machine about once a month, so this is not too much of a problem for me.

In any case, I hope that these issues would get addressed in a future update to the client.

Dropbox startup can easily bring my "spinning rust" platter to knees. They really need to copy TrueCrypts "make way for IO activity" option during encryption.

I am curious, how much data do you sync up with drop box ?

Since Dropbox offered me 50 GB for using a T-Mobile Samsung Galaxy S3, I've stuck with them. I used Google Drive since I use the spreadsheets, and I absolutely hate it. So I'm sticking with Dropbox for now.

I moved back to Dropbox after a month of use. The only thing that bothered me was google takes a long time to polish its product. Why should I be paying during all this period.

Why does it have to be either/or? I use both Google Drive and Dropbox; the two products have different strengths and weakness, and so I see them as complementary.

This has been my experience as well. Google Drive is indispensable for editing, sharing, and collaborating on school files, while Dropbox has that "just works" quality as far as storing and syncing my personal archive.

Dont know about large file size, but the problem with google drive is it is the most memory eating application. It require around 150 MB RAM when not synching. As compared to dropbox require only 40. Even if it has more space for free users i will not use it. Dropbox primary and SkyDrive a secondary are my choices.

Are you really complaining about a difference of 50 cents worth of RAM, and saying you won't use Google Drive on that basis alone?

It costs far more than 50c to upgrade from 8.0GB to 8.1GB. New motherboards are pricy for laptops.

That doesn't matter. If you can be bothered to count megabytes of RAM, you already have a shortage, with or without Google Drive (or Dropbox, for that matter).

Not complaining about the price of the RAM but it is about the thing, how much load the Google apps create on system resources. And that is because it always try to track each and every user activity.

Drive was never an option as a Linux user.

For our company it was the lack of the ability to selectively sync sub-folders. We would have to download 80 GB just to have a few photoshop files for a particular client synced between us while we worked on projects. Completely unusable.

Perhaps use symbolic links?

I just moved to AeroFS, no regrets.

Would you be willing to sling away an invite?

Sent (and that was my last of the 2 I was given).

How did you get an invite? I've been on the waitlist for well over a year without any updates from them.

I got one last week, after having waited a year.

I have 2 invites. I'll send you one if you want.

The other invite is also available to whoever else wants it.

Can I have one please?

Sent

I love to try AeroFS if you still have the invite available.

Sorry I only have 1 left and I'm holding it for goronbjorn.

Will keep you in mind if I receive more.

Yes, please send it to me! Thanks a ton. seanandrewroseATgmailDOTcom

Sent

I tried using Google Drive for daily database backups (~10 GB * 2 files). - It failed miserably - could backup these files only occasionally. - Quickly filled out my 100GB quota, even when I deleted old version.

Dropbox worked like a charm: reliable and much less expensive, considering that size of history files does not count (with special ~$3/month addition).

I looks like Google allocated mediocre product managers for creating G-drive.

Very true..same here...Dropbox is just awesome, +1 for it's usability!!

I wasted my entire day trying to install 'Google drive' on my Windows 7 machine. It was throwing installation error 1603. What the heck is that!!

I tried many solutions searching web (e.g. giving all permissions to %AppData% folder, uninstalling all existing google products etc) but all in vain!! Google...why do you make such creepy s/w?

Dropbox bug which results in data loss has not been resolved yet. So far it appears to have affected both Mac and Linux users.

http://konklone.com/post/dropbox-bug-can-permanently-lose-yo...

Hmmm you should really try skydrive in that case. Much more reliable and friendly to use.

I'm a bit paranoid with sensitive data, so wuala.com has been great in my case. You just get a client to access the data and when you upload files they all get encrypted before going up there.

I'll only use SpiderOak. I don't want the company I'm uploading personal files to, to be able to view my files.

I use spideroak as well, mainly because of it's flexibility (partner uses same account, only syncs the necessary folders) and the fact that it's cheap (at the time I signed up; especially considering many people can use the same account)

But man, is it slow! (OK, I realise it's encrypting locally, but even accounting for that it just "feels" clunky compared to the competition)

Also, I can't seem to view pictures using the online account file browser. It seems to suggest that thumbnails will be visible before downloading, but it never seems to work :(

Otherwise, it's really good! (I also have a skydrive, GDrive & a dropbox account that I use for quick sharing, save game backups, etc -- They've all got their strengths)

Losing my files in Google Drive is what made me decide to get a paid Dropbox account.

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