Hacker News Reader

Comment by packetlost | Hacker News Reader

it really is too bad. All of the major tech companies' competitors are junk. Google Drive is the least bad of the bunch (out of, say, OneDrive, iCloud, and formerly Amazon Drive), but it's still not great to deal with. DropBox really does do a great job

View on HN

OneDrive used to be rubbish but nowadays it's reliable. We use it at work and I don't feel any pressure to move to Dropbox. It's also much cheaper.

Considering I have one friend who just lost data due to a OneDrive bug less than a month ago, I'm going to say no. I have zero tolerance for data loss.

> OneDrive used to be rubbish but nowadays it's reliable. We use it at work and I don't feel any pressure to move to Dropbox.

OneDrive for Business and OneDrive Personal are two different backends. I'm guessing that you're using the "Business" version?

It’s a unified stack now.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/parable-python-goat-story-amb...

OneDrive still regularly fails when downloading large files... Unusable.

OneDrive is awful.

Why are my files I created on my local device not on my device

Click “keep files on my device”.

I had to uncheck this box since I let my OneDrive (business) account bloat up to 2TB.

This should be the default behavior.

Microsoft deliberately chose not to because keeping your files in the cloud is a barrier to easy switching.

I download an attachment from a colleague. I edit it and save it. I try to send the updated file back via outlook... And it says the file is not available.

This is one of the most basic operations that people do! Why does it not work?

Why would I need to go back in and tell it to keep it locally for when it was local in the first place!?

It's absolutely inane shit like this that drives me up a wall with Microsoft. Do these people use their own products?

To save space, I only have the stuff I am currently working on available locally.

Most laptops aren't having TB sized SSDs.

But you can just use any cloud blob storage provider (including the big ones) along with the rclone utility. rclone supports many.

I even use rclone to sync photos to OneDrive I can then share with family/friends.

Google Drive has gotten inexplicably cheap for Workspace users, too.

They've raised prices a lot over the last few years while reducing the storage you get.

The pricing is weird. If you want to buy à la carte storage, it appears to be $40/TB/month for business and $30/TB/month for enterprise:

https://knowledge.workspace.google.com/admin/storage/buy-mor...

This is more than S3 charges, but S3 will nickel and dime you aggressively for using that storage depending on your use case.

But $22/month buys an entire Google Workspace seat, which includes 5TB, for an effective $5.50/TB/month, which is quite a good deal. On the other hand, it’s rather lacking in flexibility.

I find this all somewhat confusing. At least one of these offerings does not reflect the underlying cost of the product.

The desktop client used to be just terrible. Has that changed? The Dropbox client does have its issues but it's really amazing at... Syncing files. I use it pretty creatively with large numbers of files and large volumes and it just works reliably.

I find Google Drive desktop to be just fine on Windows. Gave up a long time Dropbox sub for it and I have been happy. Dropbox just got too bloaty and unfocused for me.

What's the issue with iCloud?

Mounting Dropbox on Linux machines is really easy. Google Drive has terrible support for binary files and namespaces.

For business purposes I didn't want to use iCloud. But it seems like it's iCloud & Dropbox then.

It doesn't have a great cross platform support (no Linux client, and there are many complaints for the Windows client).

Personally, I dislike that you cannot restore an older version of a file on laptop/phone, and must instead use their web app, for which you need to disable ADP, which defeats its purpose.

I know it’s not a official client but rclone have great iCloud support (but only if you don’t enable advanced data protection).

While there isn't a proper Linux client, if you find yourself on a Linux box and need to sync to or from iCloud, rclone[1] works great. Just putting this out there in the hope that it might help someone.

It's also (ironically given TFA) what I used to sync all my files off dropbox when I cancelled my subscription because of their misuse of root to re-add their thing to special permissions on macOs after I had removed it.[2]

[1] https://rclone.org/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12463338 not trying to reopen a flame war, but for me personally, that was one of those things a company doesn't get to do to me twice. As soon as it happened, I copied my files off and cancelled. In fact I'm there somewhere in the comments on that article saying I was going to be cancelling and I immediately did.

That's neat! I had no idea rclone supported iCloud now. Looks like they added support about a year ago[1].

Step-by-step instructions: https://rclone.org/iclouddrive/

I just tested, and it worked... rclone is such an amazing and incredible project.

[1] https://rclone.org/changelog/#v1-69-0-2025-01-12

I find icloud best as long as everything is apple.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com