iCloud Drive/dropbox

What’s the difference between iCloud Drive and drop box?

There are lots but their significance depends a lot on your usage scenario… In general I find Dropbox syncing more reliable but iCloud supports tags on iOS while Dropbox doesn’t…

2 Likes

DropBox has great cross-platform support. If you ever need to use it on a non-Apple product or ever need to share it with a non-Apple person then DropBox will be more flexible.

If you are only using it for yourself and you are strictly using Apple devices, then iCloud is a great service.

1 Like

You can’t share folders or files from iCloud drive.

From iCloud help:

On iCloud.com, you can use iCloud Drive to upload and download files, share files, delete files, organize files in folders, rename files, and recover recently deleted files. Go to icloud.com/iclouddrive and sign in using your Apple ID (the one you use with iCloud).

Ah yes, true but not as integrated and convenient as Dropbox.

I’ve now been completely on board with iCloud Drive for a year and never had a sync problem. I know in the early days there were issues but in my experience, they have been solved.

4 Likes

Yep it has been flawless for me as well.
I also use DropBox for files that need collaboration with others a specially if its cross-platform.

My biggest gripe with iCloud is that there is no pause button on iCloud drive. Whenever you download a large new file on one of the synced folders. Icloud will start hammering the network until it has finished uploading.

This might be helpful:

1 Like

“solved” not quite.

I have a good 20-30G of Xcode projects on iCloud and constantly battle syncing problems. I only keep them there to use them as a library, not as an active project. Using dropbox is infinately more stable and fast as compared to iCloud. Additionally, iWork files I share across my Macs are not flawless either - syncing of these are done through iCloud also.

I see these issues on the macs I touch myself (4 different macs of various configurations) as well as 7 macs my team uses at work. Oldest Mac is 2011, newest is 2016, all have 16G or more RAM, all are on 200MBit high speed lines (or faster). All of them are worked intensely all have dropbox accounts and sharing which never (I kid you not), never fails.

So iCloud issues solved? No, not in my case.

There is more to the syncing then just the data. It’s likely the file format of your Xcode projects. Dropbox has a broader support. They also have limitations like syncing .cad files.

That site has nothing to do with Dropbox- it’s for a different product that uses the term dropbox.

Its a list of supported file formats.
Please post a better link when you find it.

Thank you for contributing

The link you posted is for what the company Finalsite calls a dropbox, not for the service provided by Dropbox.

Here’s a screenshot of Finalsite’s dropbox, which would be completely alien to most of us, and not what the OP was asking about.

image

Jezzzzz it was just a reminder for people to check if their file formats and file names are compatible with a cloud-based storage system.

I will remove it so you don’t get confused anymore. Please let me know when you find the official KB article listing the files and names.

Nothing different about Xcode projects other than that a whole bunch of files need to arrive at a destination in approximately real time. Same with CAD files. This simply points out that iCloud syncing often does not do that, whereas dropbox seems to never fail. One should not need to know the data type that is being synced to understand a synching service is good or not. Hence my reply to “icloud issues are solved”.

Yep you are right.
I realized this a while ago that not all cloud-based file sharing services are created equal and that some support more or different file types and characters in the filenames than others. Its worth remembering this when things go wrong. iCloud is very much a consumer-oriented service that works very well for its intended purposes.

If Apple only would make an iCloud “Pro” service where we can use our own URL and have Dropbox-like file sharing and collaboration features…

An infuriating topic for me! I use DropBox where I must (Quicken, 1Password), iCloud where I must (generally Apple’s own apps, like Notes), and Resilio Sync for everything else as I don’t really trust other people’s Clouds.