Given that Dropbox isn’t really that seamless an experience any longer in the Apple ecosystem, I’m looking at transitioning away from it, to something more secure and reliable.
Is iCloudDrive ok? The downside of this is that I won’t be able to use it on my Windows machine (I have a couple in my studio because they have 128GB of RAM which I need for music-making) but I can live with that. Is there any way to sync content reliably if it’s stored on an external drive?
Thanks so much
MC
For me Dropbox “just works”. Apple’s iCloud… not reliable and when it acts up there appears nothing i can do but wait till it decides on it’s own to maybe get going again. Apple’s syncing seems to work ok with simple syncs like Reminder, Calendar, and some of the third party apps with simple sync requirements. But to do the more demanding syncs (my files) it is not as good as Dropbox that “just works”
I have numerous sync apps running: Dropbox, Google Gdrive, Apple iCloud, and Synology’s sync with NAS. All have their purpose and their own idiosyncrasies.
unless you have a more compelling reason to go away from Dropbox, I would recommend you not do so. But if you must, then do it in stages by running both for a while and see what happens to your setup.
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As I wrote over a year ago:
Love it or hate it, Dropbox is still the flagship cloud sync provider. It’s still faster, its technology is still superior to the others’, and it works better with fewer quirks. That said, it’s too expensive; it bugs you too often with requests to do something (say, to upgrade to a more expensive Dropbox subscription level); it’s not nearly secure enough; and I suspect the publicly traded Dropbox is spending more time trying to please Wall Street than continually improving its offerings.
Although Apple keeps making commitments to improving its services portfolio, it still has a long way to go in making iCloud something that could win if it weren’t part of the big Apple sandwich for iOS and macOS. Its file-saving methods are opaque, and its performance is often weird at best and non-functional at worst. In a fair fight with other cloud sync providers for the hearts and minds of iOS and macOS users, iCloud wouldn’t survive long.
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Honstly I moved to iCloud Drive long ago and have no problems. I stil have my Dropbox 24GB free allotment (wink) but never use it.
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I’d love to move back to iCloud, but there isn’t really file versioning, sync statuses are not really displayed, and Dropbox seems faster to me. Much faster. I’m using my free 14Gb to house my regular files, and I’m only using about half that space. I’m happy. Can’t say I was with iCloud.
What has become less seamless about it?
My personal long-term experience across many devices is that Dropbox offers the most seamless, straightforward and reliable sync / storage / backup solution available (i.e. compared to iCloud, OneDrive etc).
I appreciate though that other users may have requirements for which Dropbox is not the best option?
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Thanks for the replies everyone. My biggest issues are around external storage. Dropbox blames Apple for the issues, but it’s causing me some problems. Otherwise I’m perfectly happy with Dropbox, and I really don’t want the hassle of moving. But I can’t store all my stuff on the drive of my mac mini, it just isn’t big enough.
UNtil such time as Apple’s iCloud can deal successfully with macOS “packages” I will be sticking with Dropbox as (once the correct settings are made) it handles the packages format used by Scrivener.
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Then Maestral may be able to help, as that will allow you to sync files on external hard drives with Dropbox.
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Apple changed their API and now require all content from cloud apps on macOS to be stored in the ~/Library/CloudStorage folder for privacy reasons. Which “coincidentally” also requires uses to purchase more internal storage on their Macs.
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This is the way.
I am not convinced Apple is maliciously trying to keep folks from storing files on hard drives. If you need or want that feature, that’s still available to you. Just not with Dropbox.
Dropbox has been the most reliable/fast file sync service. And they offer great features as well (even for free accounts).
Surprisingly, I’ve never felt the need to use 3rd party Dropbox clients, even though I’m on an Intel processor from 5 years ago. The official client feels very light at least to my machine.
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I tried switching to iCloud Drive last year and had too many problems to bear.
I develop code, in particular data models, and have hundreds of thousands of often large datasets and many small text files together. No matter what I tried, iCloud Drive would get stuck syncing these and would just stop syncing anything after a few hours. I searched the web and tried to find out why but there is no way of seeing what the errors are.
The only solution was to remove the folders with my code and data in, then it would sync. After a couple of weeks of trying to find a solution, I copied the files back to Dropbox and they synced right away.
I use iCloud for my personal files and always have with no issues, but it clearly isn’t designed to deal with files for coding and data analysis projects. The main frustration is that it just stops syncing and gives no control or even errors when it breaks. Fortunately, I have a 4TB internal SSD in both my Macs so I don’t need external storage, if I did need to use external I’d use a third party tool like Maestral and Dropbox.
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Was your problem with code files specifically related to using Git?
No, I don’t use Git. It is datasets, lots of Jupyter notebooks, c++ source files and Python code. I also have some React websites and apps (which have many small files) for publishing and lots of Docker images.
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I have had good experience with Syncovery. It’s a bit foggy to set up but it works. You can also do it with Carbon Copy Cloner, which can be set up to mount and dismount the target disk.
I moved to Nextcloud a few years ago and I have been really happy with the performance.