Correct. The advantage is that you can access more data than is on your computer’s hard drive, but the downside is that the files which are not local are not backed up.
I have a Mac Mini that downloads all of my iCloud and Dropbox files, and that computer backs them up, but for my MacBook Air, even with a 1TB drive, there’s not enough room for all of my Dropbox and iCloud files to remain locally (unless you want to tape a drive to the back of your laptop screen, of course).
Summary: When it works, it’s great. When it doesn’t, it’s impenetrable.
Tonight I tried to download a large folder from Dropbox with about 800 MB of video files in it.
It clearly stalled. When that happened, there’s literally nothing that you can do.
Eventually this message came from Finder:
I’ve restarted Finder. I’ve restarted the app. I’ve unchecked all of the “Finder Extensions” for Strongsync. I even quit the “StrongsyncFileProvider” process via Activity Monitor.
Then I relaunched Strongsync and restarted Finder again.
The Strongsync Dropbox folder is empty.
I quit everything again. I got the same error message again.
I quit everything a third time.
This time when Strongsync re-launched, it seemed to work fine.
You know how when iCloud Drive works, it’s invisible and seamless, but when it works, there’s really nothing to do but hope that it will start working again?
Strongsync is like that, except for Dropbox.
I’ll keep using it for Google Drive, for now, as my Google Drive needs are light, but I don’t think I’ll be using it for Dropbox, where I keep most of my life.
The Dropbox app, despite not being Apple Silicon native and despite being a terrible and poorly written app which I don’t feel great about having installed on my Mac, is at least more useful in telling me what Dropbox is doing, and giving me more control over the process. (Most of the time. Dropbox has its own impenetrableness at times, too.)
Fortunately I’m perfectly happy to live with a small external drive affixed to my laptop.
Thanks
Moral of the story - Leopards don’t change their spots
Expandrive did similar things - Sounds like Strongsync is just Expandrive 2.0 with similar issues
Unfortunately, I have to reluctantly agree with this assessment.
The file provider API currently slows down with huge directories, the most recent builds of 11.3 improve this!
Feel free to hit jmancuso@expandrive.com with any specific details, etc. Internally the app uses all of the same ExpanDrive protocol code, and the integration with File Provider is obviously completely new and we’re the first out of the gate with it. So any specific feedback we can improve on or test cases that fail will be super-useful.
We’ve heard the complaints about reliability in the past and, to be honest, are hopeful that with this new Apple-blessed technology we can provide something deeply reliable.
I’ve been hit with the same thing when trying to download several videos from OneDrive
Also, @hemancuso, there’s no way to keep already downloaded files locally between reboots / relaunch of the app ?
Me… 24 hours ago: “I’m going to use StrongSync on this new M1 Mac Mini, because I really don’t want to install the Dropbox app on my new shiny precious child.”
Me…5 minutes ago: “I tried. I really tried. I hope you know that. I didn’t want to do this to you, but… I need Dropbox to work reliably, and…”
/me goes to dropbox.com/install …
A single tear drops from the corner of my eye.
“I’m sorry… I’m so sorry…”
I’m betting that there are some significant improvements to File Provider in whatever comes after Big Sur. As much as I have hope, it usually takes Apple 2-3 generations before things stop being dicey.
I hope you’re right. I paid for a lifetime license for StrongSync… I want it to be a viable alternative.
The support and service is shocking. I had their software in demo mode for ages before purchasing but didn’t really demo it properly - I just trusted it did what it said. I’ve reached out to support with Loom videos going through everything. Its so unreliable I was downloading to a local folder then uploading to Google Drive via the web.
I tried many many times to get a resolution and never even got a suggestion on a fix.
Files couldn’t even be renames. Files weren’t uploaded or moved between directories.
It was absolutely useless. I can’t believe everyone’s like this until I came here - I had such high hopes and now looking for an alternative reluctantly on M1. I almost went lifetime too but I’ve been trying this for weeks now and sadly have to give up.
I don’t know the developer (Jeff) but I get the sense that he has great “vision” and high ambitions, but he needs help with support and development.
Unfortunately I don’t think the ‘market’ will support that kind of staff.
It does not seem like ExpanDrive and StrongSync are his full-time job, given the pace of development, etc. Which makes me suspect that this app falls into the category of “Hobby App” or “Nights and Weekends Project”… but the task (people’s data) needs far more attention than that.
ExpanDrive was a great idea… that never quite worked well enough to use it / rely on it for more than the occasional job. Likewise, a Dropbox app (plus Google Drive, plus OneDrive, plus…) that uses the file provider API in Big Sur is a great, but very ambitious, idea. Considering that the entire Dropbox company hasn’t been able to release an app that does it, perhaps it was foolish to believe a single developer would be able to do so.
With the latest updates this month, the app has gotten much less buggy for me (I’m only using it with Google Drive, not Dropbox) – but it still feels like a work in progress. I trust it when it comes to displaying and searching the stuff I have on my cloud drives, but I still feel like I should check on the web interface every time I add something.
6 months later…
Like @tjluoma dcraig and others in this thread, I had high hopes (and still do) for Strongsync with my new M1 Mini. I was hoping to replace the mashup of “cloud” apps- Google Drive, OneDrive, SFTP servers with one lean, clean and native app.
I really tried. But I ran into all of the edge cases and reliability problems as the above posters, and then some. Stuck files, failed sync’s, mismatched renames, connections that couldn’t be deleted, search that didn’t work. In the end I had to get back to work so I went crawling back to the old standbys.
I’ll keep testing as new versions come out, but as of now it still feels like a POC. @hemancuso I’ve sent a few emails your way with lots of notes and crashreports etc. Hope you got them, but I never heard back.
Yes, same kind of software. Just that Strongsync is buggier…
I personally use CloudMounter (from Setapp).
I’ve read that Insync seems to be a decent option for those wanting file streaming along with spotlight indexing.
Strongsync is great on paper.
There is still enormous number of bugs that make it unusable for anything. It doesn’t sync, it syncs to wrong folders, it syncs one file several times, it syncs as supposed (suddenly), but you’ve uploaded the files already via web interface and now you have 2 folders with the same name.
Support is silent (answering “I’ve sent your bug report to developers” doesn’t count) and new versions to address the issues did not appear for a half a year.
Place your bets on some other software. This is a dead horse at the moment.
So it seems if you dress up a pig it is still a pig. Seems Strongsync has the same issues as Expandrive. I was hoping those problems would be in the past.