Yay? Nay?

Always stayed with the free Dropbox account all these years, but now consulting for a nutritional company with a new need to team on big files.

Just checking to see if others love it, have other option suggestions.

Also, since the subscription contains enough room, do you paid users sync your entire Mac? I may need to rethink my whole file location schema.

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M1 2020 Mac mini (16G 2T) • Ventura 13.x • Dual 25" Acer 1440p LCDs • M1 2020 13" MBAir (256G 8G) •

Maybe.

If you need to share large files, you may need a business account. Dropbox requires personal users with whom you want to share to have their own account (a way to increase their customer base), and it must be big enough to contain the files you wish to share. The free account may or may not be large enough. This from my personal experience with my family and sharing large numbers of photos.

Mike

Quote
tuqqer
Also, since the subscription contains enough room, do you paid users sync your entire Mac? I may need to rethink my whole file location schema.

I "do". Well, I sync half of my files that I need access to daily, since the other half don't fit on the internal in my laptop. Still sorting out a final sync solution that those files. But it makes it way easier to go from work/home/laptop knowing all the files I need will be there. I was using a NAS at home to sync the other half of the files, but that got interrupted by a remodel and I haven't set it up again yet.

look into Tresorit

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!#$@@$#!

proofraed by OwEn the c@t.

I was a long-time paid Dropbox user. I absolutely HATE their web interface! Maybe it can be customized and I never found that capability, but I hated it. So if users will need to access files via their website, DON'T DO IT!

My company uses a paid Box.com plan as we're an all-MSFT shop. I actually like box.com better. It's just simple and makes sense.

~A

Dropbox is not a backup utility, so if that's where you're going with this, I'd think again.

I've found Dropbox well worth the investment to keep sync'd versions of files between several personal machines, and for collaborating with others on coordinated document editing.

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rj
AKA
Vreemac, Moth of the Future

My business wouldnt exist without dropbox. Been a user for 10+ years.

Maybe define "big" files?

There are many ways to increase your free dropbox size to something like 20 (?) GB -- might be enough?

Although its easiest to share files with a shared folder (requiring them to have a dropbox account) -- its *not* the only way to share large files.
You can send a link to a file, which doesnt require a dropbox account. You can also "request" files from people, which also doesnt require them to have an account.

if the new company already uses DBox, then a no brainer.

DB on its own its not a designed for "automated" backups -- but there are utilities to make it into one.

I cant speak to the web interface -- I rarely use it. I always access via finder.

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Edited 999 time(s). Last edit at 12:08PM by jdc.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/02/2019 01:52PM by jdc.

Wish they offered a middle-ground paid subscription plan, or a family plan.

We think Dropbox works well, but I'm not going to spend $99/person/year in my household for this.

We will be migrating over to using iCloud's new file options for sharing - advantage over Dropbox is that iCloud is global and works in places like China that Dropbox does not.

I've had a paid account now for several years after amassing ~25GB in free space through various referrals and bonuses over the years.

I use it primarily for synching files between my devices, sharing/collaboration with a few clients, and the bulk of the storage that I now use is taken up with website backups for my web hosting clients.

I'm still only using about 12% of the 2TB allowance, so it really is quite a bit more than I need. I have gotten good deals on the renewal price through various deals on slick deals (from Dell and then from Amazon), so my price per year is somewhere in the $60-$75/year range. And I think I still have 2 years of subscription built up, so I am insulated from price increases for a little while. All in all, I think the 'network effect' of dropbox still makes it the best cloud storage for me. The clients that I use it with still prefer it to other options. But for me, I can see a lot of these cloud storage options basically looking a lot the same and are interchangeable to a certain extent. I could potentially see myself moving to something else if dropbox's pricing continues to be way out of whack, etc.

I do not sync my entire internal storage, though I could now with the amount of free space I've got. I haven't looked recently to know whether it is easy to setup your Mac's user folder as the dropbox folder, for instance. That would be one thing to consider, but it seems like there might end up being a lot of stuff that doesn't really need to be synced, at least for me, in that scenario.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/04/2019 07:45PM by clay.

wish MacResource had a LIKE or THANKs button, but in lieu of that, thanks to all for these ideas and insights and personal usage stories.

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M1 2020 Mac mini (16G 2T) • Ventura 13.x • Dual 25" Acer 1440p LCDs • M1 2020 13" MBAir (256G 8G) •