Dropbox alternative

[Mr Pointy]

Well it seems Dropbox might be going down the pan a bit as they have raised my subscription by 20% & doubled the storage offered. I don't use the 1TB I have at the moment so I don't need to pay 20% extra for more. It also seems they have changed the interface so it now uses a custom app/programme rather than Windows Explorer & although I haven't needed to use it yet it's getting some poor reviews.

Dropbox has always worked ok for me: I use it to sync my personal files & pictures & it also holds the project files of the jobs I've worked on, syncing to my desktop & a couple of laptops. It just got on with it & I never had a problem using it.

So, what are the alternatives? I'm not particularly interested in running my own storage as I need it to be acessible when I'm away & the house is powered down. Some encryption would be nice as well but that usually seems to interfere with the transparent operation which is the benefit of Dropbox. Maybe Onedrive, although that would tie me in to my O365 subscription?

[bitchstewie]

Well if you have an Office 365 subscription then OneDrive for Business is the obvious choice.

I'd be looking at that or Google Drive.

Switch on Multi Factor Authentication if you haven't already done so.

[petemurphy]

just changed to one drive as i needed email and office and dropbox was 8 quid and the full office 14ish so made sense. loved dropbox but have no need for it now the others have caught up

[Art0ir]

OneDrive

[Slushbox]

OneDrive is pretty good. Backs up phone stuff too. It won't tie you in to Office, the first 5GB of store is free. 50GB is £1.99 a month.

The PC app needs a bit of configuring, it auto backs up everything I drag onto the desktop, usally just before deleting it.

Edited by Slushbox on Saturday 15th June 05:56

[Penelope Stopit]

Degoo is good

Mega is good but could be dodgy

[blueg33]

Onedrive. We also use it at work across 50,000 employees in the Group.

[wiggy001]

I don't understand the logic of Dropbox:

2TB Dropbox = £96 per year
Office 365 inc 6 x 1TB = £80
Office 365 inc 1 x 1TB = £60

Office 365 is a no brainer vs Dropbox imho

[anonymous-user]

But Dropbox offer a free option, which is what most people use.... It's only a few GB, 10 for most people, but that's more than enough for what most people use it for.

They have recently limited the number of computers / devices that can use one account to three, which now has me shopping around.

I store all my photos on Google photos. I might start looking at using Google drive more...

[NoTreadLeft]

RogerDodger said:

But Dropbox offer a free option, which is what most people use.... It's only a few GB, 10 for most people, but that's more than enough for what most people use it for.

They have recently limited the number of computers / devices that can use one account to three, which now has me shopping around.

I store all my photos on Google photos. I might start looking at using Google drive more...

Have just switched to Google Drive for exactly this reason. Seems to be working well so far - functionally I haven’t noticed any difference.

[Mr Pointy]

wiggy001 said:

I don't understand the logic of Dropbox:

2TB Dropbox = £96 per year
Office 365 inc 6 x 1TB = £80
Office 365 inc 1 x 1TB = £60

Office 365 is a no brainer vs Dropbox imho

I started out using it when working on a project with five others, not all of who had O365 & I needed more than the free 1GB so coughed up for the £80 1TB package. I just carried on with it as it was business expense anyway & I have an aversion to bundling several services into one as it makes it much harder to be flexible & change. A 20% increase is too much though so I'm off.

[Ken Figenus]

Yeah - I'm not into 20% overnight hikes on anything. Its taking the p and I'll be canning it.

I find Dropbox handy (especially the auto camera uploads from my phone that works sometimes) but hate the way you cant link folder outside of Dropbox to it. Everything must be IN Dropbox and as I use different drives for different things (have RAID10 set, SSDs,M.2 + basic HDD's for different functions on my PC) so it is not flexible. Also if someone shares a media folder with me it insists on chewing up my HDD space and my Dropbox allocation.

What I also use is Jottacloud. The HUGE advantage this has over everything is that you can archive a folder so as its still backed up on the cloud but cleared off your HDD, freeing up space. Its also unlimited.

[Equus]

Mr Pointy said:

I'm not particularly interested in running my own storage as I need it to be accessible when I'm away & the house is powered down.

We replaced our collaborative Dropbox account (which was costing us something silly like £60-£70 a month, from memory) with a MyCloud server. Yes, it needs to be left switched on (along with your wireless internet server), but I never 'power down' my house that far, when I'm away. Costs nothing after initial purchase.

[Mr Pointy]

Equus said:

Mr Pointy said:

I'm not particularly interested in running my own storage as I need it to be accessible when I'm away & the house is powered down.

We replaced our collaborative Dropbox account (which was costing us something silly like £60-£70 a month, from memory) with a MyCloud server. Yes, it needs to be left switched on (along with your wireless internet server), but I never 'power down' my house that far, when I'm away. Costs nothing after initial purchase.

It's not really on for me though as I could be away for six weeks & there would be no-one here to reset anything if it needed it. The whole idea is to have (virtually) guaranteed access to the storage. I'm having a play with Onedrive to see if it's adequate.

[Mr Pointy]

Ken Figenus said:

Yeah - I'm not into 20% overnight hikes on anything. Its taking the p and I'll be canning it.

I find Dropbox handy (especially the auto camera uploads from my phone that works sometimes) but hate the way you cant link folder outside of Dropbox to it. Everything must be IN Dropbox and as I use different drives for different things (have RAID10 set, SSDs,M.2 + basic HDD's for different functions on my PC) so it is not flexible. Also if someone shares a media folder with me it insists on chewing up my HDD space and my Dropbox allocation.

What I also use is Jottacloud. The HUGE advantage this has over everything is that you can archive a folder so as its still backed up on the cloud but cleared off your HDD, freeing up space. Its also unlimited.

I see what you mean but for me it's the opposite: I like knowing that if I want something stored & synced than it needs to be in the Dropbox folder. There's no faffing about & finding out you forgot to share a particular folder & so you haven't got the files.

It's a shame they ran out of ways to grow the company so went for a price hike & a fairly meaningless offer of more storage that they can be pretty sure most people won't actually use.

[Equus]

Mr Pointy said:

It's not really on for me though as I could be away for six weeks & there would be no-one here to reset anything if it needed it.

Fair enough, although ours has been running for a couple of years now, I think, and neither it nor the wireless router has ever needed a reset.