Dropbox Reaches Key Profit Milestone
I wrote this 448 days ago, on why I moved to Google Drive.
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11030171" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11030171</a><p>But now I&#x27;m back.<p>Google Drive is unusable. I upgraded to a paid plan so I&#x27;d have no storage limits. But the moment I tried to back some large folders, I noticed the upload speeds were capped, and the native client kept crashing. I&#x27;d leave it on overnight, just to see it not running in the morning. 100 GB of files is a trivial amount these days, and it&#x27;s impossible to manage on Drive. And selective sync would attempt to upload the folder before it deletes it locally, so was useless. I couldn&#x27;t just select which folders to upload first, even though I was there trying it due to Drive&#x27;s own inability to upload large amounts of files.<p>Then there are all the sync issues. I had setup 5 or 6 computers to sync files, which is the main use case Drive is sold on. Yet, I&#x27;d notice (1) and (2) and (3) duplicate versions of the same file, and at one point I had a folder with (79).<p>So I&#x27;d have to dig through partially synced folders and duplicates just to figure out what to sync first, then sort through computers to see if Drive was actually running. Then remove large folders to outside of Drive, and drop them in in batches just so Drive wouldn&#x27;t choke itself.<p>I also had an issue with file name length. I had copied a folder of saved web pages from Dropbox. I&#x27;d noticed all the directories were empty in Drive. Turns out, the folder names were too long. I understand the existence of technical constraints, but if I can&#x27;t move files from Dropbox just by copying them, Drive needs to modify it&#x27;s feature set.<p>Insync is the only reason I still have Drive. It doesn&#x27;t crash, and it doesn&#x27;t have sync duplication issues. But again, there is some API rate limit that causes it to halt. Drive is simply incapable of handling large amounts of files. I wish they&#x27;d just say that.<p>So I am back on Dropbox because I have no other options. And it just works. I had no idea syncing was such a hard problem.<p>And now with smart sync, I can see the files locally without having them take up space. Most of the files are for storage purposes anyway, so this is genius. The new online interface is better than google also.<p>It still locks up Photoshop, and I bet it&#x27;s still piss slow in Japan, but for now all my large folders are back on Dropbox. Drive is reserved for Sheets and Docs that don&#x27;t take up any space anyway, because the files are just links.<p>I use Windows but I don&#x27;t trust Microsoft.