Independently of whether DB reads/uploads all the files or not, I've arrived at a difficult position about Dropbox: I'm looking for alternatives. No, it's unrelated with politics or pricing; it's just that in many cases Dropbox sucks.
Why? Well, I mostly don't care about all the new features (mobile, Carousel, etc.). What I care the most is that i) it syncs files and ii) acts as a quasi-backup. However, I see the same old bugs from years ago and nothing gets done. To name just a few:
- If I copy a file to the Dropbox folder in Windows, it will convert it to small caps, even if the file is in Camel Case. Yes, I get that for windows caps are just "optional", but do not change it just for the sake of it!
- Many people sometimes have temporary files. Photoshop, Matlab, Word, Latex, etc. leave crumbles of temp files and folders. Can't I just set a quick rule to avoid "tmp" folders and e.g. ".tmp" files?
- A few months ago their forums went down and stayed down for around a month? Why? Technical problems. But the real reason is that they don't really care.
There is no way DB can justify their valuation with just the syncing part, and I'm fine with that. But just stopping altogether to improve in that area is a huge turn-off, and on top of that they do not care to fix bugs (there were hundreds of bug requests about the lowercase bug in the forums, before they deleted it).
Now that my rant is over, I ask you: are there any useful alternatives? I've heard that GDrive is very slow and the MSFT alternative seems a bit risky to me (will it work on Linux in the future? will it be customizable?).
I use spideroak. It has been very reliable and fast, but you have to actually want its main feature, which is secure (client encrypted) versioned backup. Keeping versions saves you from data loss by overwriting but it also needs more storage space. However, spideroak does it in a pretty smart way. I am surprised how little space it actually needs.
Unison was the first thing I tried after moving away from DropBox. The main problem I had with it was that both machines involved in the syncing had to be running which made moving from laptop to desktop not as seamless as I would have liked. Still the syncing process was flawless. I had better results using Seafile, http://seafile.com/en/home/, their free account was sufficient for my needs and worked great. You can self-host if you are worried about keeping control of your files.
You'll have that problem with anything you don't run yourself so that seems like an unfair complaint. Can't this sync desktop <-> server and laptop <> server?
In Seafile the server doesn't notify changes to clients, instead the clients poll every 30 seconds, which means that changes are synced with a 30 second delay (and presumably bandwidth is wasted). See https://github.com/haiwen/seafile/issues/992. I'm not a fan of Dropbox but at least the lag is only a few seconds, which I think is because the clients notice changes with inotify and send them to the server, and the server probably pushes updates to the clients.
I haven't tried to use it seriously, but seeing that it doesn't do this right discourages me a bit from testing it further.
I'm using ownCloud[0] in version 7 and 8. In the early version ownCloud was a bit hard to configure and run on your own. But the new versions are really good (in my opinion). For me it's very reliable.
I once wrote a plugin for OwnCloud for work. But before running OwnCloud on a server I would first like to see an audit and/or analysis of the code. I read some code of IIRC version 5 or 6, which made me skeptical.
SpiderOak. When I decided I wanted auto-syncing cloud storage, I chose them exactly because of the temp file issue. I ended up also liking their security policies and pricing quite a bit. https://spideroak.com/
Why? Well, I mostly don't care about all the new features (mobile, Carousel, etc.). What I care the most is that i) it syncs files and ii) acts as a quasi-backup. However, I see the same old bugs from years ago and nothing gets done. To name just a few:
- If I copy a file to the Dropbox folder in Windows, it will convert it to small caps, even if the file is in Camel Case. Yes, I get that for windows caps are just "optional", but do not change it just for the sake of it!
- Many people sometimes have temporary files. Photoshop, Matlab, Word, Latex, etc. leave crumbles of temp files and folders. Can't I just set a quick rule to avoid "tmp" folders and e.g. ".tmp" files?
- A few months ago their forums went down and stayed down for around a month? Why? Technical problems. But the real reason is that they don't really care.
There is no way DB can justify their valuation with just the syncing part, and I'm fine with that. But just stopping altogether to improve in that area is a huge turn-off, and on top of that they do not care to fix bugs (there were hundreds of bug requests about the lowercase bug in the forums, before they deleted it).
Now that my rant is over, I ask you: are there any useful alternatives? I've heard that GDrive is very slow and the MSFT alternative seems a bit risky to me (will it work on Linux in the future? will it be customizable?).