Dropbox vs Google Drive **Update**

In this video we'll be looking at the two most talked about cloud storage services: Dropbox and Google Drive. I show you what I think about which solution is best for your files and what you need to be thinking about before going for one solution or the other.

[nephi]

Good guy to follow! He gives you a wealth of information, is thorough, & delivers it both clearly & concisely. Plus his videos have each category that he covers " labeled " @ the bottom of the screen, which really helps....for all the obvious reasons - he gets two thumbs up in my book!!

[Rnegade]

Thank you for this! Very clear, detailed, direct, and informative. One of the best no-nonsense helpful videos online. Thank you again

[camb]

you can buy a 8 TB external drive for around $200. From there you can setup an SFTP server on your home machine, and open up port 22 on your router. Then you use dyndns to get a static ip to connect to, since your isp will automatically change your ip every couple weeks, when your lease-time runs out. It's completely free and easy to set up, it just basically routes your internet connection on the application layer, separate from your home router IP. Your computer will always have to be on however, but it does allow you to access your files from anywhere, even your phone with apps you can download on android, and if you know the commands, you can easily download all the files, open a file and save over it, etc. Then you aren't locked into a monthly bill, and it's completely secure, especially if you use SCP (secure copy) to copy and send files back to the ftp server and to your machine.

The one downside to this, is that there's little in the way of redundancy over data loss. So you can buy something called a DROBO, which basically is a hot swappable sophisticated raid setup, (but it's its own technology), that basically color codes dying drives, and if one dies, you just swap it out, and you don't lose any data. It's expensive though around $300. But at the end of the day, you can spend around $500 for your own server, that is much higher space and more secure in the ways of keeping your data private, than any of these online cloud services. It is also infinitely expandable. You can get up to something like 50 TB on a drobo. Which for google drive, that would be $300 / month for 30TB. Although for that amount of data storage, you are going to spend well over $1000.

Also, it's worth noting, that these online services are as safe as you want them to be. You can encrypt literally everything on these servers in 7zip under a AES -256 encryption and that would basically make it impossible to access, to anyone but yourself, depending on the complexity of the password you use.

If you're a team, and you have a gigabit ethernet infrastructure, with a fast public connection, then the drobo home server is the way to go. You just have to train people on how to connect to the FTP server with filezilla, or bash, or powershell, or PuTTY, or whatever you want to use, there's dozens, if not hundreds of ftp clients. There's also servers that basically allow you to make a web interface, but you would have to do some digging for that, for similar functionality to dropbox. But at the end of the day, you will have more control, won't be held down by a middle man between your data, where you are actually renting it, not owning it, once you put it up on their cloud. Best to use dropbox basic for txt files, docs, or something basic for your own personal use that you don't care to share, and then use this SFTP server / SCP for the larger, more sensitive stuff.

[JaniceWilliams-wdwv]

Very informative and clear. I just uploaded all my phone pictures to dropbox and I will now make sure they are backed up on a second storage drive.

[eortegaz]

Hey cloudwards, great video! Just a few comments:
1) You CAN create symlinks on OSX and Linux and thus making "any folder" syncable -this is what I do to sync my desktop.
2) An underestimated but worth discussing feature is data recovery. I've had a lot of trouble rolling back folders where I accidentally deleted a large amount of files using Dropbox and dealing with customer support is seriously painful. Google handles this in a breeze!
3) Google says they do not sell or share any of your information with anyone without your explicit consent (unlike services like Facebook). All information used to improve products is allegedly non-identifiable (they do this with email text as well, although I'm honestly not sure how their algorithm picks out identifiable data).

Hope this helps!

[MurphyArtPrints]

More people need to make their video's like this with that timetable. Very helpful.

[Mz_Patchouli]

I'm incapable of learning anything about Dropbox/Google drive watching Mr Handsomepants. I muted the sound. I don't even care. He's adorable.

[alexanderwise]

Very professional, I appreciate the great work you are doing!

[jhagley]

Awesome video, thanks for taking the time to put up such a detailed comparison! One question: I usually use dropbox to send files to clients, and they have no problems downloading it. If I were to send a file with Google Drive, can they only download it if they have a Google account?

[mave]

Hey @cloudwards :: Quick update for your Review :: We discovered a Google Drive disability -#1 it cannot transfer ownership of movie/video files and #2 we actually reached a cap on its drive and maxed out storage from uploading our library of videos without any other options. To sum up, Drop Box was our vote and hands down the winner on this end, both for storage capacity for videos and for file options to transfer ownership of files. Sadly, we have to spend hours now downloading video files to transfer and the process time is unbearable, after searching online - all we learned was that Google drive can only transfer in ownership is Excel and Word Docs. I think these are two extremely important time saving points to mention, as I haven't heard any one else run into this, unless we missed some new upgrade or something. This is a huge deficiency in google drive, and other video producers, will have to find out the hard way.

[FantasticFundas]

Such a clear presentation with almost neutral accent. Good going Cloudwards.

Can you please share the name of the mic that you are using?

[capjus]

I started with Google Drive, didnt know Dropbox that time. After getting in touch with people who were using Dropbox and never heard of Google Drive, I started using Dropbox with them for study etc due to the majority. Since I know both, I am personally still using GD and prefer it most. GD is very powerful and unfortunately not much people know it. I also want to underline my thanks to Google, helped and helping me quite a lot!

[Parmeseanie]

Could you get a less pretty guy to compare the two? I'm trying to study here and his arms are... distracting me

[qworq]

Really excellent presentation. Maybe one of your other vids talks about zero knowledge encryption but I just wanted to mention that I've started using Boxcryptor in conjunction with Google Drive. All in all, it works really well and addresses the issue of private encryption keys. And, it works with any cloud provider, so great for Dropbox too. One small criticism - I found the drumbeat and repetitive music in your video a bit annoying. It seems superfluous. I mean, you're hot as all get out and I'm sure just gazing at you is enough to coax people into staying around to listen.

[byucknahthered]

The annotations are hard to click because of the video play bar. Moving forward having the annotations at the top of the video instead may be more beneficial so that play bar for the video does not get in the way.

[raeschnapp]

I have been struggling with this exact question - whether to use DropBox or Google Drive. I found this video super helpful, but one thing you didn't mention that DropBox uses Microsoft Word & Excel so that the formatting functionality is much better.

[mannysilva]

Thanks great information.How do you send a Dropbox Folder to a person who does not have DropBox?Your table of contents in your video are pretty cool.   What software did you use to create the table of contents in your video.

[jim-mcintosh]

Your bonus tip mentions Otixo. How about a comparison of the major cloud storage managers (Otixo,  SME, etc.)?

[anoopsharma]

Thanks for the video! Helped me lot in understanding the potentials of both cloud services.

[sijokxavier]

Bottom Tabs + time stamps = best video experience