Dropbox vs Google Drive (2015)

After my iPhone battery packed it in last August I decided to jump on the Android bandwagon until my next upgrade was due – perhaps managing to squeeze a little more frugality (as opposed to cheapness) out of my phone/contract situation.

Side note: I like Android so much that I’m forgoing my upgrade and dropping to a cheaper 30 day rolling contract – saving money per month and giving myself the gift of the peace of mind that comes with cutting another contract from my life. For anyone interested, I’m rolling with a Moto G 4G, first generation, and it’s a sweet piece of telephonic goodness at a crazy-good price. It’s not the cheapest phone out there but it’s the cheapest one that still fulfils my geeky needs.

One of the things that comes with the Android Life ™ is a switch to relying on Google for your cloud services as opposed to iCloud. A big part of that is Google Drive – Google’s answer to Dropbox.

I’ve been a Dropbox fan since nearly day one of the company. Software developers out there with version control experience (which should be every single one of them) will cringe to hear that I have vivid memories of working on a second year college project with my good friend Rob in which we used Dropbox to live sync our files. Every time either of us hit ctrl + s – which for me is after nearly every line of code – the other would get a popup notifying them that x.cpp had changed and been synced to their local computer. It was like coding on quicksand, and needless to say the project was not the high point of our college careers.

That aside, I saw the brilliance of Dropbox straight away. Suddenly the USB sticks I used to carry with me, ferrying code from my home computer to the lab computers and back, were made redundant. My files were now anywhere I needed them. Backing things up became an effortless process – pretty much every single thing I can’t afford to lose is in my Dropbox directory and synced to the cloud (and thus any of my other computers that happen to be on) before it even has a chance to fall through the digital cracks or become a victim of an over-zealous directory clear-out (I’m looking at you, quick-to-fill Downloads directory). When I started to eat my Dropbox space up early last year after deciding to store all my photos there I didn’t hesitate to stump up the fee for a paid account. It’s worth it to me.

Dropbox even worked great on my iPhone, with a slick app and the ability to auto-save my camera roll to the cloud as soon as a picture was taken (if I had the connectivity to support it). Combined with iCloud it meant I was in no risk of ever losing a photo or cherished file. When I switched to my Android phone the Dropbox features were still available to me through the Android Dropbox app, but I was curious – was the Google offering as slick on the Android platform as iCloud was on iOS? And could it, with it’s paltry $1.99 per month fee, take over from Dropbox as my cloud storage company of choice?

Ease of use

Dropbox is ease of use personified (or, like, softwarified. Stop looking at me like that). You can set your grandma up with Dropbox for free in five minutes, show her where to save her files and get her camera automatically uploading to it without even breaking a sweat. Suddenly her backups policy is completely sorted and if she ever needed her files from elsewhere they’d be easy to get.

To be fair to Google Drive, most of this can be accomplished with them too, although the auto photo and video backups, bizarrely, go straight to Google+ and not to an easy-to-find location from which they can be pulled out again. This smacks of a decision made to promote Google+ without thought for the end user. That said, it does back them up so it’s not a complete loss for Google Drive just yet.

The problems start when you want to do anything with the directory other than set it up on a computer once and completely leave it alone. For example, around the same time as I was attempting to make this switch I was also installing a new harddrive in my work machine, so I needed to copy across my Dropbox and Google Drive directories (synced to be the same at this point). With Dropbox this was straightforward and came off without a hitch – I pointed the newly-reinstalled Dropbox app at the directory, it noticed that I already had all my files, gave me the green tick and took a nap.

Drive, however, commenced redownloading the tens of gigabytes from the server, completely ignoring what was already there to the point where the operating system was automatically renaming the incoming files to be Example(1) and SecondExample(1) as they were duplicates of already-existing directories. Nothing I tried could stop it from redownloading all my stuff. Stuff I already had in there. Madness.

Deleting a file was a nightmare too. Half the time I would remove something from my Drive directory and find it had redownloaded itself a minute later. Even a basic timestamp check of when the change was enacted should tell the app which directory’s info (cloud or on-device) to treat as correct, so I was flabbergasted by this, and deeply unsettled. It meant that when using Drive I could never trust that my files were being properly backed up – if it could near-silently mess up a deletion, could it also mess up an addition?

In the end I completely uninstalled Google Drive from all my computers and deleted the directory. It was easier to treat as a purely in-browser back-up tool.

Verdict: Dropbox wins. Obliterates, really. Google, what on earth are you doing?

Security

Both companies are doing well here as far as I can see, though Dropbox have had to up their game in answer to Google. I’ll preface this paragraph by stating that I am by no means a security expert. I’m talking about this from the POV of a user.

Google have had two factor authenication available for as long as I can remember on all Google account-related things – Gmail, YouTube, Drive et al. Dropbox added this more recently than Google, but it offers the same high standard of security now as Google did then.

One could make the case that Google are probably better in general at securing data given how much of it they deal with and how closely they are scrutinised, though the counter argument could just as easily be made that Google have so much of your data now that giving them even more is a security risk in itself. Drew Houston, Dropbox CEO, has been very adamant about how opposed to allowing the NSA to snoop on his customers he, and his company, are.

Me? I prefer to shrug, do my best to secure everything with two-factor (and strong passwords) and go enjoy my life. We’re in a bad way if either of these companies are massively breached, and there’s little we individuals can do if the US government decides to get heavy handed.

For extra safety you can always encrypt certain subdirectories yourself before storing them, at the expense of searchability and having to decrypt them locally (not being able to read them in-browser) when you want something from them. Worth doing if you store very sensitive information in either solution though.

Verdict: It’s a wash. I cannot reiterate enough how much you should all be using two-factor authentication on all the accounts that offer it though.

2Chainz for 2Factorz

Phone Integration

Dropbox, previously through their normal app and now through Carousel, are pretty slick at this. According to the user’s configuration Carousel can be set up to seamlessly sync every photo they take to Dropbox. It’s really fun if you happen to be near your computer when you take a photo and then a minute or so later see the little tray notification pop-up that tells you it has synced it. Another nice side-benefit is that Dropbox automatically names your photos with the correct way to date things – yyyy-MM-dd (plus HH.mm.ss for time) – this way making your photos order by date and time even when ordered by name. This is a huge help when you want to find a photo.

In addition to this from-the-phone tech, the Dropbox app installed on your computer will also detect when you plug your phone (or camera) into your computer and grab all the (new, not already uploaded) images and videos off it for you. They’ll even reward you with free space if you elect to use Dropbox’s auto-media-backup facilities.

Drive is a little more of a strange fish. As mentioned in the ease of use section, you can enable a form of auto-backup for your photos on your phone in the Android “Photos” app (not to be confused with Gallery – this fragmentation and duplication of apps being a major embarrassment for Android in my opinion). The problem is that these photos are then backed up to Google+ and not straight to an easily handled Drive directory. This is not acceptable for anyone who respects the value of data portability. There may be a way to quickly pull all your Google+ photos out of there (Google’s Data Tools, for those curious, let you export a lot of things), but I don’t even like that it has to be done that way. That’s an extra step that shouldn’t be necessary, even if they do do some nice things with the photos they get – the “auto-awesome” automatic gif-creation tool being a highlight.

To get around this, I’ve hacked together a solution on my Moto G that backs up my photos as normal to a Google Drive directory a la Dropbox using a third party app called Drive Autosync. The free version of the app only allows syncing of one directory, but this is enough to sync the photos you take with your phone’s camera.

The app is intimidating to the average user, with a distinct lack of design or UX thought in general, but once configured it does a nice job. I have mine set up only to sync when my phone is plugged into power and on WiFi and it respects those settings and has never missed a beat. That said, this feels like a highly unnecessary complication. Compared to the Dropbox method, it certainly is.

Verdict: Dropbox wins for the easy, seamless and proper backing up of photos. Shout out to the Google+ Auto Awesome feature though. It’s pretty, well, awesome. Both solutions have apps for accessing files in your accounts, so not much point comparing them.

Randall knows what I’m talking about…

File Sharing

Dropbox were pretty much the first company to make this easy, and they’ve since improved it. Originally on Dropbox the only way to share your files was to share them with another Dropbox user, forcing them to create an account and sync that file or folder into their stuff, potentially overloading their available storage amount but providing you both with a collaborative space. Now, as an alternative method, you can also just share a link with someone to a file or directory, allowing them to download it straight to their machine without having to sync it with their account and take up their valuable space. Nice.

Google allow the same nifty features on their own offering, and have an ace up their sleeve – Google Docs. With Google Docs – now a part of Drive – you can share collaborative, near-MS Office level documents, spreadsheets and presentations with other people, editing them together in real-time and even being able to watch another person as they edit; see where their cursor is in a doc or see which cell they have selected in a spreadsheet. It’s fantastic, and indeed in my company it has pretty much entirelty replaced MS Office.

Verdict: Google win this one on the strength of the Google Docs suite, but for general file sharing both providers are great.

Bang for Buck

A little while ago Google would have won this hands down (at least in terms of GBs/$), but this is another area in which they and other competitors have forced Dropbox to become a little more competitive and as a result they have fallen behind.

As it stands right now, 100 GB of Google Drive storage will run you $1.99 per month, or just about €1.88 at time of writing (it used to be far less before the Euro took a nosedive). This is a lot of storage. In fact, so much that it was the number that made me realise that finally, if I wanted, I could store pretty much my whole life’s worth of files in the cloud and cease to worry about backing them up ever again – even HD movies. Of course, I say that now but having lived through the era of 500 MB hard drives that seemed large I know that’s not strictly true. Either way, right now it’s a great deal, especially for more casual computer users (in contrast to how hard it is to use for casual users in most other respects).

The problem for Google is that Dropbox have very recently boosted their $99 per year (or $9.99 per month if you don’t like saving $20) package from 100 GBs of storage to 1 TB. That’s a terabyte, or, 1000 GBs. Ten times as much storage. When you take that into account and add all the ease of use and slickness that Dropbox imbue their product with, it’s hard to argue in favour of Google Drive here.

It is worth noting that Drive also offer 1 TB of storage at the same $9.99 per month price point as Dropbox, without the ability to save by prepaying for a year. I don’t honestly know why Dropbox don’t offer a 100 GB package at $2 a month and blow Drive away. I get that they might be angling for “premium” users, but this seems like a no-brainer given how cheap storage is. There’s too much of a gap between the free 2 GBs and the 1 TB not to do this.

Verdict: A hard-fought draw. In terms of cost, Drive is cheaper but for less. In terms of real bang for buck, Dropbox probably wins, but how many normal people need 1 TB right now?

Conclusion

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For me, Dropbox is the clear winner.

Dropbox is so easy that I can set it up for my dad and explain it to him and then never worry about it again. Just last week he had a USB key apparently malfunction on him and without even having to ring me he was able to jump onto his online Dropbox account and grab the file from there. This is revelation-level stuff people!

He could have achieved the same with Google Drive of course, but given how finicky the desktop syncing is, and the complete lack of real photo backups (this is pretty unforgivable in my eyes), I would not feel as secure in setting him up on it. Dropbox passes the dad test.

That said, Drive is not without merit. If you’re a savvy computer user and you don’t mind the faff, or perhaps don’t care about desktop syncing, Drive offers much the same benefits of Dropbox at a lower price point – albeit for less space. If you don’t need the space then the cheap monthly fee of Drive make it a nice choice.

For me, I’ve decided to use both for different purposes.

Drive is pure back-up for me, particularly for RAW photos I take with my cameras. Although I have more space in Dropbox and can easily hold them there, I like to have them duplicated over to Drive too, and I like the auto-awesome and stories it sometimes creates with them. As it’s so cheap, it’s not a decision I feel uncomfortable with and I hold out hope that they will up their game.

Dropbox though, that’s my jam and I use it for everything. I’m not sitting on the fence here. If you can only have one and you want to be able to set it and forget it, go with Dropbox.