Here’s Why I Broke Up With Dropbox & Switched To Google Drive…

Generally every year I spend December in reflection and review. You can give things a very serious thought to things. Be it projects, payments, or portfolios… it’s a time to review.

2018 was all about cleaning up and closure. I killed off some projects and resurrected some that were killed but in a new avatar.

As companies improve their software, others fail to. This provides you with an opportunity of making a decision on what to continue, and to stop what doesn’t seem to work for you. For me it was always deciding between Dropbox and Google Drive.

Sometimes if I get the opportunity to pay for a lifetime subscription, I would go for it. Those who offer this tell me two things, 1) they’re in for the long run and want to get funding to make it happen and 2) if they’re also offering a very nominal fee to maintain, I don’t mind because they’re all the more serious of being in business.

When we started Eqoris - we purposefully decided to make it as remote as possible, and that meant being cloud based as well. Are there any risks to being on the cloud? Ofcourse there are. But there are also risks of having everything local. You have to weigh the benefits vs cost of operating locally. And during my research, listening to others - I’ve come to the conclusion that The Desk is Dead.

First why did I shift from Dropbox to Google Drive, well because Google has gone beyond just storage, it has made sure that we can put to use those files, and most of the time that’s what we do for our work… we manipulate documents or content to make it more valuable, applicable.

Ok, enough jargon… Google Docs / Slides / Sheets and the entire G Suite work so well together, that we’re literally built our business on their platform - and we pay for it.

Dropbox on the other hand, became a great place to store stuff (aka backup), and probably sync. But that was about it. They made attempts with Dropbox Paper and other things, but those were mostly half-baked products.

What they could have looked at is something like Notion, and just bought it to make it the defacto organization tool for the workspace, with everything hosted off dropbox (backup/archiving & syncing) and a slew of integrations.

Keep in mind, Dropbox acquired Mailbox for $100 million and did nothing with it, instead it killed a good app. Sometimes I wonder why the board of directors and shareholders did not question this as an after thought even. Come to think about it, they’ve hardly done anything epic recently, not even in the collaboration space where Box.com I feel has done a better job!

Instead Google created that collaborative environment that we required, starting with email, and then office documents, and then storage. Of course, with Google Drive, the dilemma is whether to use FileStream or Back & Sync.

If you’re an average (normal is better word) user, photos and videos will take up the most space of your smartphone. And that’s where Google shines with Google Photos. If you install the app on your mobile or your desktop (using Back & Sync) - you can backup unlimited photos for free!

Okay, so there’s a limitation of high quality (which is more than enough for 90% of users) at 16 Megapixel vs. original quality. The limitation kicks in when you want to save as original. If you’re okay with high quality, the upload is unlimited… yes, unlimited!

I went ahead and paid $99/year for 1 Terabyte, which I would have given to Dropbox, because I store more than photos and will need the extra space. But after paying Dropbox $600 over the years, I really haven't seen much groundbreaking developments to continue.

Ultimately, over a two day period and a 50 Mbps connection, I managed to migrate all our files to Google Drive, and just in time. As I was going through my email, I noticed one from Apple, that my particular MacBook Pro could have its SSD replaced due to some possible manufacturing defect. Believe it or not, saving to the cloud was probably the best decision I’ve made this year.