Ask HN: Have any of you switched away from Dropbox?

9 points by barbequeer 1 year ago | 15 comments

I am a long time dropbox free user, and I find it very useful, but I have more than three devices.

I don't want to shell out for a pro account because 120 a year just seems too much to pay for syncing things between devices, and I'm a tightwad on a budget.

I've tried various combinations of syncthing, github, owncloud, nextcloud etc, on private servers and raspberry pis in my home. I work from home and dont really care about having access to stuff away from home - its really more about syncing between various family laptops and across different OSes. I'm not talking enormous amounts of data - I have 15GB storage on dropbox from when they did various promotions years ago, and I have not hit the limit yet. I mainly just sync around important docs, scripts, config files, source code for things, handy files, the odd photo or thing I want to move from one to another.

has anyone found a good free alternative that actually works well? Was it one of the above ones I mentioned? if so, what were the teething problems?

am I missing a really obvious alternative?

legitster 1 year ago |

> has anyone found a good free alternative that actually works well?

Free? No. But cloud storage comes bundled with so many services now that I don't feel the need for another discreet one.

We already pay for an annual Office 365 plan and it comes with 6 terabytes of free cloud storage for our family which is more than enough! And more storage than you get for a basic paid Dropbox account that costs more!

sejje 1 year ago |

I use syncthing. It's so simple. How did it fail for you?

The only problem I can think of is that they both/all need to be on.

I have almost your exact same use case. I do sync one machine at work, but mostly I'm just trying to avoid drive failure and be able to share programming projects easily.

KetoManx64 1 year ago | |

The way I solved the issue is having a server device that's always on, i use a NAS, but it could be a old laptop, old phone etc. All my nodes sync with each other but also with the NAS device, so everything is always in sync even if I switch laptops or turn off my desktop and switch to my laptop

HenryBemis 1 year ago |

I stopped using Dropbox many years ago. I switched to a non-syncing but encrypted cloud backup, with the years they changed and now they are Carbonite, that have unlimited storage. Challenge is that if you encrypt then you cannot recover "that one file" but you have to download the whole blob (mine is over 1TB).

When I need to travel and take my "burner" laptop it carries only the OS, firefox and the very few files that I copy with a flash disk.

And, SyncToy, I used it plenty 10-15 years ago.

You mentioned syncthing, if momery serves me well, Steve Gibson has mentioned it quite a few times but I haven't played around with it.

scblock 1 year ago |

Years and years ago. I see you've tried many things but not described whatever issues you may have had with them. I use Nextcloud running on a NAS which also runs a Wireguard endpoint so I have access via VPN to my home network when I am traveling. It's not perfect but does what I want it to do syncing a folder of files between Linux, Windows, and macOS systems, and the iOS app works well enough.

I don't use it for large scale file storage, such as photos or media. Those are on the NAS and accessed through traditional SMB file shares.

nopelynopington 1 year ago | |

Syncthing was unreliable for me, I would not always sync stuff. I'd have two machines on and sitting next to each other on the same network and not see sync happening.

I tried to install nextcloud on a digital ocean droplet and a borked installation corrupted everything in a way I didn't think was even possible on Linux. I had to restore from a backup.

I tried to use owncloud locally on a raspberry pi but the client app on Mac and Windows, I tried for about a week to get it to sync but every time I opened up either machine I seemed to have to stop and restart the client and even then it wouldn't always connect.

kadushka 1 year ago |

That question sounds to me like “have any of you switched away from myspace?”

I last used dropbox ~15 years ago. Since then I used S3, Google Drive, Synology NAS, and iCloud. I don’t need to do any syncing across devices: if I need a file I know where to find it (gmail if it’s a document, icloud if it’s an image/video). I still back everything up to Synology.

nopelynopington 1 year ago | |

Synology, thanks I'll take a look

solardev 1 year ago |

I just use Google Drive since it's where all my stuff lives anyway. It's free up to 15 GB, or $20/yr for 100 GB.

Probably if you're on Mac or Windows, iCloud and whatever the Microsoft one is called now also has free storage?

For source code and config, just make a Github repo for them so you can host them for free in a private repo and also version control them?

nopelynopington 1 year ago | |

Yes I haven't GitHub for source code, that was maybe a bad example

shaunpud 1 year ago |

I went with filen.io, the apps work great and provide client-side encryption. You can sign up for a free 10GB account.

Leftium 1 year ago |

I think there may be a "hack" to get around the three device limit:

1. Upgrade to pro for a single month (Dropbox often offers free trials)

2. Add all your devices

3. Downgrade back to free

Dropbox will continue to work on all your devices. You just can't add new devices.

Source: I currently have five devices on the Dropbox free plan.

nopelynopington 1 year ago |

Thanks folks, I'm going to reevaluate syncthing and Google drive!

muzani 1 year ago |

I set up some syncing to AWS cloud thanks to GPT-4 several years ago. You can probably do the same thing today with AI agents and they'll even install aws cli and run the commands for you.

twentythree 1 year ago |

I got an FTP account, mounted it locally with curlftpfs, and use SVN on the mounted filesystem. Quite trivial, really.