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Dropbox and Google Cloud integrations
- usuallymatt 9y agoThis is great for me. I use dropbox for my personal files these days instead of GDrive because there's no native linux client for Gdrive. There are some 3rd party ones but they're not that great. I've also been moving away from Google Docs and now the only thing I have in my GDrive is a financial sheet for budgeting that I like to access from my phone. I'll probably store it on Dropbox now.
- johnsmith99 9y agoGoogle Drive always fails to sync correctly on my Macbook as well, unlike Dropbox.
- neolefty 9y agoIs that the old client? Yes, it was never great for me either. I had an alert to switch to "Google Drive File Stream" (and uninstall the old Google Drive client) that is some kind of virtual filesystem. I went ahead and did it but haven't used it much yet.
- joelrunyon 9y agoWhat does Dropbox do for me that going all the way over to Google Docs wouldn't?
- danieldk 9y agoFar better file synchronisation (peer to peer LAN sync, partial file sync, file requests). And you are the customer, not the product, to repeat a cliche.
- skrowl 9y agoI had the opposite impression. Dropbox sync was constantly making conflict files while Google Drive Sync (now replaced by File Stream) was able to more gracefully determine which file was newer. File stream adds the benefit of just keeping a stub file on all of my machines, then not actually downloading the file until I need it (you can, of course, specify which folders to always keep a downloaded copy of).
- pedro2 9y agoFile Stream is for Business account only (G Suite). Dropbox Sync is also for paying individual customers (Dropbox Professional tier, not Dropbox Plus). That being said, I had conflicts with Dropbox when opening a Visual Studio solution on a directory mapped through a junction point, which made me unsure about how reliable is their filessystem driver.
- joelrunyon 9y agoTheir permissions + folder stacking are much worse than Google (or even Apple's default system). Logging into dropbox.com is actively confusing.
- deelowe 9y agogsuite is the paid version of drive, docs, calendar. It's not supported by ads.
- crsv 9y agoAs someone who has never used Dropbox and has instead typically used Google Drive for doc sharing, could someone who's a user of Dropbox provide their perspective on how Dropbox is different and why it would make sense as a G Suite user to use dropbox vs Drive?
- lucideer 9y agoDropbox is simpler, has easier setup, less features, and in my experience a more reliable/quicker on-disk sync client. Google Drive has quite poor UX, which puts a lot of people off. I use Google Drive, but I can see the appeal of Dropbox for someone who doesn't need Drive's web UI features and extras and just want something that works.
- kody 9y agoI moved from Drive to Dropbox as part of my plan to become less reliant on Google's ecosystem and start self hosting and/or paying for online services. I've stuck with Dropbox for a while because it's easy to set up, portable, the iOS app is fantastic, and I feel like my data isn't being siphoned off to advertisers.
- usuallymatt 9y agoSame. I was a kool-aid drinking Google fanboy but started looking elsewhere a couple years ago. I found myself using Google products just because they were Google. Part brand loyalty and also it was nice to just have one account for everything. After a while I admitted to myself that there were better products. Deezer is awesome and I like it much better than Google Music, I've been on Firefox for a year now and much prefer it to Chrome (tried switching back just to see if Chrome had made any changes and I was back on Firefox in 24 hours). I prefer Simplenote to Keep and, other than my one spreadsheet in Google Docs I use Libre Office locally for my other docs/sheets. The other thing I've noticed is how fickle Google is with their products, either not advancing them or straight up killing them. I used to use Listen for Podcasts and Reader for RSS and got disheartened when those were killed off. Dropbox is my latest switch, hell I even use DuckDuckGo more these days, too. The only Google products I can see myself using long term are Gmail (with my Google Apps Domain account) and Photos. Also, Maps is still the best Maps software. Other than that I don't use their services much at all these days.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- juanmirocks 9y agoSo with this I would be able to edit Google office docs directly from Dropbox / see it in my Dropbox folder? For our startup tagtog.net this is useful because we like having all centralized into our docker folder and so not miss important documents in other services.
- danieldk 9y agoIndeed, it will be interesting to see how this works, since on with Google Docs the documents are not actually stored on Google Drive (just a placeholder/link that opens Google Docs when you open it). I would expect that this works there same, because so far there are no Google Docs file formats. It should also be noted that Dropbox already had Office Online support for a while, which allows one to edit Office files that are stored in Dropbox in Office Online. This integration stores the actual Word/Excel/PowerPoint documents on Dropbox, so after syncing you have these files locally as well.
- sseth 9y agoGoogle apps (now GSuite) has had offline functionality for several years. You can work on Sheets, Docs etc completely offline.
- danieldk 9y agoSure, but that’s not the same as: the documents end up as regular files in a directory in a standard(ized) format, that you still can open in 10 years long after you cancel your subscription/account. One of the huge benefits of Dropbox was that everything ends up as a normal file on your hard disk, that you can archive/backup. Unfortunately, that is not really true anymore, since Dropbox Paper docs are not saved to Dropbox. You can save a copy of a Google Docs document on your drive in a Microsoft Office format, but that goes in one direction.
- samfriedman 9y agoWhat does this mean for Dropbox Paper?
- notatoad 9y agoGoogle's branding continues to confuse me. Isn't Google Cloud their AWS competitor, and the thing they're talking about in this article called G Suite?
- kevinios 9y agoGoogle Cloud regroups G Suite and Google Cloud Platform products. Edit: As well as Google Maps API, Chrome & Android devices.
- azurezyq 9y agoG Suite is a product series part of Google Cloud. https://gsuite.google.com/together/?user-benefits_activeEl=tab-connect https://gsuite.google.com/together/?user-benefits_activeEl=t... on the top left corner you can find "G Suite by Google Cloud"
- rvo 9y agoThis naming is ridiculous. Did they hire a bunch of Microsoft people ?
- huangbong 9y agoGoogle naming products at this point is just memes. But it proves that if you have an amazing enough product (G suite) the name doesn’t matter at all. Whoever came up with G suite is just a bad person though ugh.
- pedro2 9y agoIs this just for Business accounts? Or does G Suite here includes Gmail+Google services?
- canistr 9y agoIt's worth pointing out that BECAUSE Dropbox recently announced their plans to IPO, all media coverage is now viewed in light of what's best to prop up their pricing. No surprise that they are including names like Google, Microsoft, and SAP to put a more positive spin on everything.
- jpalomaki 9y agoIs the Dropbox plan to be a better-than-the-default sync provider, something you purchase in addition to the Google Cloud or Office 365 subscription? I've been thinking that it will be hard for Dropbox to grow alone, but I would have expected them to establish closer ties with companies offering complementary services. I see Google Cloud as a quite straight competitor for Dropbox. Teaching Dropbox customers to use services like Google Docs might be risky.
- elago 9y agoThat's confusing. I'm a G Suite customer and it comes with either huge or unlimited amount of google drive storage. I can access that storage either through a browser, or with a program from google called "drive file stream" which creates a 'fake' local file system interface to online storage. Isn't that the same as dropbox? Where would dropbox fit in for a G Suite customer?
- kody 9y agoI'm in the same boat with my organization. My guess is that you'll be able to store the .gdoc 'files' in Dropbox and opening them will open the docs in your web browser, just like Drive File Stream. I'm also curious how this will work with things like Team Drives. You cannot copy a folder from one Team Drive to another (unless you're a domain admin, and even then the folder's URL changes), for example.
- reificator 9y agoRight after a news article that they've mostly dropped AWS. Must sting a little for Amazon.
- varenc 9y agofrom the article, it doesn't sound like Dropbox is actually using any of Google's infrastructure. It seems to be an a set of integrations with Gmail/Hangouts and G-Suite
- reificator 9y agoI didn't say they were. Just that right after dropping AWS they go public with a collaboration with one of AWS' competitors.
- nkw 9y agoI don't really get why this is that useful. Except maybe the Gmail/Dropbox integration. Our office pays for 1) G Suite - from which we use Gmail and Calendar, 2) Dropbox for Business for file storage/sync, 3) Office 365 for Word and Excel, and 4) Slack. I would really really like to give my money to one company, except Google Docs/Drive sucks (er, doesn't meet our use case), Office 365 - Outlook sucks (in comparison to Gmail) as well as whatever the Microsoft file syncing option is (OneDrive?). Our Dropbox for Business comes up for renewal this month and Google and Microsoft's file sync stuff isn't remotely comparable. Same for Slack vs the Hangouts incarnation of the moment. I primarily blame Google. We are probably paying an extra $500/user/year because outside of Gmail and Calendar the other G Suite services are pretty awful in comparison to their competition. It is super frustrating.
- crsv 9y agoI feel like the GSuite product experiences outside of Mail and Calendar still feel really unrefined for a company of the size, scale, and capability of Google. They've had the opportunity to absolutely crush the productivity / work suite of apps, and yet somehow for all their resources and prowess, they've not been able to produce products that are truly _compelling_ options vs Office and Slack. Maybe there's a "yet" at the end of that, but as time marches on, it feels less likely for some reason.
- ben_jones 9y agoIs it possible the "movers" (individuals with the passion, drive, skillset, etc. to push a product forward) avoid GSuite and similar projects like the plague? Google undoubtedly has a lot of talent at their disposal, what are they working on? GCP? Cars?
- fh973 9y agoIt probably sounds odd, but I think Google is not good at doing large complex projects that require considerable man power and time. And that's what you need to refine products to the next level (or go into billion dollar markets). It's partially due to the promotion system, partially due to bring allergic to top down management, paired with some arrogance. Best example are their numerous failed attempts to do payments. Apart from search and ads (which have strong leadership) the examples are legion.
- polskibus 9y agoIf only this was standardized somehow so that in the future users could integrate the features the way they want, not depending on current business partnership set of deals.
- askvictor 9y agoDo you mean like an API? https://developers.google.com/drive/ https://developers.google.com/drive/
- SnowingXIV 9y agoI would love to move from Google Drive to Dropbox because of syncing issues and the UI/UX but the pricing models kills me. I have around 40 GB of stuff I need to be backed up and in cloud so more than the free version that Dropbox offers but not enough to justify the first tier of 2TB. I get plenty of room to grow with the cheapest version of Google Drive. I've been tempted to just suck it up and pay for way more than what I need.
- bloudermilk 9y agoI'd argue that what you need is not 40GB of storage, it's enough storage and a great service. To me, paying $8.25/mo is a no-brainer for the quality and reliability of the service alone. Having enough storage space so that I never have to think twice about uploading something is just a nice bonus.
- SnowingXIV 9y agoThe only thing holding me back is I'd probably have to pay for both since I use Drive for a daily NAS scheduled backup for business purposes. Looks like I can now do that with Dropbox as well. Great. Might just spend the money :)
- gowld 9y agoPay if it's a good deal for what you need. It doesn't hurt you to have free space. Surely you wouldn't find the deal more attractive if today's 2TB price was only for 100GB.
- m3g4synC 9y agohttps://mega.nz/ https://mega.nz/ is what you want.
- jostmey 9y agoIs it really 2tb? Dropbox only offers me 1tb for the first tier. Can you post a link where you see 2tb being offered?
- tomc1985 9y ago
- newuser94303 9y agoAs long as my Google data does not leak to Dropbox, this is fine. I am still boycotting Dropbox over the Condelessa Rice.
- putlake 9y agoIt's clear that the money is in the enterprise business and not their consumer business. The problem for Dropbox is that storage is commoditized. For them to make money, they need to become a collaboration platform. Storage is a necessary (but not sufficient) piece of that. The more important piece for any collaboration platform is identity. When your company is on G-suite/Gmail, Google manages identity for you. So it becomes frictionless for other Google products to piggyback on that identity and authenticate you. That's what turns a suite of products into a proper collaboration platform. Microsoft and Google have an advantage because they manage email. So I had expected Dropbox will launch a G-suite competitor. If you're in the Google ecosystem with G-Suite, I don't see why you would want to complicate life by using Dropbox. G-Suite integrates well enough with Google storage. In fact, for $10 per user per month, G-Suite offers unlimited storage.
- fh973 9y agoYou might be interested in this Stratechery article then that looks at Box vs Dropbox: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16465883 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16465883
- orliesaurus 9y agoCan anyone explain why would I ever need to use Dropbox over Google Drive when I already pay for Google Apps for business (and I use GDrive through the official desktop plugin that creates a virtual drive just like dropbox)
- jvagner 9y agoClients, partners, departments... people can barely ever agree on a single platform. I'm a WFH digital nomad (I know, but, as we travel around a lot but mostly HQ ourselves from the home-office...) with clients, and my partner has her mix of clients, some of them are shared, and we both have a few different/overlapping businesses that interface with our respective clients & vendors via different platforms. We use Adobe CC, Microsoft 365, G Suite (G Drive), Dropbox, Slack, etc. Our non-technical clients overwhelming prefer Dropbox, and can't figure out G Drive's weirdnesses, even if they're G Suite organizations. Dropbox is way friendlier and more normal in non-technical businesses. (For our core business, we're as G oriented as possible, plus Adobe CC). Frankly, this news excites me.
- 5_minutes 9y agoIt’s quite unclear what this practically would mean. Some things are getting confusing with Dropbox already. Why for example, can’t I find the “Paper” files, in an actual seperate folder? I’m not sure this is a good thing. Then again I’m quite surprised how incredibly good iCloud syncing is from Apple, it took them years, but it works impeccable - though I know it’s more limited.
- gordon_freeman 9y agoI think what this means is an integration with Google Drive in Dropbox itself. You might need to connect your Google account with Dropbox (by allowing permission of course) and can then able to access GDrive files in Dropbox or create a Docs/Slide/Sheet from within Dropbox which will in turn save it in Dropbox and GDrive both. At least that's what I am getting from this announcement.
- fictionfuture 9y agoBig strategic mistake by Dropbox. Not sure what their differentiation is going to be in 2 years now that they've capitulated to GSuite. Is Dropbox just a hosting company? Why are people still using it?
- brightball 9y agoI wonder if they'll make it easy to attach MULTIPLE Google accounts to your Dropbox accounts. I have 5 at the moment and there would be some real value in Dropbox giving me an easy way to pull things from all of them together. For example, the Dropbox Paper feature of integrating with your calendar to creating meeting notes is great. I've started using it to take all of my meeting notes as well as tracking action items from those meetings. The biggest issue is that I have 1 Dropbox account and I'm often dropping in links (or calendars) from multiple Google accounts.
- mixedbit 9y agoThis is the reason why proprietary cloud services will never be as flexible as traditional programs on our computers. With N cloud services there need to be N^2 integrations to make them all work together. With N desktop programs it is enough if each of them implements a single common API (for example text bast stdin/stdout Posix API) to make them all work together. Imagine if 'cat' and 'sort' needed to implement a dedicated API to work together, and then 'sed' would add another one, and 'wc' another. This is a kind of mess that we see with cloud services integrations.
- cdancette 9y agoWhy couldn't cloud providers adopt a common API? Some providers are adopting AWS apis for their services. And we can also look at the email example : a lot of cloud provide email services and they all use the same protocols (SMTP, IMAP...).
- mixedbit 9y agoThey probably could, but it isn't happening. It is hard to find a cloud service that seamlessly works with some other cloud service without explicit integration between the two services. Email was introduced and has become a popular standard long before commercial cloud services. The companies adopted it, but they do not seem to be interested in introducing similar standard protocols for new APIs.
- jolmg 9y agoBecause they want to lock their customers to their platform. AWS has the biggest marketshare, so if a smaller provider adopts AWS's api, that means that AWS customers can easily migrate to them. I do wonder how we managed to get standard protocols adopted for email. What did email providers use before SMTP and IMAP? Maybe the key difference then from now was that the internet community was much smaller? Did Mark Crispin simply write the RFC for IMAP, email vendors noticed on their own, and adopted the protocol? Or was the emailing community then so small that there were no vendors and it was really just a handful of programmers, who could discuss and agree on protocols via something like Usenet and implement their own clients and servers?
- eagsalazar2 9y agoThis seems like google is finally coming to terms with reality: (a) docs/sheets/etc are awesome, (b) drive is an insane piece of crap that has been significantly holding back the impact of (a). I'm pretty excited about the possibility that we might be able to ditch drive at my company. Definitely will be trying this out.