Dropbox or Google Drive?

[Van Dalton]

What Frank and Leo said.

You just can't beat the low cost, reliability and security of operating your own FTP/HTTP server. You don't have to worry about your stuff "disappearing" suddenly because some lawyer decided they didn't like what you were doing. Plus you don't have Google and their bed-buddies in the N$A to contend with, because Google.

You could get a server going for peanuts with an old junk laptop (or maybe that old beater Pentium IV collecting dust in the back corner of the booth?), Debian (or Net-BSD) and Apache (or NGNIX) and do exactly the kind of thing you're wanting to do, no corporate-owned hosting services necessary. Biggest problem you have to worry about is being on a dynamic IP system and your IP number changing, unless your ISP has a static IP option like mine does (Centurycrap), which makes it much easier to hang a server from.

Of course if push really came to shove, and it absolutely has to get there, there's always the old standby Sneakernet fallback: sending physical disks to your recipient through overnight express post. It *has* been done.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Just like we run our own NextCloud server, we've got a fully loaded VMWare cluster to run all kinds of services on-premises. We made a dedicated choice to do so, because we've got the knowledge in-house and we did have the up-front budget to do it (mostly) right. We also have sufficient data to render most cloud-services actually more expensive. But if you want to do it right, it certainly isn't low cost. Also, no matter what operating system and software stack you're running on top of it, you need to factor in the cost of maintaining all this infrastructure: You're constantly updating the whole crap out of it.

So, the hardware you need, if you want to do it right and want to have stuff like 99,9%+ availability, backups, a meaningful recovery scenario, security, the power to run the stuff, the internet connectivity you need, etc. If you factor all of this in, then most people are far cheaper off with a simple cloud service.

Most businesses also don't really need to be afraid of the NSA. I'd rather keep my personal stuff off of the cloud than my business stuff. And while Google is certainly known for pulling the plug from certain services, the chance of them doing so on one of their core business offerings are pretty slim. The chance of your business getting impacted by some lawyer pulling some content somewhere is also pretty slim in the case of e.g. Google, they've got some big leverage to keep the service running.

Now, I'm not advocating to "feed the beast" with all the information you have, but I think it's important to make reasonable, informed decisions. If you can afford to do stuff on-premises, then I guess that's still preferable, because you're in total control of your data. But you should only do this, if you know what you're doing and you factor in the real cost of doing it right. If you do not factor in all aspects, you're not doing it right and then you really aren't in control of your data and you may be better off asking someone else to do it for you.

[Justin d'Entremont]

we've got a fully loaded VMWare cluster to run all kinds of services on-premises.

Out of curiosity, what are you running as VMs? I've been thinking about doing this at our site as well.

[Marcel Birgelen]

It's a whole bunch, some production some are playthings.

It ranges from simple DNS and DHCP servers, to firewalls to file servers for both Windows (SMB) and Linux (NFS), Windows Terminal Servers, mail servers, some web-servers for some low-traffic intranet related stuff, database servers for all kinds of stuff like MySQL and Postgresql for some web stuff, MS SQL for some accounting stuff. Even the PBX (3CX) is now running in a VM. Heavy stuff like rendering servers get their own hardware, everything else gets virtualized, to cut down on machine count and power usage.

We're pretty much a mixed shop when it comes down to platforms, if we can do things on Linux, we will do so, as it saves on our software licensing footprint and in many cases also maintenance overhead. Most of it is Debian or Ubuntu. We run a very lightweight Windows environment with its own Windows domain, essentially just to support the Windows desktops and to have a small footprint "hosted desktop" for administrative use. Heavy audio-visual stuff is done on individual workstations. We used to have some Macs too, but since all tools we need are available for Windows, we standardized on Windows for desktops.

We're running VEAAM to back the whole thing up to a remote DC. We can spin up most of the VMs in this datacenter out of a recent snapshot if things go boom.

[Frank Cox]

A VM is indeed a wonderful thing. I keep a "sacrificial image" of my Centos installation (and a few other things) that I use for experimenting with. When something doesn't work out and goes blammo! I can just return to the last snapshot, which is handy as all get-out.

I just switched my main computer (this one) to Centos 8 (it was previously on Centos 7) and spent a couple of weeks running a Centos 8 virtual machine to compile and arrange the programs that I wanted to install on it before doing the actual installation onto my computer. Then I had everything ready to install when I bit the bullet and reformatted my hard drives. Install the software, re-load the data from my fileserver, done in less than a day.

[Carsten Kurz]

We use DropBox. I do have accounts with other cloud storage providers as well, but, in general, I prefer DropBox. It has proven very solid, whereas other services showed the occasional quirk. I hate the recent GUI upgrades as well, but some of that 'functionality' can be disabled in the setup. In general, I think the DropBox people know what they're doing, and they are doing it right. I have NEVER lost something on DropBox, and operation never appeared unreliable. And I use DropBox on quite a few different platforms, machines, with a bit of sharing between different accounts. Everything so far worked as expected, and I was never surprised about what happened. That means something to me...

My second best choice would be Google drive.

- Carsten

[Bobby Henderson]

I mainly use Dropbox. It's kind of a "platform agnostic" service. I worry a little about that with Google Drive, although I assume Apple doesn't block out its functions. With Dropbox I sync frequently used data between four devices: my aging Dell notebook PC at home, my Dell desktop PC at work, my Android phone and my iPad Pro. There are no problems between any of those devices. I also like using Dropbox for its "public" folder and how easy it is to send huge documents to other people when they're too big to send via email. I don't really feel like going to all the trouble of setting up my own personal server for these kinds of tasks. If I was frequently sharing lots of huge data files with various people I would consider the dedicated server approach. For my own needs Dropbox is just a whole lot more convenient.

[Steve Guttag]

Dropbox recently became more problematic in 2-ways (for me):
1) Their "free" version, which was already storage limited...which is fine...it's free now is restricted to 3-devices...which doesn't work for me. I have desktops at work and home, phone, tablet and laptop. So five devices but only 3 can sync. The tablet could be excluded from the list but not the other four.

2) Dropbox now has their own Win10ish interface rather than just opening a normal window to work with the files.

I'm now leaning towards Google Drive. It starts with more free storage and it doesn't interfere with how I work. Now, Dropbox's subscription isn't unreasonable (something like $120/year for 2TB) but I'm living just fine on under 5GB (I mostly have text files, configurations, and backups on it).

[Dave Macaulay]

I use OneDrive. I get enough free storage with Microsoft free email accounts. Sharing works well, I upload something to share and get a link. I just have to remember to select "read only" rather than "modify". Not a lot of storage, but I don't know how much as I've never reached the limit. I send a link and then delete the file after a few days. I have not used dropbox myself, other than occasionally when someone else sent me a download link. There are a few images "permanently" in onedrive that I have on various forums... I had used photobucket but we all know what happened there.