Sync with other cloud service providers

[Michael Miles]

I'd like to suggest adding in some flexibility with the cloud syncing that is currently only tied to DropBox. While I use DropBox, I pay for Office 365 and have a ton of space there on OneDrive and would rather park my stuff there. The space that I have on DropBox is going to disappear when my current subscription is over with them. I'm sure that other folks have reasons to want to use iCloud or Google Drive or Box or Copy or any other of the leading cloud providers out there. Just having it tied to DropBox makes me feel handcuffed.

 

If this is asking too much, can someone point to me which files are sync'd and I can write up a batch file that will get this done, perhaps.

 

Thank you.

Maybe I should just look in my DropBox folder to see what files are in it. Duh.

[R. Mansfield]

Despite the fact that I work for Accordance, don't take my comments here as reflecting that or anything official. Just consider these comments as that of a regular user.

 

From what I understand (but I'm not a programmer), a cloud service like any of these mentioned have to have an API that third parties can access to implement direct connections to them. Obviously, Dropbox has that. I'm not certain about OneDrive and iCloud. I would guess that iCloud has an API for developers to use since other programs can save to iCloud, too, but I would guess these are all programs exclusively in Apple's App Store. Accordance is there except for the non-App store version of the Mac desktop software, as well as the Windows version. I also think it would be difficult to ask users who only use the Windows version to create an iCloud account that they wouldn't use otherwise. At least Dropbox is neutral ground for those who still despise one computer platform over the other (I've mellowed greatly in this area in recent years, although I still prefer the Mac over Windows).

 

For my own purposes, I hardly ever use DropBox. I keep it installed ONLY because of Accordance. It was expensive when so many other services were free or at least less expensive. Those of us with Office 365 now have unlimited (!) space in OneDrive. That's really incredible if you think about it. I currently have about 80 GB of data in OneDrive because I often need to go back and forth between my MacBook Pro and Acer laptop.

 

iCloud Drive is now available for Windows, but Apple doesn't let you specify where it installs, and I need to put it on Drive D on my Acer instead of Drive C because of space limitations. Plus, I recently tried putting about 30 GB of data into iCloud Drive on my MacBook Pro, and it brought my computer to a near-unusable slowdown. This was about a month ago leaving me to think that iCloud Drive is not completely baked yet.

 

I've not had much experience with Google Drive, although I notice that it seems to be one of the few cloud services without filesize limitations. So, recently, I recorded our church's Christmas dinner theater and uploaded the 1020p file to Google Drive and shared it from there because the file was about 13 GB in size. I currently have about 100 of space GB in Google Drive and have only used about 15%. I've never purchased any of this space, but I have it for some reason.

 

So, all that to say, it seems to me--from my non-programmer vantange point--that Dropbox may still be the best solution. However, I wonder about their longterm viability. They have the momentum of being an early cloud service that people really latched onto, but now they are more expensive than most other services, many of which are free. Dropbox's only commodity is their cloudspace, but Microsoft and Google give away the service as a "free" add-on. At what point will people who purchase more space from Dropbox quit renewing in favor of one of the free or less expensive options?

[Michael Miles]

Thank you, Rick, for your input on this. I've done some programming back in the day. I'll take a look at these APIs when an opportunity affords itself. Perhaps it's not too difficult to go with a batch file on OS X to do this. I have Windows machines here, but I try to avoid them like the plague.