(for the past week or so) I tried to use Google Drive to backup about 7Gb of images I had from an older iPhone.
I was supposed to be easy but:
- After installing and copied the files to the GDrive folder, the GDrive app would show the files with the Green tick (which should mean 'its published'), but its service status was still showing that most files where still uploading/syncing
- It looked quite slow (when compared with DropBox, which I'm sure does some compression analysis to only send new byte-sequences to the server)
- Eventually I realised that the 5GBs would be NOT enough (although I never got to the point of GDrive stopped working since it was still uploading the files)
- When I tried to buy more storage (i.e give money to Google) it didn't work (something about the account that I was using was not part of a particular Google Account)
So I gave up on GDrive, installed DropBox locally, chose NOT to sync the whole thing (but just a specific folder I'm going to use), moved the files across, and all seems to be working as it should:
It's taking me longer to write this post up, than it took to set up DropBox to backup my files :)
Its a sign of a good service, when it survives the constant threats of its users using another competitive service (by making the competitive services look bad in comparison, and making it easy to go back and use it again).
Of course that DropBox's workflow is still not perfect since I didn't chose to use it initially. And the reason is that DropBox likes to Sync the whole thing, and I just wanted to backup (async since it was 7Gbs) an large number of files.
One feature DropBox should add, is a 'Backup mode' that allows 'one-way-only' files to be sent to a specific 'private/backups' folder.
Btw, is there a way to get an offline copy of DropBoxes data? I wouldn't mind paying a fiver to get a DVD (or USB stick) with all my data for offline backup :)
