[ale] Dropbox opinions wanted

[Joe Knapka]

I've been using both DropBox and SpiderOak for about a week now, and I've
noticed a few things:

1) SpiderOak's sync facility -- keeping one or more folders identical across
a number of machines -- is definitely an afterthought.  Sometimes it takes
several hours to sync a folder when only a single 10K file is added.  Since
I have the backup frequency set to "automatic", I would expect that sync to
take place almost instantaneously.  It does, with DropBox.  I have one
folder that has not synced overnight after having had about 40MB of content
added to it. I added that same content to my DropBox folder and it synced in
a few minutes.  I think it very highly unlikely that this particular content
(a zipped folder containing some proprietary but non-sensitive executables)
was already present in either the SpiderOak or DropBox repositories, so
magic-copying-by-checksum-recognition is probably not happening. Looking at
the SO user forum, they seem to  have had ongoing problems getting this
right.

2) OTOH SpiderOak sync is considerably more flexible than DropBox. It allows
you to define multiple "Syncs", and to sync multiple folders,  with
arbitrary names, across some or all machines. With DropBox you get only one
synced folder, period.  If SpiderOak's sync worked consistently and quickly,
it would have an edge in this regard.

3) The SpiderOak UI (which is also the same process that does backups and
syncs) has crashed on me twice on XP (never on Linux). Also it has once
reported that it needed to close because another copy of SpiderOak was
running, when that was not the case.

4) If DropBox notices other clients on the same LAN syncing to the same
account, it will sync with them directly, in addition to syncing the server
repository. Obviously that's a lot faster.  SpiderOak requires that sync'd
files be backed up to the servers before syncing.

5) As mentioned else-thread (I think), SpiderOak is somewhat less expensive
per GB as a backup solution, and backups seem to work consistently --
provided the SO app stays alive :-P

So for me, DropBox wins as a sync solution -- it just works, so far.   I've
only mentioned DropBox to my non-geeky friends, since it is easier to
explain, understand, and configure. I'm also looking at JungleDisk and a
couple other providers for backups.

-- JK
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