- Hey guys, Pete Moriarty here
and in this video, my case from making the switch
from Dropbox over to Google Drive
and I'm gonna make this one real quick.
Now, we're asked this question pretty much
every single week by every customer
that we have a chat to about making the switch
into the Google ecosystem and they always ask,
"Hey, well, if I've got Dropbox and I'm using
that right now.
Do I still need to make the switch over to Google Drive
or keep using Dropbox?
What's gonna work best?"
So, here's my number one.
Dropbox unfortunately built a feature and not a platform.
When I'm moving into a world of ecosystem where we have
whether you're in Google or Amazon or Microsoft or Apple.
You're in an ecosystem and unless you have something
that is really a full platform which Dropbox is not
then unfortunately some products are now just
being absorbed as features within other platforms.
So Dropbox kinda falls into that category in there.
File syncing is now being handled either
in the Microsoft world with SkyDrive
or now OneDrive it's called.
With Google Drive and the Google world,
Amazon have their own synchronization products
and Apple have a very consumer focus.
Apple, I don't even know what it's called.
It's probably called iCloud drive or something like that.
So that's number one.
You're gonna save cost because it's kind of a double up
in a world where you already have these tools
as part of different platforms that we're using.
Okay, number two is, "Can I still work with
Microsoft documents?"
Yes, you can.
So switching over to Google Drive,
most people use Dropbox for their Microsoft docs,
for Office and Dropbox does have some
collaboration features but they're not fantastic.
You still every now and again have sync conflicts,
even though it does try to keep different people
out of files.
Microsoft documents can go straight into Google Drive
which is great.
What that means is you can keep them
in their Microsoft format.
You can open them still in Microsoft Office
but you don't have to worry about having it
in a completely separate place.
We got Andy watching, good day Andy!
How you going?
So what I love about using Google Drive
is for all of my Google files like my Google docs,
its spreadsheets and all the other cool Googly stuff
like forms and everything else.
They live in the same set of folders of anything
Microsoft placed.
So if you've got like Office documents,
if you've got PDFs, images, videos, anything like that.
They all live in the same folder structure in Google Drive
as they would alongside all of the Google docs.
Where as if you're running two, if you're running
Google Drive and your own Dropbox as well,
you'll end up with two folder structures
and it gets really really messy.
So that's one of the advantages is basically
getting rid of that double up on the folder structure.
Now, the third point is permissions
and this is where Dropbox really falls down
and something like Drive is absolutely brilliant.
Now with permissions, one of the great things
about using G Suite is you can do group base permission
which is how large and scaled businesses do all
of their permissions.
They don't do one on one permissions,
they actually use groups and organizational units
and even if you're a small business,
you should be thinking about how your business
is gonna scale and how you can have basically ideal
and strict permissions as your business grows
and as your teams are kinda put into groups.
What does that is it keeps the security nice and high
on your documents and but it just keeps them
in nice order so it doesn't turn into a complete mess.
So Google Drive does that really really well.
Dropbox doesn't do that so well.
You're managing a second set of permissions
where as within G Suite, if you create one group
within G Suite, you can use that group
across calendar, across Google sites,
you can use that use that group inside Google chat as well.
That permission group goes everywhere
and you can use it for your files and folders.
Not to mention, Team Drives which is excellent
and I've done separate videos on Team Drives by itself.
Team Drives is the way where you can have internal staff
and even contract that's outside of your business.
Put shared files into a folder which they can effectively
put files into but not take files back out.
So love Team Drives, great feature for Google Drive.
Okay, your question may be, "What does Dropbox do that
Google Drive can't do?"
And there's one thing that Dropbox can still do
that Google Drive can't do and that's lancing.
So what that means is if you've got three computers
in one office, when you put a file into someone's Dropbox,
it'll send it to those other computers first
before it uploads it to the internet.
So in the Google Drive, the way of doing things
is kind of goes up the internet and then back down
to everyone.
Well, that's how it used to do it.
Now with Google Drive file stream,
Google will actually intelligently, won't send
them locally between the computers,
doesn't quite do that.
But what Google Drive does is it only downloads
the files that people are actually using.
So, it'll only download the files that people made.
So if you've got three people in an office
and person A uploads a file, only if person B
and person C need that file or open that file
will it then be downloaded to their computers
and that's called Google Drive file stream.
Very intelligent, very useful feature of Google Drive
included for all business accounts now.
So if you have any questions or you want to go toe to toe
on why you're holding onto your Dropbox,
go ahead and put your questions right below this video.
But my recommendation is and from what I've seen
with literally hundreds and hundreds of businesses
that we've helped make the switch from wherever
they are right now over to the Google ecosystem
and into Google G Suite.
For most of our customers, six months down the line,
they're just not even bothering using Dropbox anymore.
They've switched everything over to Google Drive,
everything is in one place and they're absolutely loving it.
Until next time.
Take care.
Cheers.