Hello and welcome back to Cloudwards.net.
My name is Mauricio and today we’re talking about Dropbox.
Dropbox is among the most well-known names in cloud storage, and for good reason.
It was founded all the way back in 2007, making it a veteran of the industry.
Naturally, this means that there are high expectations, so let’s dig in and see if
it lives up to them.
Before we do that, however, I’d just like to remind you to subscribe, hit like, and
click on the bell icon so you can see when we post new videos.
Dropbox, like many others, uses a “freemium” model.
This means that you can actually get the service for free, but you’re only going to have
2GB of storage space.
This gives potential users a great opportunity to try the service, but anyone doing much
serious work will need to upgrade.
When it comes to that there are two plans on offer, which aren’t the cheapest out
there.
The lower plan, Dropbox plus, gives you an impressive 2TB of storage while the Dropbox
Professional plan allows you to store up to 3TB.
For a better deal, we’d suggest taking a look at our sync.com review by clicking this
card here.
Moving from a weakness to a strength, let’s talk about speed.
Dropbox is remarkably fast thanks to its powerful servers as well as a sophisticated and highly
optimized system by which the files are actually updated.
Dropbox does not reupload entire files when it syncs things, but instead, only updates
the parts of a file that has actually changed, which can save huge amounts of time and bandwidth.
One interesting aspect of Dropbox is that it offers Google Drive integration, which
is very rare in a cloud storage industry that mostly sees Drive as a direct competitor.
Dropbox is also integrated with Microsoft office, meaning you can create new documents
or open existing ones right from the Dropbox website in either software you like and anyone
you’re collaborating with can do the same.
Collaboration is one area where Dropbox has improved greatly in recent years, but ultimately
it’s still more of a file syncing service first and a cloud collaboration platform second.
Most of its features and functionality are geared towards giving you control over your
files, things like in-depth versioning and rewinding, rather than being focused on letting
others also work on your files.
Dropbox seems to focus on the actual storage side of the business while letting integration
with other third parties pick up the slack in other areas.
Dropbox is now integrated with Trello and Zoom, for example, allowing you to post files
to those services right from your Dropbox.
While all of this integration has, in some ways, filled in the gaps where Dropbox was
weak with things like collaboration, it has opened a completely different can of worms.
Dropbox has poor security and privacy, largely as a prerequisite for being able to properly
integrate with so many different services.
It does not offer zero-knowledge encryption, for example, because it would be impossible
to share files across multiple services and computers if the files were encrypted and
only you had the key.
If security and privacy is what you really care about then check out sync as a good alternative,
if you’re looking for secure cloud storage for your business and you need your files
hosted in Europe, Tresorit is probably a good bet.
On top of this, Dropbox seems to not really care about user privacy, at all.
In its privacy policy, it outright says that it can access your data and look at it to
ensure that you are not violating its policies.
This is something most people would agree is a violation of privacy and will ultimately
drive many people, including us, away from the service.
If you’re still interested in trying Dropbox out despite the questionable security, I’ll
include a link down below so you can sign up for the free trial and get started right
away.
I’ll also include a link to our full written review of Dropbox that goes into much more
detail than what we discussed in this video.
As always, thanks for watching and remember to give this video a thumbs up if you found
it helpful and subscribe to our channel for more upcoming reviews.