It turns out DropBox isn’t the answer… yet…
A little while ago I wrote that I thought I had found the answer to my file synchronization problems in a service called DropBox. For a little while it looked as if it was going to do a really good job at keeping all my files in sync across multiple computers without having to carry a jump drive with me wherever I go.
Unfortunately, DropBox turned out to not be as good as I had hoped. Although it did a good job at small amounts of files I found that with large file counts and longer path names over 150 characters or so it started to miss a lot. In fact, on any given sync it would miss 10-20% of the 25,000 or so files I was trying to sync. In addition, all files with DropBox have to be stored in the same folder and your My Documents folder cannot be set to the root of a drive. In my case both of these issues turned out to be problematic as moving files resulted in me having problems with windows character limits in the path names.
In the defense of Dropbox it sounds as if these issues will eventually be resolved and they have a very active and helpful forum for support issues. Unfortunately for me though not have a good chunk of files was not something I could live with and I would have to move on to something else.
The next service I tried was Sugarsync. For about 2 days it seemed to be great until I noticed a fatal flaw. It would not sync the .htaccess files in my websites. I emailed support about the issue and although it took about 3 days they finally replied that this was by design and would not be changing. OK, I can’t understand why they would block these on a Windows machine, but whatever, time to move on again.
Now I’m with Syncplicity. I’ve been using their service for over a week now and it does a very good job of keeping everything in sync. It’s only real flaws are the need for a forced or manual sync as sometimes it takes the client a few minutes to find an updated file, and there is no Mac client yet. The latter is due out next month which, as I haven’t bought a Mac yet (I’m waiting for the new ones next month) really isn’t that much of an issue yet.
I don’t know if I’ll stay with Syncplicity in the long term as DropBox seems to have a lot of potential. However for now it does the job and does it well and that really is the bottom line.
Related posts
Comments are closed.
Chris, we expect to enable support for files such as .htaccess back at some point soon. It was disabled due to compatibility issues we found among various platforms but we are working on bringing it back as we have heard this concern from a few people. Thanks for the input.
Domingo – SugarSync team
Hi,
I just wanted to let you know about nomadesk. http://nomadesk.com
NomaDesk integrates well with windows, it gives you a drive letter in your explorer window and it comes with a shell extension.
There is also a dashboard(client application) that lets you easily manage everything.
It also uses delta syncing, that way if there is a change in a 100mb file it won’t sync the 100mb but only the bytes that were changed(comes in really handy when bandwidth becomes an issue)
Also, for now NomaDesk is free. It’s beta, just like dropbox. Ofc it won’t stay free forever, but a couple of days ago the free trail has been extended indefinitely.
Your data is also secure, all trafic to and from the server is done with a secure connection, there is even a way to delete your data when your laptop is stolen or something(first time coming on-line after reported stolen it delete everything). + all data on your local drive is encryped anyway
Just like dropbox you can share your data, send filelinks(an email that lets other ppl dll a file), invite guests(a public one allows you to invite unlimited guests etc)
Just check it out
, it’s worth giving it a try. It’s different then dropbox, but if it’s about syncing between computers, or working in team, NomaDesk will beat Dropbox any day 
Also, NomaDesk is still in full development and each release it improves ALLOT, the last release improved the syncing allot and I’m sure that the next couple of releases will make it allot easier to work with etc.
Did you try nomadesk ? Synchronization is really reliable, and by the way, you can create as many fileservers or workspaces as you like. Give it a try and let us know if it works out for you. If you have any questions, there is great support through live chat on the http://www.nomadesk.com website.
Thanks for the input. I’ll give Nomadesk a try. As for Sugarsync, I’ll give it a go again when the .htaccess problem is fixed. My impression from you tech support however was that there are no plans on changing that feature any time soon.
Hi Chris,
Leonard from the Syncplicity team here. Thanks for the nice review. I wanted to let you know we recently did a major infrastructure upgrade (http://blog.syncplicity.com/2008/09/22/infrastructure-upgrade/) to eliminate the delays that some users saw in syncing. You should be seeing faster synchronization times now.
Thanks,
Leonard
Thanks Leonard. I’ve noticed a definite improvement in speed so far. When do you think you’ll have that Mac client ready???
Chris,
End of October is our latest ETA. We’ll keep you posted.
Email me if you have any feedback for us – we’d love to hear from you.
Ondrej @ Syncplicity