of research decided to make the move from Dropbox to Google Drive. In
this post I’ll explain why I did it and some cool unexpected benefits
that came from the move and give you a rundown of Dropbox vs Google
Drive.
Dropbox and Google Drive
are file storage services that sync files between a folder on your
device(s) and the cloud. Making it easy to backup and access your files
from anywhere.
Up until a few weeks ago I was paying for premium plans for both
Google Drive and Dropbox. Both 100GB plans, $1.99 a month for Google
drive and $9.99 a month for Dropbox.
Price
Update 01/09/14: Dropbox in an aggressive move has
dropped its prices to match Google Drive, now offering 1TB for $10.
While price was originally a key deciding factor for me, the extra
benefits I got from moving to Drive still made it worthwhile.
Really want to know why Google Drive is better?
Check out this bonus content: 25 Google Drive Tips you’ve Probably Never Heard of
Storage
As mentioned above, I got 10x more storage with Google for the same price, a massive 1TB. My main computer has a 500GB SSD and a 750GB HDD
drive, for a total of 1.25 TB, but neither Google Drive or Dropbox let
you split your folder across drives, so I was basically restricted to a
maximum of 500GB on my main drive. This number is false however since
Operating System and Application files take up a bunch of space that I
don’t need to back up. So really I have about 350GB capacity on my PC
that I can sync with Google Drive. My second computer, a Macbook Air has even less storage space, 128GB total, so I can barely fit any of my files on that computer. And Google Drive gave me 1TB!
My point is I now have more space than I know what to do with
(actually thats a lie, I’ve been using Google Drive to replace my 3
external hard drives, something I will cover in a future post – Post now live – check it out here).
But it feels great to no long have to pick and choose which files I
want to back up and which ones I don’t, another step towards reducing decision fatigue, yay!
Google Search
Another awesome benefit is that now all my files are in one place,
and I can search them using the best search engine in the world! Finding
any of my files is quick and easy using Google search on the web,
mobile app or Android device.
For an added bonus, you can even search files directly from inside Gmail.
Google Docs
Since I work with remote teams and customers all around the world, I
use Google Docs a lot. I find it works better for a number of things,
especially collaborative spreadsheets, and it’s great to just be able to
share links out to people to collaborate on documents straight through a
browser, without needing emails etc…
For content, Google Docs is pretty much the standard method of
distribution when pitching guest posts for other blogs. Being able to
quickly hit ‘share’ then attach a document by pasting a link into Inbox or Gmail is invaluable, and pretty much makes Microsoft Word useless.
Having docs as part of all my other files is nice for organization and search purposes as mentioned above.
Update: Looks like Dropbox has come up with a counter for this by integrating with Microsoft Office. See article here.
I’m not sure how much of an advantage that is since you get a free
1TB of storage when you pay for Office which is $7 a month, less than
the price you would pay for a 1TB Dropbox plan.
Unlimited FREE photo storage with Google Photos
Google recently released Google Photos, a stand alone app for managing your photos that syncs directly with Google Drive.
Google photos is one of my favorite new apps. Firstly, they give you
unlimited free storage of non-HD photos which is pretty awesome. Once
installed, you instantly can browse ALL your photos on Drive. When I
installed the app, suddenly I was looking at photos from 5+ years ago.
They also do a bunch of cool auto effects on your images, creating
stories, collages and effects. It lets you sort images by time, place
and person to really make browsing a massive photo library the cleanest
experience I have come across so far.
Check out this story from a trip to Budapest I took a few years back, Google made it for me without having to touch a thing.
I’ve thought for a while that a needed product is something that auto
arranges and displays your old photos. Since we’re taking an
exponentially increasing amount of photos each year, by the time my
generation is 70+ we will have millions of photos that will literally
take years to look through. So being able to consolidate all those
photos down for easy consumption is going to be absolutely necessary.
Looks like Google is already starting to do this, and I’m really
enjoying it as I rarely get time to go through my old photos.
Auto Awesome is another cool feature that automatically stitches
similar photos into Gifs and even combines videos and photos into short
auto videos. Check out the below Gif it made for me automatically!
One annoying thing I found about Google+ Photos was the number of
unnecessary albums Google created for me that are full of junk and that I
can’t figure out how to bulk remove. Since I work on the web and I’m
constantly launching websites, designing landing pages, advertisements, blog posts
and scraping stuff from various sites I have a ton of random images.
Google decided to make a new album for each of my folders with images in
them, equating to thousands of random albums that just have 1 or 2
banners or add to cart buttons. Hopefully they give me a way to mass
organize this in the future.
Update: Looks like they are working on this as we speak.
Videos
Another cool thing is the ability to watch all my videos straight
from drive. I have lots of educational courses and video clips I use for
making videos, and its cool to be able to watch them from my Mac and
phone without having to download them. Dropbox lets you do this too but
Google supports a few more formats than Dropbox and gives you the nice
YouTube player.
Really want to know why Google Drive is better?
Check out this bonus content: 25 Google Drive Tips you’ve Probably Never Heard of
Google Apps Integration
We use Google Apps at Process Street to manage our emails, calendars,
files and documents. Since I now have all my personal stuff on Google
Drive I can share my Process Street folder with my local account and
that links all my work docs into the same Google Drive account. The
space doesn’t bother me and this puts all my stuff in the same place for
both work and home giving me the same advantages above with things like
search.
I know this move may not be for everyone, Cameron
chooses to stick with Dropbox as he doesn’t like the idea of having all
his files and emails under one service provider but it seems to be
working out well for me so far.
Do you use Dropbox, Google Drive or something else?
Check out these 25 Ninja Google Drive Tips!
