Google Drive vs Dropbox vs Onedrive
Consumer cloud storage services
Storing your files in a cloud, to be accessed anywhere at any time. No USB-sticks or portable hard-disk are needed, as long as you have access to the internet. But what are the differences and risks of these consumer cloud storage services?
Dropbox makes it easy to share, with a free space of at least 2 GB, it is useful for example when you can not email a file that is too big. Other than just a great and easy way to store all your files, it is free to use.
Onedrive, with a free space of 7 GB, is what was formerly known as Skydrive and belong to Microsoft.
But lets talk about Google Drive, with free space of 15 GB. Next to the advantages that Dropbox has as well, Google drive has a lot of innovative advantages. Such as their own type of files.
Personally I am a big fan of Google Docs, which can be described as the ‘Word’-version of Google. It is a typewriting document which allows you to collaborate with for instance your colleagues or fellow students on the same document on the same time. A Google mail account is needed. Google Drive has no native app for Windows Phone or Windows RT, but does for Windows PC, Mac, iOS and Android.
Dropbox also has native support for iOS, Mac, Windows and Android, but not Windows Phone or Windows RT. However, it’s the only service here that has a native app for Amazon Kindle Fire and BlackBerry. Of course, you can also access all three services online through your browser, and there are third-party Windows Phone apps for Dropbox and Google Drive.
There is automatic upload for Dropbox and Onedrive which is great for smartphones with limited space, to upload your photos automatically to the storage cloud in order to clean up space on your smartphone.
What do you think of these cloud storage systems and what is your favorite?
Sources:
http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/dropbox-gdrive-skydrive/
http://www.gigitaal.nl/netwerk/dropbox-vs-onedrive-vs-google-drive/
5 responses to “Google Drive vs Dropbox vs Onedrive”
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My personal favourite is Onedrive ! This is for the reason that I am able to edit Word and Excel documents easily which is the same document that I have uploaded from my laptop. I feel using Google’s documents and excel does not give me a seamless experience and how I have formatted a document changes considerably when I am using Google’s documents.
I think Dropbox is the best and easiest way to share and store files, Onedrive definitely lacks the smooth experience that Dropbox offers to users. In Google drive you need to specify for each document whether sharing should be enabled or not – which is not a smooth experience for the end user.
For me it depends what my purpose for the document is. When I want to share photos I rather do this via Dropbox, because I can use every e-mail account and invite a lot of friends for the same photo map and then never look at it again or check whether everyone downloaded the map and then delete it because it takes too much space. When I am writing an essay with several other students I rather use google drive. Personally I have only made a g-mail account for the use of google drive. The great thing of google is you can all work in the same document and leave comments for each other before changing their texts (you have a sort of word, powerpoint, excel etc.). If someone has made specific changes, you can easily ask the person in question what they did with your inforrmation or why they changed it since google keeps track of which change is made by whom.
Personally I have never used OneDrive (or Skydrive) before but I will definitely check it and see whether it will change my preferences!
In the past I only used Dropbox to store and share files. But as other Dropbox users probably will recognize, when working in teams, you experience conflicted copies when two of more team members are changing the same file at the same time. In that case, Dropbox won’t merge the changes, but will save the original file as well as a conflicted copy. You will then need to manually merge the additions to the file from the conflicted copy to the original one. Not that convenient.
Therefore we moved to Google docs. The option to seamlessly work together in the same document at the same time without the problem of conflicting copies seemed pretty neat. Being able to add comments works fine. But after using it a while, we weren’t that satisfied. Google docs lacks decent formatting options. For instance, it’s hard to make a nice looking cover page (if it is possible, please tell me how). Another problem is compatibility with Microsoft Office files. Especially when you need to hand in a paper as a Word file for example, Google docs messes things up. You will still need to manually edit the file in Word then.
So this year, we started using OneDrive. Online Word offers a subset of traditional Word, but enables you to seamlessly work together in the same document. And because it saves the files in native Office formats, no compatibility problems. And since last June, every user has 15GB at their disposal to store files. Unlike Google drive, this storage space is not shared with your email storage.
Because almost anybody uses Dropbox, as opposed to Google drive and OneDrive, I often need to use Dropbox to share files. With Project Harmony Dropbox will in the near future offer a solution to the conflicted copy problem.
Sources:
Dropbox (2014). Get a closer look at Project Harmony, Available at: https://www.dropboxatwork.com/2014/04/get-closer-look-project-harmony-video/
Dropbox (2014). What’s a conflicted copy, Available at: https://www.dropbox.com/help/36
Wollman, D. (2014). Microsoft giving away 15GB of OneDrive storage, 1TB for Office 365 users, Available at: http://www.engadget.com/2014/06/23/microsoft-15gb-free-storage-onedrive
After having tried Google Drive and Dropbox, I am switching toward Google Drive. There are several reasons for that. Firstly, Dropbox offers tiny 2 gigabytes of storage, where they definitely need to improve because competitors offer 15. Second, Goole Drive lives in the huge and cozy universe of Google apps. This mean, the my email (Gmail), calendar (Google Calendar), VoIP (Google Hangouts) and document editing software (Google Docs) are all integrated. In this way the meetings work organization is much easier, because there is no need to switch between platforms and accounts. Integration adds value. Dropbox, at the same time is only integrated with Facebook, which is meant for entertainment rather than productivity.
For those who feel that their Dropbox is becoming a legacy system, there is a solution! Multcloud.com offers a simple, free to use migration tool between all majour cloud strage systems. Just register you account choose the platform, to which you want to switch and Multcloud will do the magic!
Out of all these skydrives dropbox seems to be the best integrated over all devices and has least restrictions. Even Apple puts in a lot of efforts to integrate it over its devices.