So, a few years back, I almost moved away from Dropbox. In fact, I generally got away without using Dropbox at all, which worked out nicely. However, I went back and for a while, I’ve also had Dropbox lurking away on my system.

That is until today where I fell foul of the three device limit. On the free, basic tier, Dropbox only permits three devices to be used. This hadn’t effected me, as for the past year and a bit, I had my personal account linked to my Pro, office account. It seems that where the paid for account was linked, the three device limit didn’t apply.

However, I hadn’t been working for that company now for almost a year, and it looks like they’ve now stopped paying for my account and the account has lapsed. Which now means that my ability to add additional items has now lapsed.

This has caused some issues initially when I came across it, as I was trying to add Dropbox to a new device.

Resilo Sync

The reason I don’t have a paid for Dropbox account is Resilo Sync. This allows me to sync all my files between my PC’s and devices without having to pay a monthly fee. The downside perhaps, is that one device always has to be on for the files to sync. However, it has worked pretty reliably for me since I bought it.

One main downside is that as it is based on BitTorrent, it doesn’t seem to work on some internet connections that may block torrents (my workplace wifi springs to mind). This has never proven to be particularly problematic, as it isn’t often I’ll be on a wifi for a long period of time.

OneDrive

However, there are still times when using a cloud based service comes in handy, and for that, I’ve switched over to Onedrive. By default, this is installed on Windows and working, so it seemed like the best solution. I can also run it alongside my work Onedrive as well, as it allows you to link different accounts to it - it also links to Teams/Sharepoint folders and can sync those to the local drive as well.

Whilst I’ve found the syncing to be slightly slower perhaps than Dropbox, it performs equally as well with the sync of files so far, and it also supports selective sync on the free version, which is better than the free version of Dropbox (Resilo Sync does as well).

By having the online service, I can sync files back to my Mac and Hazel can file them for me and I can add these from anywhere.

Sacrifices

There are some issues with switching fully to Onedrive - for example, a lot of iOS apps use Dropbox as the file system. Some of these are being updated to use the iOS files app, so those ones work quite nicely, but where the apps haven’t been updated to take this in to account, then these apps are stuck using Dropbox and I can’t access the synced files on the desktop.

This mainly effects writing apps - Editorial for example still uses Dropbox as it’s file storage and it’s a shame, as this one of my favourite editors on the iPad. However, as I seem to have moved to Inspire Writer on Windows for writing blog posts and use plain text for my notes, which are accessible in Onedrive on the iPad Files app, I don’t have much of a problem.

Overall, it’s been a fairly decent breakup, and currently no signs of having to return!