onedrive

Un-cancelling Dropbox Pro

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Yes, I know, that didn’t take long. But having spent a week with Microsoft OneDrive, I decided that Dropbox Pro was actually worth paying extra for after all.

I originally cancelled Dropbox Pro because I didn’t need the extra space that I was paying for, and indeed had access to enough extra space in OneDrive. So I spent most of last week moving my photos (which take up most of the space) from Dropbox to OneDrive – almost 15 GB in total. This took several days to upload, on and off.

I then decided to enable the photo backup feature in OneDrive’s iOS app. Dropbox has a similar feature, as does Google+ and Flickr – all of the photos in your camera roll are backed up. And this is one of the key reasons why I decided to go back on my original decision and re-subscribe to Dropbox Pro – OneDrive is a bit dumb. It wanted to upload every image on my iPhone again, even though they were already there, having been copied across from Dropbox.

To put this into context, this amounts to over 1000 images, plus a few videos. That’s a lot of data to duplicate. I’m lucky that both my home broadband and mobile internet services are “unlimited” but it would still take a long time and require tidying up afterwards.

This is something I mentioned a couple of years ago in the technical superiority of Dropbox. Dropbox does a lot of things to reduce the amount of bandwidth it needs, by automatically detecting duplicate files, only uploading the modified portions of files, and synchronising files on the same network directly as well as with Dropbox’s servers. And last week an update to the Dropbox desktop client enabled ‘streaming sync’, which should allow large files to upload more quickly. OneDrive is evidently a much more basic client, that doesn’t check for pre-existing files.

What’s more, when I copied all of my photos back into my Dropbox folder, there was no need to upload them all again. Dropbox keeps copies of all files deleted within the past 30 days – or, for an extra $39 a year, its packrat feature will keep any deleted files indefinitely (business customers get this as standard). So it was able to bring all 15 GB of photos back online within a few minutes, and not several days.

Of course, cloud storage is pretty much the only thing that Dropbox does as a company, so of course it has a greater focus on the quality of its product. Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Apple and most of Dropbox’s other rivals all focus primarily on other products, with cloud storage as a small sideline.

As much as I would prefer to pay less for Dropbox Pro, my experiences over the past couple of weeks have convinced me that it’s worth paying a bit more for a better service. OneDrive may now be giving me over a terabyte of storage as part of my Office 365 subscription, but I can do so much more with the 100-and-a-bit gigabytes I get with Dropbox Pro, even though it costs extra.

Cancelling Dropbox Pro

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Screenshot of an email confirming a downgrade to Dropbox Basic

At the weekend, with a heavy heart, I cancelled my Dropbox Pro subscription, and reverted to a basic account.

I’ve been a Pro user, paying $99 each year, for almost the past two years. But when Dropbox emailed me to say that my Pro account was up for renewal in a couple of weeks, I didn’t feel like I could continue to pay for it. $99 is a bit less than £60, which is money that I could spend on other things.

But there’s also the issue that I’ve already paid for four years of extra storage for Microsoft’s OneDrive, from when I signed up to Office 365. Whilst the Office 365 package only provides an extra 25 gigabytes of storage, I was using less than that with Dropbox. So it was hard to justify continuing to pay £60 per year for something that I was barely using.

This isn’t to say that I will no longer use Dropbox – it’s still my favourite cloud storage service, and besides, I have some shared folders that I need to keep going. But I’ve shifted all of my photos over to OneDrive, since they take up most of the space. So I’ll be using both in tandem, at least for now.

Dropbox is now one of the most expensive cloud storage services, when compared to Microsoft, Google, Amazon and the rest. I may be tempted back if its prices drop (and I noted this in the survey that I was asked to fill out when I cancelled). Also, I’m looking forward to seeing how Apple’s iCloud Drive service turns out when that launches in the autumn. Though iCloud’s extra storage tiers are also rather pricey – 100 gigabytes is £70, which is more than Dropbox, and the next smallest is 20 gigabytes which may be too small. Perhaps Apple will also drop its prices nearer the launch, as I expect more people will be upgrading.

I do feel a bit sad about downgrading my account, even though it makes financial sense. Perhaps as and when Dropbox lowers its prices, I’ll come back.

Update: I changed my mind less than two weeks’ after this was posted, and re-subscribed to Dropbox Pro.

Debating whether to ditch Dropbox Pro

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A screenshot of Dropbox settings showing how much storage I am using

I’m a Dropbox Pro user. This means that I’m paying around £60 per year (or £5 per month if you will) for an extra 100 gigabytes of storage, over and above what free users get. This is mainly because I use it to keep photos in sync between my devices – and as I have a SLR camera, those images can be quite large – but also because I believe in paying for services that I rely on.

But lately, two things have happened.

One, I signed up for Office 365, which gave me an additional 20 gigabytes of storage in Microsoft’s rival cloud storage service OneDrive. Coupled with the 28 gigabytes that I have free, that means I have almost 50 gigabytes available that I’m also partly paying for anyway. As I was able to purchase the Office 365 University package, that means that I paid less than £60 for four years, and also get access to Microsoft Office and some Skype minutes thrown in. So, using OneDrive would still give me plenty of space, at a significantly reduced cost.

The other thing that happened was a recent appointment to Dropbox’s board, in the form of Dr Condoleeza Rice, the former US secretary of state under George W Bush’s presidency. During her time in office, she authorised widespread wiretapping, which is a bit of an issue when it comes to privacy and cloud storage. Plus there are all of the uncomfortable things that surround the War on Terror that happened during that time. Whilst I’m pleased that Dropbox has a woman – and a woman of colour at that – on its board, this appointment makes me feel a little uneasy, in the same way as Brendan Eich’s brief presidency of the Mozilla Corporation.

With these two factors in mind, I decided to explore OneDrive a little more, and see if I could really replace Dropbox with Microsoft’s cheaper alternative. Last year, this would have been a non-starter, as I was still using Windows XP at work which SkyDrive (as OneDrive was called at the time) would not run on. But whilst OneDrive supports fewer platforms than Dropbox, it does support the ones I use – Windows 7, Windows 8, Mac OS X and iOS.

However, its Mac client isn’t as good as Dropbox’s client, and this is the first reason why (spoiler alert!) I’m not going to ditch Dropbox. Sure, it does the same basic job of synchronising the content of a folder to the cloud, but without any status icons on each file informing you of its state. So whereas Dropbox shows you which files have been successfully uploaded, and which are still pending, with OneDrive you’re in the dark.

Dropbox’s other useful feature is photo importing. Now OneDrive is happy to import the contents of my phone automatically – as is Dropbox, and indeed Google+ and most recently Flickr in its version 3.0 update released yesterday. But on the desktop? Not so much. With Dropbox, I can put the SD card from my SLR camera into my Mac, and have it automatically import the new photos, which saves me the effort of doing it manually.

There’s also the issue of third-party app integration. OneDrive does have an open API and integration with sites like IFTTT, but not to the same extent as Dropbox. For example, I use Dropbox to keep my 1Password keychain in sync between my devices. If I didn’t use Dropbox, then I’d either have to use iCloud (which wouldn’t work on Windows) or over a local Wifi connection (no use at work). I suppose I could switch to using another service like LastPass instead, but I’ve already paid for the individual 1Password apps and like using them.

I also use Dropbox for collaboration – Christine and I had a shared wedding folder for planning our wedding, which was really helpful. OneDrive does this as well but I’d also have to convert Christine over as well.

So really, I can’t use OneDrive as a drop-in replacement for Dropbox. I could cancel my pro subscription for Dropbox, and drop back to being a free user for those services that need it. But then OneDrive makes it more difficult to upload photos and that’s the main reason why I pay for extra space in Dropbox. And I’d have to run both the Dropbox and OneDrive clients simultaneously and remember which one has which documents in it.

As much as Dropbox is the more expensive option, for me, it’s the better service.

Office 365 University

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A copy of Microsoft 365 University in my cart on the Microsoft Store

Over the weekend I bought a copy of Microsoft Office for the first time. In the past, I’ve managed with either what’s been pre-loaded on new computers, or, since I got my own computer, OpenOffice or its variants.

But now Microsoft offers Office 365 University. For £60, you get to use Microsoft Office on two computers, and an unlimited number of mobile devices, for four years. The catch being that you need to be a full-time student, or a member of staff at university. Thankfully, the latter is true in my case.

These two computers can either be Windows or Mac machines: Windows users get Office 2013, Mac users get the slightly older Office 2011. They can be in any combination, so one Mac and one PC, two Macs, or two Windows PCs. Although all users of compatible iPhone, Android and Windows Phone handsets can install the free Office Mobile app, Office 365 users can also use the new suite of iPad apps and be able to create and edit documents (non-subscribers can only view documents). Unfortunately, as my old iPad 1 isn’t capable of running iOS 7, this isn’t a feature I can yet take advantage of.

Other benefits of the Office 365 subscription include 60 minutes of free calls to regular phone numbers on Skype each month, valid in around 60 countries, and an additional 20 GB of storage space on Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud storage service. As an early adopter of this service I already had 25 GB, plus a 3 GB bonus gained by enabling photo sync in the iOS app, so I have 48 GB of space now.

I’ve got Office 2011 up and running on my Mac, which in this edition includes Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Outlook, with OneNote as a separate free download (previously reviewed by me here). Although be aware that the first thing you will probably have to do after downloading the almost 1 GB install package, is then download another 100 MB or so of software updates. This is Microsoft software after all!

For the most part, Office 2011 for Mac can do anything that Office 2010 for Windows can do, with a couple of exceptions – no ActiveX controls (so no embeddable YouTube videos in presentations), and no support for the OpenDocument file formats. This means that you’ll probably still want to keep either OpenOffice or LibreOffice around if you have documents in these formats. I was a little surprised at the ugliness and clutteredness of the user interface, when compared with Office 2010 and indeed the new OneNote for Mac. Whilst it uses the new ‘ribbon’ interface introduced with Office 2007, it’s not as well designed as its Windows counterparts. Hopefully this will improve as and when a new version of Office for Mac is released.

As for why I’ve bought Office 365 when I already have LibreOffice installed? The main reasons are speed and file compatibility. LibreOffice is still quite big and slow, when compared with the Word, Excel and PowerPoint apps on my Mac. And file compatibility with Microsoft’s own formats isn’t quite there, even after all of these years. It’s not helped by there being several forks of what was originally OpenOffice.org in parallel development – there’s now Apache OpenOffice, LibreOffice and the Mac-only NeoOffice.

In terms of the additional perks, I don’t think I will get to use the extra Skype minutes, bearing in mind that I never use the inclusive minutes in my mobile contract either. Whilst I wasn’t planning to use the extra OneDrive space, since I’m mostly a Dropbox user, I may need to think this through. Right now I’m paying £60/year for Dropbox Pro, but only using around 15 GB – theoretically I could switch over to OneDrive and still have ample space whilst saving myself some money. I’ll need to ponder this.

If you are a student or a university staff member, I would therefore recommend Office 365 University to you. It’s £60 on the Microsoft store, although Quidco users should be able to claim 15% cashback, making it about £52. On the other hand, it’s £52.56 on Amazon, which is probably a better option.