Goodbye Dropbox. Finding an alternative.
Today I finally said goodbye to Dropbox, having Condoleezza Rice as a member of the board of Dropbox was just the final reason, but it's not the only one, Dropbox has been critized latelly for security bugs and the fact that it's a U.S. based company and one of the next targets of the NSA doesn't help eather.
This left me with the difficult task of finding an alternative, becuase to be honest, Dropbox is still the best service out there, easy, cheap, and fast, it's just not very secure. I also had a big problem, because I use a Mac and Linux devices, and having iOS support was a nice thing to have too. So after almost a month of research and $30, here's why I know now:
Copy.com
Copy.com is kind of new, it's easy to use and has integration with Mover.io which basically moved all my files from Dropbox to Copy.com with the click of a button. The service offers 250 GB for $10 but I had two problems:
1. Copy.com doesn't accept Paypal, which is not a big deal.
2. The Linux client sucks, big time.
After a few days, I just decided to move on.
SpiderOak.com
This was the next one in my list, the price was 100GB / $10 so it is in the range of what I needed. It has support for all platforms and even an iOS app. The plus is that it encrypts everything on you computer before sending it to the cloud. This has the disadvange of being a little slower compared to Dropbox, but it's a nice thing to have.
The problem with SpiderOak became evident after I uploaded 100% of my files on my Linux box. On my Macbook, I already had like 99% of the files already becuase I was moving from Dropbox, but apparently, SpiderOak was just downloading the files again, after a week I decided to contact support. They came back to me after a few days asking for logs to debug the problem but it was too late, I already decided to give the next one a try. Also, the UI of the client needs a lot of work since it can be hard sometimes.
The final two options was Wuala.com and owncloud which means you need to host it on your own server.
Wuala.com
This is a really nice service, it has the same kind of encryption that SpiderOak does but also this is a Swish company, which means that it's out of the NSA jurisdiction. I installed it and made a test with two directories. Both of them were already in sync. After a few minutes of uploading files, the second device detected that the files were the same, so it skipped them and flag them as "synced" which is exactly what I wanted. I currently have the 50GB / $7 plan and I'm almost finishing syncing.