Windows Live Sync and Dropbox, thoughts and comments after several months of use...

I've been running both Windows Live Sync and Dropbox now for several months.  My Dropbox account is a 50Gb paid account.  I find myself using both of them, for related but slightly different purposes.

The main difference between Live Sync and Dropbox is that with Dropbox, files are also 'in the cloud' so they can be accessed via the web, and if you add a new computer, the files sync from the 'the cloud' rather than other computers.  If you add a new machine to your Dropbox account, therefore, it will begin syncing immediately, even if none of the other machines it is linked to are online.  With Windows Live Sync, files exist only on the computers that have been paired.  If you add a new computer but none of the machines that you want to pair to are online, the files on those machines won't sync over until one of them is online.

Another big difference, of course, is that Dropbox is a paid service if you want to use more than a few Gb, and it isn't cheap.  I don't mind paying, however, since it is so convenient and useful.  One feature that I fortunately have not had to use, but gives me peace of mind, is Undo, which allows retrieval of older versions of files, up to 30 days.  For extra money, there is another feature that removes the 30 day limit for Undo.

Basically, I use Dropbox to Sync the entire contents of My Documents across my office desktop and two laptops.  It works seamlessly.  I work on a file in the evening at home, and next morning it is there in my office.  Because everything is up on the cloud, if I need a file and I'm not on one of my computers, I can just log in to the web page and retrieve the file.  I've used this a few times when giving presentations in venues that already had a machine.  I just logged in, retrieved my ppt, and did my presentation.  This has also been very handy a few times when I needed to print something at the business center of a hotel.  For various reasons, I don't like flash drives.

I also make heavy use of shared folders in Dropbox for collaboration, but at present there is one frustrating limitation.  I work with people in Asia and the East Coast, and as long as they're not in China (more about that later) we can collaborate fairly seamlessly on documents in shared folders.  One limitation that is somewhat frustrating is that folders on a paid account that are shared with people with a free account also count toward their 2gb quota.  So basically sharing with people with free accounts works well only for documents and smaller files.  If you want to share large data files, or images, or anything that takes up a lot of shortage, you will blow through their free quota pretty quickly.  I do find this a bit frustrating, and I hope that Dropbox figures out a way of introducing some kind of functionality that would permit sharing of larger amounts of data paid accounts to free data.  I did correspond with Dropbox about this and they had a fairly reasonably explanation for why they are doing things this way, and apparently they are looking at creating some options that would facilitate the kind of sharing I have in mind, so maybe this will be resolved.

Another issue that has emerged with Dropbox is that since the beginning of May 2010, or perhaps late April, it has been blocked in China, for who knows what reason.  As I mentioned in a previous post, I understand but don't sympathize with China's decision to block Twitter and Facebook since the experience of Iran and other countries shows that they could be used to organize protests and so forth, but why Dropbox?  It is all a mystery.  So if you want to have remote access to your files in China, or share files with someone in China, for the time being Dropbox is not a viable option.

So if I like Dropbox so much, why am I also using Live Sync?  It is free, and since nothing is being hosted in the cloud, there isn't any space limitation.  I think there is some kind of limitation in terms of the total number of folders you can sync and how many computers you can sync across, and each synced folder can only have 20,000 files, but for me that is only an issue for syncing my picture collection.  Syncing my music collection was fine since I was able to break it into two folders of less than 20,000 files each, but reorganizing my much larger photo collection to make it compatible with Live Sync would be too cumbersome, so I use another approach for backing up my photos, which I will describe in another post.  I wish they would relax the 20,000 file limit so I could sync my photo folders.

Thus I use Live Sync to sync a work directories that contain a lot of data (> 100gb) and are accordingly too large for Dropbox.  These are data files that I can only work with on my desktop and laptops and don't need remote access to them, and I have daily off-site backups for them.

Live Sync also allows folder sharing with more options than Dropbox.  Like Dropbox, it allows folder sharing where both parties have full rights over all the contents of the shared folder.  Unlike Dropbox, it offers other choices, including making the contents of the folder read-only for the party it is being shared with.  We have been experimenting with using this to give access to my data directories to collaborators, so they can retrieve any file they need whenever they want, without risking my original files being corrupted.

And here's something else: at least at this moment, Live Sync still works in China.  So the people I was working with there have installed Live Sync and we're sharing folders with each other.  Who knows how long this will last, but it is OK for the time being.  Microsoft web services never seem to encounter trouble in China, and I certainly have some suspicions as to why, so I am hoping Live Sync will be a viable long-term option for collaboration with people in China.

One other limitation with Live Sync: it doesn't play well with external storage.  If you sync with a folder on an external hard drive, maybe because like me you want an external HD that is always ready to grab-and-go, it will work fine as long as the drive is attached, but if Live Sync ever runs while the HD is detached, it becomes upset, and forgets the pair, and you have to pair the folder again.  I wish it would remember the pair and then sync next time the HD was hooked up.

Both Dropbox and Live Sync both seem very robust and have nice user interfaces.