from Hacker News

Ask HN: Have any of you switched away from Dropbox?

by barbequeer on 3/3/25, 8:01 PM with 15 comments

I am a long time dropbox free user, and I find it very useful, but I have more than three devices.

I don't want to shell out for a pro account because 120 a year just seems too much to pay for syncing things between devices, and I'm a tightwad on a budget.

I've tried various combinations of syncthing, github, owncloud, nextcloud etc, on private servers and raspberry pis in my home. I work from home and dont really care about having access to stuff away from home - its really more about syncing between various family laptops and across different OSes. I'm not talking enormous amounts of data - I have 15GB storage on dropbox from when they did various promotions years ago, and I have not hit the limit yet. I mainly just sync around important docs, scripts, config files, source code for things, handy files, the odd photo or thing I want to move from one to another.

has anyone found a good free alternative that actually works well? Was it one of the above ones I mentioned? if so, what were the teething problems?

am I missing a really obvious alternative?

  • by legitster on 3/3/25, 8:41 PM

    > has anyone found a good free alternative that actually works well?

    Free? No. But cloud storage comes bundled with so many services now that I don't feel the need for another discreet one.

    We already pay for an annual Office 365 plan and it comes with 6 terabytes of free cloud storage for our family which is more than enough! And more storage than you get for a basic paid Dropbox account that costs more!

  • by sejje on 3/4/25, 1:21 AM

    I use syncthing. It's so simple. How did it fail for you?

    The only problem I can think of is that they both/all need to be on.

    I have almost your exact same use case. I do sync one machine at work, but mostly I'm just trying to avoid drive failure and be able to share programming projects easily.

  • by HenryBemis on 3/3/25, 10:25 PM

    I stopped using Dropbox many years ago. I switched to a non-syncing but encrypted cloud backup, with the years they changed and now they are Carbonite, that have unlimited storage. Challenge is that if you encrypt then you cannot recover "that one file" but you have to download the whole blob (mine is over 1TB).

    When I need to travel and take my "burner" laptop it carries only the OS, firefox and the very few files that I copy with a flash disk.

    And, SyncToy, I used it plenty 10-15 years ago.

    You mentioned syncthing, if momery serves me well, Steve Gibson has mentioned it quite a few times but I haven't played around with it.

  • by scblock on 3/3/25, 8:13 PM

    Years and years ago. I see you've tried many things but not described whatever issues you may have had with them. I use Nextcloud running on a NAS which also runs a Wireguard endpoint so I have access via VPN to my home network when I am traveling. It's not perfect but does what I want it to do syncing a folder of files between Linux, Windows, and macOS systems, and the iOS app works well enough.

    I don't use it for large scale file storage, such as photos or media. Those are on the NAS and accessed through traditional SMB file shares.

  • by kadushka on 3/4/25, 3:04 AM

    That question sounds to me like “have any of you switched away from myspace?”

    I last used dropbox ~15 years ago. Since then I used S3, Google Drive, Synology NAS, and iCloud. I don’t need to do any syncing across devices: if I need a file I know where to find it (gmail if it’s a document, icloud if it’s an image/video). I still back everything up to Synology.

  • by solardev on 3/3/25, 11:22 PM

    I just use Google Drive since it's where all my stuff lives anyway. It's free up to 15 GB, or $20/yr for 100 GB.

    Probably if you're on Mac or Windows, iCloud and whatever the Microsoft one is called now also has free storage?

    For source code and config, just make a Github repo for them so you can host them for free in a private repo and also version control them?

  • by shaunpud on 3/4/25, 2:46 AM

    I went with filen.io, the apps work great and provide client-side encryption. You can sign up for a free 10GB account.

  • by Leftium on 3/4/25, 3:59 AM

    I think there may be a "hack" to get around the three device limit:

    1. Upgrade to pro for a single month (Dropbox often offers free trials)

    2. Add all your devices

    3. Downgrade back to free

    Dropbox will continue to work on all your devices. You just can't add new devices.

    Source: I currently have five devices on the Dropbox free plan.

  • by nopelynopington on 3/4/25, 1:42 PM

    Thanks folks, I'm going to reevaluate syncthing and Google drive!

  • by muzani on 3/3/25, 10:08 PM

    I set up some syncing to AWS cloud thanks to GPT-4 several years ago. You can probably do the same thing today with AI agents and they'll even install aws cli and run the commands for you.

  • by twentythree on 3/4/25, 2:48 AM

    I got an FTP account, mounted it locally with curlftpfs, and use SVN on the mounted filesystem. Quite trivial, really.