Originally Posted by
Copper Bezel
Machines where you have the Dropbox client installed sync actively with every change you make in the Dropbox folder. So no, you don't have to take any steps to update to and from the cloud. Basically, on a machine you own, you're working with local files all the time, and they're silently and immediately mirrored to the cloud as you make changes to them (the files are, as I understand it, tunneled but not encrypted, but this allows Dropbox to use delta changes.) You'd normally only open the web client on a machine you don't own, because you need to print this or that thing or give a presentation and so on.
And yeah, it's a very officeworky tool.
What makes it really usable is the dependability of the updating. It's very rare that I trick it into creating a file conflict copy of something (and when it does, of course, both versions are still there) by, say, saving different versions of a document on two different machines at once or something. The Dropbox daemon monitors writes to the local folder and updates to the web storage at all times. I tried using Ubuntu One while it was a thing, and it just wasn't comparable - it wasn't as smart and quick. Where I can save a smallish document on one machine and have it show up on another almost immediately with Dropbox, that wasn't possible with U1.
And like I said, to me at least, Docs and Dropbox solve two different problems. Obviously, you can use Drive for more than just documents, and there are local syncing tools for it that emulate something like Dropbox. But Drive is still driven almost entirely through the browser, where Dropbox is first and foremost a sync daemon (and mobile app.) And the Docs files themselves are in Google's own document format and can't be edited with local tools. At the same time, Docs' handling of sharing and permissions, simultaneous editing by multiple users, and so on along with the simplicity of the Docs interface and the fluidity between the desktop web app and the mobile app are all totally unparalleled.
So if you're already using Docs and you just want a way to back up or make accessible some other files that don't happen to be documents, Drive is very good at those things. Docs itself is a tool that Dropbox doesn't have anything comparable with, while Drive doesn't have the local integration that Dropbox does and largely requires you to work through webapps, where Dropbox is about synchronizing and backing up local data to be used with local applications.
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