Short question: Currently I’m a Dropbox user on Mac, is iCloud a viable alternative? If not, who do you have a good experience with?
I’ve been a happy Dropbox user for 10+ years, it’s rock-solid syncing of a local directory with my other devices and the cloud has never let me down.
However, I’m starting to feel uneasy about staying with them. In the last years they’ve tried to cram more and more functionality I don’t care about (functions not related to syncing files) into the product, their menu-bar app has become a monster, and I’m tired of the up-sell nudges.
Apple is also transitioning all the cloud filesystem companies (like Dropbox, Google Drive, MS One Drive, etc) to use the MacOS File Provider API - probably a good thing to ensure there is a consistent experience for users. But that also makes me think they’re all going to perform exactly the same. I could be wrong of course.
Considering all that I want is for a directory tree to be mirrored between the cloud and my devices, are there any alternatives you’d recommend? Have you had good/bad experiences with iCloud say in the last 2 years?
iCloud is extremely slow. Updates in files can take 10 minutes or more to propagate, especially if two or more people have been editing them. If you’re the only one editing a file, on multiple devices, it’s still slow but much less so.
It also tries to be clever about what it syncs and when, with no options (that I’m aware of) to force it to simply fetch local copies of everything. This makes it unusable for files that you want to access in a terminal as the terminal is, for some reason, not part of the clever sync on demand system.
However, if you want to get fancy with sharing stuff with applications on iOS, such as, for example, an Obsidian file directory or some other set of markdown files to view and edit on the go, you’re pretty much forced to do it in iCloud as the Dropbox file provider on iOS is extremely unreliable and prone to locking up, even if you’re the only one editing the files. For this use case you’re pretty much condemned to iCloud.