I deleted Google Drive and went all-in on Dropbox

In April this year, I decided to boot Google Workspace completely and moved my email to iCloud Mail and Spacemail. Even though Spacemail gave me some stress not so long ago because of an outage, I am still happy I moved out of Google Workspace.

Read also: Spacemail is down, and I blame them, but mostly myself

Except I still had some remnants and lots of backups, documents, and images in Google Drive, and it annoyed the fuck out of me. Because I don't use anything else from Google Workspace.

And I just wanted a clean "divorce" from all this. When I was so focused on writing and less on building in the last week of August, I also wanted to do some admin work and prepare myself for September.

After all, my month is going to be packed with recording for Echo Room, bedtime stories, and I am very much on track. Thanks to writing down mental notes on my blog and taking a reasonable approach in terms of balancing content creation, planning, and building.

I've been using Dropbox since its inception. And yes, I am aware that Dropbox received some scrutiny over the years. Not only for some security breaches, but also notorious for their questionable approach to building, buying, and maintaining products.

I wouldn't put much faith in their entire ecosystem, especially not when they killed the apps for Dropbox Paper, but we can safely bet that cloud storage provided by Dropbox will not be going anywhere.

Main reasons I am using Dropbox

It's a combination.

I found the syncing of files on Mac, iPad, and Dropbox far superior and faster than Google Drive or OneDrive.

And the iPad app is definitely superior. It's faster, better, and more polished than Google Drive. That alone is one of the key decision-makers for me.

Because I create a lot of my content on iPad, even though I now use my SaaS as a docs editor and my custom-built dashboard for writing, I still need to manage content.

Moving around files on iPad in the Dropbox app is just easier and faster. Especially when I have to manage 4 different podcasts, save audio files, and properly organize the creatives, artwork, Pinterest pins, and imagery for each of them.

Read also: Pinterest strategy: I finally figured out my content plan

Every time I try to manage content on my iPad Pro in Google Drive, I am about to throw punches, and I never had that problem with Dropbox.

Last but not least, I still love dropbox Paper mimimal interface, whilst Google Docs tilts the absolute fuck out of me in terms of editing and overload of UI. Dropbox Paper is a great backup for me in case TWO Doc would fail (unlikely).

3-2-1 Rule

Dropbox isn't the only place I would store my most important assets. iCloud Drive has gotten better over the years, including on iPad, and I still plug in my MacBook to two external drives that have enough storage to save hundreds of videos or MP4 files for YouTube (I convert my audio podcast files to Videos for YouTube).

The only reason I don't want to go all-in on iCloud Drive is that I might feel too dependent on the Apple ecosystem, and that's not what I want, especially when I just declared that I won't be buying an Apple Watch.

So my backup and storage rules are:

• Dropbox: all content

• iCloud Drive: primary, most important content

• SSD Drive #1: backup of all content, doesn't leave my desk

• SSD Drive #2: more portable drive, stores most important content and recent files if I am on the go

This might sound like overkill, but when you're taking content creation seriously and want to insure yourself against disasters, then this is the equivalent of doing regular QA checks on the software you built.

The cost of Dropbox vs Google Drive

My subscription is about to expire, and I was always on a basic plan from Dropbox. It is $25 per year, but now that I am going all in on content creation, I need a larger storage plan, which would result in $11.99 monthly or $9.99 when paid yearly.

Yes, Dropbox is slightly more expensive than Google Drive, but Drive also offers features I totally don't need. I don't need a Google AI plan, and I don't need a Pro subscription on Gemini, because the free tier has proven to be extremely useful for me for my needs, unlike Claude, as it became so stupid, even when you pay for it.

And I don't want AI to interfere with cloud storage. I just want to store things.

But even if Google Drive were to offer the same as Dropbox, I would still go for Dropbox because of convenience and the way it works so well on iPad. I am too old to cut corners and sacrifice my workflow, speed, and pace for a few bucks. So the cost is easily justified.