Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) vs. Dropbox

Amazon S3 is a great service to safely backup your data where redundancy is guaranteed and the cost is fair. We use Amazon S3 for data that we backup and hope we never need to access but in the case of a catastrophic or even small slip of the finger with the delete command we know our data and our client's data is safely backed up by Amazon S3. Transferring data into Amazon S3 is free but transferring data out has an associated, albeit low, cost per GB. This needs to be kept in mind if you plan on transferring out a lot of data frequently. There may be other cost effective options although Amazon S3 prices are really low per GB. Transferring 150TB would cost approximately $50 per month.

Incentivized

Ultimately, Dropbox just works better when working crossplatform between Windows, Mac, Andoid, ios. It's snappier compared to Google Drive and is overall a more pleasant experience. The lack of integration with the rest of Google's suite is a small sacrifice. Image preview is also snappier and more pleasant to use compared to drive. Though any large batches that need review should be relegated to a better image gallery hosting platform like pic-time.

• Fantastic developer API, including AWS command line and library utilities.
• Strong integration with the AWS ecosystem, especially with regards to access permissions.
• It's astoundingly stable- you can trust it'll stay online and available for anywhere in the world.
• Its static website hosting feature is a hidden gem-- it provides perhaps the cheapest, most stable, most high-performing static web hosting available in PaaS.

Incentivized

• Dropbox's real-time collaboration features, including simultaneous editing and commenting, have revolutionized the way our teams work together.
• On multiple occasions, we've accidentally overwritten important documents or needed to retrieve deleted files. With Dropbox, we can easily revert to previous versions or recover deleted files, preventing data loss and minimizing disruptions.
• Dropbox excels in making file sharing a breeze. With just a few clicks, we can generate shareable links or invite colleagues to shared folders.

Incentivized

• Web console can be very confusing and challenging to use, especially for new users
• Bucket policies are very flexible, but the composability of the security rules can be very confusing to get right, often leading to security rules in use on buckets other than what you believe they are

Incentivized

• Change the name of the root folder, the "()" can cause problems sometimes with some tools trying to find paths inside of the root folder.
• The upload queue becomes slow trying to upload files that have more than ~500mb of file size, even if I have 1 Gbit of speed, Dropbox gets stuck uploading single files with that rule.
• Sometimes we can't move a shared folder from root location.
• LAN sync seems not to be working in my experience.

Dropbox is a user-friendly, easy tool which requires little to no skill and they offer a free version with a good amount of storage available. There are other file sharing tools available however at a cost. Dropbox free version I have used for years and it serves every purpose I need.

Incentivized

It is tricky to get it all set up correctly with policies and getting the IAM settings right. There is also a lot of lifecycle config you can do in terms of moving data to cold/glacier storage. It is also not to be confused with being a OneDrive or SharePoint replacement, they each have their own place in our environment, and S3 is used more by the IT team and accessed by our PHP applications. It is not necessarily used by an average everyday user for storing their pictures or documents, etc.

Incentivized

[Its] functionality and usability are very good, however[,] on every computer that I have ever installed the app on, Dropbox assumes I want it to update the files every time I start the system up. That's not always true, but the app assumes it is. I can switch that function off, but I would rather that function default to "Off" and then I can decide to turn it on as needed.

Incentivized

Dropbox is really useful, you can access any file from anywhere and you can upload and even edit files online, but, sometimes it can be slow. Downloading, uploading, and syncing is a bit slow, it can take several minutes. Furthermore, the search engine for large amounts of data can be slow too and it is not powerful.

Incentivized

AWS has always been quick to resolve any support ticket raised. S3 is no exception. We have only ever used it once to get a clarification regarding the costs involved when data is transferred between S3 and other AWS services or the public internet. We got a response from AWS support team within a day.

Incentivized

Our experience with support has been limited which is a good thing. We haven't experienced any major issues with the service and most of our service interactions have been useability questions which we were able to find answers for within their knowledge base. For the few times we have reached out to support, the responses were on point, quick, and our issue was resolved in one interaction. I appreciate not being routed to a chatbot or offshored support.

Incentivized

I needed to stay current in improving my daily operations. Dropbox
was suggested to me by a former colleague two-years ago and I've been using it just fine ever since.

Overall, we found that Amazon S3 provided a lot of backend features Google Cloud Storage (GCS) simply couldn't compare to. GCS was way more expensive and really did not live up to it. In terms of setup, Google Cloud Storage may have Amazon S3 beat, however, as it is more of a pseudo advanced version of Google Drive, that was not a hard feat for it to achieve. Overall, evaluating GCS, in comparison to S3, was an utter disappointment.

Incentivized

Dropbox gives more visual control over the success of uploading. WeTransfer uploads and then sends a link to the recipient. If something goes wrong during the upload, there doesn't appear to be a way to begin again from the dropping point. With Dropbox, I can watch as it uploads. If I lose a connection, it will continue uploading where it left off when I get a new connection. This is vital in transferring large files. If WeTransfer offers that, I was never able to figure it out.

• It practically eliminated some real heavy storage servers from our premises and reduced maintenance cost.
• The excellent durability and reliability make sure the return of money you invested in.
• If the objects which are not active or stale, one needs to remove them. Those objects keep adding cost to each billing cycle. If you are handling a really big infrastructure, sometimes this creates quite a huge bill for preserving un-necessary objects/documents.

Incentivized

• Helped us to streamline boxes of papers into electronic folders.
• Enables a more solid backup of necessary files, not dependent on one specific computer or one specific box of papers.
• Enabled a quicker search to locate specific files than the previously used operations.

Incentivized