Best of the Dropbox Alternatives? [Resilio Sync]

in this video we're going to be talking about what is in my opinion the best Dropbox alternative [Music] [Applause] so I've been using Dropbox for years I was actually amongst the first to use it when it was originally in beta many many years ago and from the get-go Dropbox was amazing it was this concept where you could just install it on all your different devices and then they would seamlessly sync and just work that was the main idea but however as time went on as as Dropbox grew and as the computers on which they were installed became more complex or whatever it is I don't know if it's just the cruft or the junk that kind of gets put into a software as it ages over time but at least for me Dropbox has become increasingly slow memory intensive and increasingly expensive as well so this led me and it has probably led you as well since you're watching this video to search for Alternatives now there are a lot of them and many of them do relatively the same thing I think Google has something similar with Google Drive and there is box and there's so many other variants to Dropbox but in my opinion A lot of them kind of run into the same problem especially if you work with video or super large file sizes and that is that you start to run into speed problems and then you also start to run into space problems that is you're going to be paying a lot of money in order to store all of those video or large files the other issue that some have had I'm one of them and maybe this isn't as big of a deal for you is some of the privacy concerns in the sense that you have a third-party company who you are completely trusting with all of your data that might be totally fine but some people have the concern that if they can't pay for whatever reason or if they change their policies or whatever they decide to do as a big company at the end of the day they have the full choice of what to do with all of your files we're not just talking about maybe a few emails here and there which is important in and of itself but we're talking about all of your files which for many people could be all of your livelihood and so I think that's led a lot of people to want to just have a little bit more control over that so all of these things with a few others that I won't bore you the with the details on have led me in search of an alternative and the one that I've landed on for several years now has been one called resilio sink probably pronouncing that wrong but the important part is that it is a good Dropbox alternative and it syncs your files but my goal here in this video isn't necessarily to walk you through step by step all of the features because there's a lot of them and they've got a great website with videos that can do that for you I'm also by the way not an affiliate I'm just sharing with you my experiences so the goal here is for me to share with you the things that I have found the most useful as I've been using sync so you can decide for yourself if it's something that you would like to use as well so they do have a personal or home plan which I believe has like an individual and then there's also like a family plan and then there's a business plan where you have I think a minimum of five users and then from there you can pay per user based upon how many people are using it the really cool thing about the family plan if you're just using this for personal use or even just your own individual files is that there's no monthly fee unlike Dropbox and so many other which get pretty expensive as they add up over time especially when you're talking about multiple users the business plan does have a monthly fee however from what I remember seeing it was pretty comparable with what you would be paying for Dropbox however with all the added features that kind of make resilio sink a little bit of a better option okay now for the software itself what is it about resilio that I actually like the main thing and the number one driver which I alluded to previously particularly when it comes to data is that it is peer-to-peer which means that it there is no Cloud there is no server that's hosted out there somewhere in the world that another third-party company controls instead the server or the cloud is just your computer and so if you need to sync between computers so say you've got two Macs or you've got a Mac and a PC you just install resiliosync on both of them and then they'll connect to each other there isn't the connecting to the cloud or to the server or to Dropbox or to you know Google drive or whatever it is and then it connects to all your computers there's no Cloud there's no Drive there's no third-party server it's just all of your computers talking to each other through this software now just beyond the Privacy aspect of this the sense that nobody else can see your access files there is the security aspect of this so you're not actually if all your devices are inside your house it's not actually having to go all the way out onto the internet to finish that transfer so there's not really any way that somebody can intercept that making it a really secure way to transfer your files the other benefit of this is that it makes the file transfer significantly faster again it's not as reliant on your internet connection it's just your whole network now again if you're going to go outside your house if you're in a hotel or something then of course you're going to be using the internet to transfer those files but the great news is that connection is peer-to-peer which means that it's direct it's not I mean to go somewhere else and then to your computer it's just going from computer to computer now one of the things it does have built into resilio sync is the ability to share files however in my personal opinion I don't think that this is the best functionality of resiliosync I actually think that this is something that Dropbox does a little bit better that is that you can just find one file on your computer and then share it you can just give someone a Dropbox link and then they can just download it now they may have changed this feature however the last that I saw in terms of resilio sync you can right click you can create a shareable link that you send to someone however from what I noticed the last time I tried this is that it sends somebody a link on resilio's website where you can in fact download the file however you have to have resilio sync installed so that works fine if you're just working amongst family members or within business partners or whatever it is and they all have the software installed however if they don't then there's not really at least that I saw a way just to download the file so I use other things like cyberduck in order to upload and then create a share link through you know backblaze or something else to actually share a file with somebody who does not have permissions to one of my resilio sync folders which brings me to the next feature which is amazing about resilio sync and that is the different options that you have available to you within a folder that you create in resilio sync so the different types of folders that you can create are a standard folder an advanced folder and an encrypted folder so a standard folder is just what you can think of as just a folder that you're just going to use yourself and you're going to sync across all your own devices this works for most people this is just going to be this could just be what you consider your main quote-unquote Dropbox folder but then what's really cool is the advanced folder and this is going to be something that you can use for collaboration and so what you can do is you know set aside a specific folder somewhere in your computer that you set as an advanced folder and then you can share that with a number of people and give permissions about who can read and write you can just use that as your own workable server where you and team members can collaborate on files and you don't have to rely upon Dropbox or Google or somebody else you can just have all of those files stored on all of the different computers instead of having to worry about again like I said that third-party server again all those same features come along with that which means it's faster safer more secure and just a little bit easier to use the other really cool thing about creating an advanced folder and I think this works on a standard folder as well is that as long as you're using the paid version of resilio sync it comes with something called selective sync so this is similar to what Dropbox has which is that you only have to have one computer that has all of the files on it so what do I mean you need to have one computer that has you know enough space to have all the files that kind of works as your server or your Cloud right so all the files have to live in at least one place however once they live in one place all of your other computers that have access to that and that includes team members or just your own personal devices can use selective sync which means that you don't have to have all the files on all the computers you can just have a directory listing of or kind of placeholders of each of those files and then you can download them to that device when you need them that way if you're working on a laptop per se that has a smaller hard drive than your desktop at home that you work on you can turn on selective sync and just download the files that you need you don't have to worry about clogging up that hard drive with tons of files that you either don't need or can't fit on that device then there is the encrypted folder which I've personally never used before but if you have a third-party server that you do want to use then you can use an encrypted folder which just ensures that the data that's being stored on that server is encrypted so that nobody can access it or mess with it now to kind of expand upon that and one of the main reasons why I find resilio sync so incredibly useful is that in addition to everything else that it does it also allows me to use external drives which for video is amazing so the way that I have this set up for my video work is that as I'm working on various different projects particularly for this YouTube channel each project is pretty large so I've got a main four terabyte SSD hard drive that I am working on my active projects on so all my active projects are on that four terabyte SSD then when I'm finished with the project I put it on one of these 10 or 12 terabyte drives that are just used for storage they're just the regular old hard drives with the spinning plates so they're a little bit slower but they don't need to be fast best because I just am using them for storage now as you might imagine that's adding up pretty quick because I think I've got five or six of these so far so we're talking about 50 60 almost 70 terabytes worth of storage space that I'm currently working with however what I can do is that I can actually set each of these drives up as their own resilio sync folder so that way on all my other devices I obviously cannot fit 70 terabytes worth of data but we just turn on that selective sync and so wherever I am if I ever need to access a specific file or project on one of these mini archive drives I can do that through resiliosync so the goal of this of course isn't to be a sales pitch for resilio sync so what I wanted to do is share some of the things that I found to be cons things that are a little bit negative about using the software one of course is that it takes a little bit of time to set up it is a little bit more more of a manual process they've made it a lot better it's a lot easier to work with however there is some intensive time that you have to put into setting up all the folders setting all the permissions getting it installed on all your computers and all your devices the great thing that they've done recently particularly for working on mobile devices is that they have a QR code so you can just scan it and it kind of walks you through getting it set up but it just does take a little bit more time I will say something like Dropbox or Google Drive is just going to have it streamlined a little bit better it's going to be a little bit more plug and play as opposed to something like sync which is going to be a tad bit more manual but I do find that the time invested is well worth it the other thing that I've noticed particularly on my Mac and I don't use it quite as much on my PC for work is it is pretty memory intensive I have found sometimes when it is eating up a serious amount of memory and it doesn't seem to be doing anything so I'm not quite sure what exactly is causing it to eat up so much memory so I have found that when I am not actively syncing files I will as a matter of practice just exit I will turn off resilio sync and then when I'm done actually doing memory intensive work I'll just launch the app again and let it continue syncing the other thing I've noticed is that they do have an IOS app an app for you know I think they even have one for Android so for your iPad or for your iPhone as well and it works pretty well but I have found it to be a little bit clunky a little bit slow kind of unresponsive I think some of that might have to do with just the fact that I have so many devices and files I don't really know I think if you're in a serious pinch it works just fine to access like a PDF or some or a Word document or something like that but for any serious daily use I am not a major fan of their mobile app version I mainly find it useful for desktop but again they do have iOS apps just in my opinion they're just not the greatest and if if there is one more downside it'll be one that I alluded to a little bit earlier which is that you have to have at least one computer with external and or internal hard drive space that is very large that is to say you have to have at least one computer with a lot of space enough space to be able to handle all of your files something like Dropbox would allow you to offload massive amounts of files if you wanted to and then use selective sync to free up that space on your computer since you are the Dropbox since your computer is the server or the cloud one of your computers must be able to store all of the files that you want to be able to share now in my opinion those downsides are way outweighed by all the positives mainly the fact that I can kind of serve as my own server so the whole goal here was to share with you the aspects of sync that I've personally found useful and why I use it every day if you're somebody who works with giant files if you work with video files if you have your own external hard drives that you want to be able to sync between devices resilio Sync has made that super simple plus if you're somebody who's more concerned with privacy it's also a great solution to being able to keep your files safe and secure and not having to trust a third party to host them for you but that's it for today if you found this video useful be sure to hit that like button subscribe if you haven't already and I look forward to seeing you in the next one foreign [Music]

Channel: Thomas McGee

Views: 5,994

Keywords: resilio sync, dropbox app, dropbox file sharing, dropbox backup, dropbox alternative, dropbox error, file syncing software, file sharing between two computers windows 11, file sharing between two computers windows 7, file sharing app, file sharing app android, file sharing mac to mac

Id: NhJceS5dpvA

Length: 15min 37sec (937 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 06 2023