My previous experience with Google Drive was that it would chew up CPU and memory a lot more than I liked.
I've been pretty happy with iCloud Drive since I switched to it. Works seamlessly and effortlessly on my Mac and iPhone, affordable pricing fo storage which can be shared with family, and also solves my photo storage needs with Apple Photos. The only drawback is the lack of shared folders, but they just announced that is coming soon.
As soon as Shared Folder is released on iCloud, I'm moving everything out of Dropbox. I already pay for iCloud for my photos but have tons of unused space, that just makes more sense to consolidate, especially since Apple cares about optimizing for battery and CPU usage.
Yeah, I've never had a good experience with the Google Drive client. Heck, I remember when the Windows version would suck up all available file handles and basically make the machine unusable.
That being said, the whole point of Dropbox to me is that its cross-platform. iCloud Drive is basically worthless for the Dropbox use case unless your entire computing universe is on Apple equipment.
Funny enough just yesterday they announced a completely redone Windows client that they built collaboratively with Microsoft to use the right APIs etc. There’s a bunch of news chatter about it right now.
After reading some of the comments here I decided to give the Google Backup & Sync client another go on my MacBook Pro. The CPU fan has been blowing at full speed for the last 15 minutes. It's still terrible, extremely resource-hungry and slow.
(I work for Google, not on drive. Opinions are my own).
Have you tried the newer drive client? Backup & Sync[0] replaced the old client and I believe is a bit better than the older client. If you are on GSuite, there is the Drive File Stream[1] that is a lazy-load of resources from a drive folder (which is why it's targeted for businesses only).
Backup and Sync for MacOS at least is a disaster. It locked me out of my account because when backing up photos, if it can’t figure out how to convert files to normal quality JPEGs, it uploads them anyway and your quota is charged. Then a month later when you start wondering why nobody sends you email any more you might figure it out.
I posted above, but can elaborate in some more detail here.
I used the new Backup & Sync tool for the first time and had a poor experience.
Context: I have a paid MS OneDrive account but maxed out my storage and was seeking alternatives (specifically ones with easy family sharing). It turned out my wife was already paying for Google One so we just used that. I downloaded Backup & Sync just to transfer my photos from my local PC into Google Photos. Backup & Sync's UI is terribly sluggish on Windows. Clicking the system tray icon renders a blank dialog and then a second or two later the dialog is rendered (Surface Book 1). The UI responsiveness was a turnoff but not my primary concern.
In the sync tool and the Photos webapp preferences there are two checkboxes that affect syncing:
* Backup & Sync client (upon upload to Drive copy photo to Google Photos)
* Google Photos web app (automatically index Drive and copy images to Google Photos)
As an end user I liked the separation of Drive and Photos from the user experience. I do not want to upload photos to Drive and have them sync to Google Photos. And I definitely don't want Google Photos to index all images on my Drive account.
Simply using the Backup & Sync tool forces you to upload photos to Drive and have them sync over to Photos ruining that separation. And unfortunately in a case of bad timing there was some server outage on Google's end that affected the syncing of files from Drive to Photos. My photos successfully uploaded to Drive but did not appear in Google Photos web app, but no error is displayed to the user. I contacted Google One support and they informed me there was a problem they were aware of but also that I had to enable the latter checkbox in Photos webapp (have Google Photos index and parse all of my Drive images). I was incredibly hesitant to check that since I have a massive amount of images (not photos) in my Drive account (paper scans, tons of small icons, etc) and I don't want any of those appearing in Photos. I listened to support regardless, enabled that checkbox, and of course it did not work due to the server outage.
And I definitely don't want Google Photos to index all images on my Drive account.
I've had this happen and it's a nightmare to fix. Once I accidentally had a node_modules folder sync to Google and it had images in some of the subdirectories for some reason, another time I had something else with third-party resources like an HTML eBook and ended up with random images of charts and graphs all over my Google Photos.
It’s still terrible. Actually Google Drive (or Backup & Sync) client hasn’t improved one bit in the last 4 years. The only update we saw was “material design” revamp that was about it. It still spends 15 minutes “preparing for sync” every time I restart and consumes considerable CPU while doing that too.
As siblings say, it’s still terrible. I installed the business version on my Mac to give a look, I have zero files synced with it. After a few days I checked activity monitor and it had used tens of minutes of CPU time. For zero files and zero activity.
Backup and Sync is not so great. I wish the Photos backup client was still available, and I'd use that together with InSync.
InSync is great and works on most platforms. I've been using it since dropbox lost a bunch of my important files in 2014. (I have multiple backups now)
I've been pretty happy with iCloud Drive since I switched to it. Works seamlessly and effortlessly on my Mac and iPhone, affordable pricing fo storage which can be shared with family, and also solves my photo storage needs with Apple Photos. The only drawback is the lack of shared folders, but they just announced that is coming soon.