I've been testing Dropbox, box.net, Google Drive, and AeroFS head to head for the past month or so (I guess I should add SpiderOak, Wuala, Bitcasa, and maybe something else I don't know about)
They all do pretty well for small datasets (1-10GB of text files, office documents, mp3s, and sometimes 1-2GB video files and similar files) on OSX and Windows 7. I haven't tried them on Linux or mobile devices much. They all kind of suck with multi-user access (which I simulated by putting clients on all my machines and using them randomly), larger files, etc.
None have particularly good performance (fucking Comcast Business; reasonably good on the colo LAN but still not what I'd consider great). Even with the LAN Sync options turned on, adding a new large file with a few client devices on the same LAN causes pain (multiple trips up and down...). A per-client 1/10 of the link size throttle isn't really helpful with 10 clients. AeroFS is different (since it's peer to peer), but is a lot slower than the LAN speed in my experience to sync. Having clients on VPN sometimes makes the whole thing even weirder, since machines on the same LAN aren't on the same network, so syncing traffic goes over a (potentially remote) VPN. And then there's the lulz caused by sync-over-cellular, which admittedly isn't transparent to the client (mifi hotspot sometimes).
Looking forward to just getting an 8x4TB Synology or FreeNAS for home, syncing with some combination of physical drives and rsync to/from the colo, and using disk in the colo. iSCSI seems like the best solution.
In the long run, I think what's needed is a smarter client -- it should be smart about syncing based on what network I'm on (VPN, LTE, etc.), pre-caching some files and not others (either explicitly or predictively, and maybe different on different devices)
There's also the huge mess of security -- both confidentiality and versioning/availability. For multi-user, you can't just layer truecrypt on top. It's depressing that someone yesterday asked "what's the best way to manage corporate documents without putting a copy on every laptop..." (data room style) and the best answer in 2012 seems to be SharePoint :(
Another issue to consider is multiple accounts. For example I have 3 Google accounts (1 personal, 2 for work). I also have two Dropbox accounts (1 personal, 1 work).
You are essentially in for a world of hurt because all the services want to believe you only have one account, or at the very least a one to one mapping between their accounts and user accounts on your systems.
Thankfully I was able to get dropbox running with two different dropbox accounts but with one user account on my systems. This was because dropbox has command line tools (for Linux only) so you can fake them out with different $HOME settings.
Why have two accounts if the work account is not more secure than the personal account (since both accounts are on your computers?) If you want some devices to only have the work account, you could still use a shared folder to sync between the work account and the personal account rather than actually using two clients.
I keep my personal content (eg photos, music, backups of my personal systems) in my personal dropbox. My work dropbox contains software builds, presentations, customer stuff etc. Both are paid accounts. I work from home and hence use the same system for work and home activities.
What I want is to be able to access both sets of content on many of my machines. For example I can read my work and home email on multiple devices. But dropbox for Android only allows for one account, as does dropbox for Windows and Mac.
Shared folders are a no go. First of all I don't want to mix personal and work stuff. Secondly dropbox penalises you. For example if two users each separately pay dropbox for a 100GB account and then user 1 shares 25GB of content with user 2, dropbox will subtract 25GB from user 2's allowance. ie what you pay for is the total amount of data you can access, not the amount of unique data.
Couldn't you create multiple user accounts on Mac OSX and then leave one dropbox account logged in in each account, and use local permissions to access files in one account from the other? You could probably do the same with Windows, although I'm not sure how permissions would work.
Having to have an entire extra user session logged in, just to keep dropbox running is way overkill. I did briefly experiment on Linux having two user accounts with different home directories but the same user id (numeric) but other bits of the system really didn't like that.
In any event my original point is that this sort of setup will increasingly happen, none of the existing products handle it well, and it is a factor to consider when choosing what products to use.
I have a similar issue so use different browsers for different accounts as my work around. So at any one time I will have Opera, Chrome, FF and Opera Next open.
I was a happy Dropbox user until Google Drive came out at half the cost, so I switched and bought 100GB of Google storage --- Big mistake! --- Google Drive is beta quality software at best. Many bugs, missing features and no support.
Google would not refund the extra storage I bought, so use Syncdocs to sync to it. Syncdocs works just like Dropbox (reliable) but uses Google Drive server as storage backend.
They all do pretty well for small datasets (1-10GB of text files, office documents, mp3s, and sometimes 1-2GB video files and similar files) on OSX and Windows 7. I haven't tried them on Linux or mobile devices much. They all kind of suck with multi-user access (which I simulated by putting clients on all my machines and using them randomly), larger files, etc.
None have particularly good performance (fucking Comcast Business; reasonably good on the colo LAN but still not what I'd consider great). Even with the LAN Sync options turned on, adding a new large file with a few client devices on the same LAN causes pain (multiple trips up and down...). A per-client 1/10 of the link size throttle isn't really helpful with 10 clients. AeroFS is different (since it's peer to peer), but is a lot slower than the LAN speed in my experience to sync. Having clients on VPN sometimes makes the whole thing even weirder, since machines on the same LAN aren't on the same network, so syncing traffic goes over a (potentially remote) VPN. And then there's the lulz caused by sync-over-cellular, which admittedly isn't transparent to the client (mifi hotspot sometimes).
Looking forward to just getting an 8x4TB Synology or FreeNAS for home, syncing with some combination of physical drives and rsync to/from the colo, and using disk in the colo. iSCSI seems like the best solution.
In the long run, I think what's needed is a smarter client -- it should be smart about syncing based on what network I'm on (VPN, LTE, etc.), pre-caching some files and not others (either explicitly or predictively, and maybe different on different devices)
There's also the huge mess of security -- both confidentiality and versioning/availability. For multi-user, you can't just layer truecrypt on top. It's depressing that someone yesterday asked "what's the best way to manage corporate documents without putting a copy on every laptop..." (data room style) and the best answer in 2012 seems to be SharePoint :(