Originally published at: https://tidbits.com/2019/03/14/dropbox-limits-free-accounts-to-three-devices/
Dropbox has introduced a three-device limit for its free Basic accounts as of this month. However, if you have four or more devices currently linked to your Dropbox account, they’ll remain connected for now.
DropBox needs a tier below the $10 a month level - I don’t need 1TB of DropBox storage, but more than 5GB sure would be handy!!
I’m on the $1 a month 50GB iCloud account - if DropBox would match that I’d happily give them the $1 a month, but $10 a month is a bit rich for how I use DropBox currently.
Roger
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Yeah…me too. I have 9.2 GB through some of the image upload offers a couple years back…but a $2.99 per month 100GB or 200GB would work for my wife and I just fine. We’ve got the 200GB family account but for a lot of stuff DropBox just works better.
Dropbox never really hit the family market. I have a 1Tb account which will need upgrading soon. My wife would be happy with 50 or 100Gb. My daughter could use about 10Gb tops. Seems crazy that I can’t offer them some of mine or that Dropbox don’t offer some form of overall family account.
If there isn’t a sharing issue then just use the same login with your wife and daughter…it’s your 1 TB since you pay for it.
The issue then lies with syncing and security. All our company files and accounts are on there. All my photography research too. Happier to keep it as is.
Interesting that iCloud permits family sharing of my 2Tb there. I wish Apple did offer the level of control and selective syncing Dropbox do though.
I just wanted to point out that in the article it says, “Google Drive provides 15 GB for free, although that’s shared with Gmail and Google Photos.” But for the “optimized photos” (default) there is no limit and the photos don’t count towards your 15 GB.
Thanks for the added detail—I didn’t want to get sucked down the rabbit hole of all the details of the competing services in the article itself.
I would love it if I could create a “datasoup” folder on my iCloud Drive that would permit sharing documents between iOS apps, between Mac apps, and between iOS and Mac apps. That common storage location is what I use my Dropbox for.
I’d happily pay Apple, as I have more trust in their data integrity than Dropbox’s.
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Hi, I would like to warn everyone who uses a language with special characters (I use German) not to migrate to MS OneDrive and take advantage of the 1 TB available via the Office 365 subscription. The synchronisation does not work with files which have names with special characters, those files will not be synchronised. All other services I tried (gmail, icloud, dropbox, Amazon) do not have this problem.
One of the special characters leading to sync errors is “|” (vertical bar) which is not even a special german character, but it is often included in web sites titles, and so a collection of url files will be affected.
Andre
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unfortunately icloud does not allow family sharing, so there is no possiblity of using it with two icloud accounts.
Hi Andre. If you have a Family Account, the account manager can share their 2Tb with other family members. This is what we do at home.
I have a monthly subscription (9.99 storage and 14.99 music) which is shared amongst the five of us.
I think OneDrive is supposed to support diacritics (accents on characters) in file names. If it’s not working for you, I would report the problem, they may be able to correct it. Searching online, I found references to such problems from two or more years ago but they were described as bugs and it appeared they were corrected. I also found a post about OneDrive web filename sorting from February 2019 that had to do with accented characters, which implies that such characters are allowed on OneDrive.
It’s true that OneDrive does not support the vertical bar (pipe) in filenames. Since it also syncs with Windows, OneDrive’s list of invalid characters matches Windows’s list of invalid characters:
" double quote
* asterisk
: colon
< less than
> greater than
? question mark
/ forward slash
\ backslash
| vertical bar, pipe
macOS Finder still prevents use of the colon in filenames (the original Mac OS used colons instead of slashes to represent folders) and all of these characters have special meaning on the command line which can complicate working with files that include them.
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OneDrive’s long list of unacceptable characters in filenames is very annoying if you try and use it as a replacement for Dropbox etc. For example, I have a lot of saved webpages as Safari web archives, and many of these contain characters which are not acceptable to OneDrive. This essentially makes it impossible to copy over folders from other services or my hard drive into one drive, as I just get huge numbers of sync errors.
One can get rid of problem characters in filenames. Last year, TidBITS had a good article, macOS Hidden Treasures: Batch-Rename Items in the Finder, about what’s built-in to macOS that can help do that quickly.
For Safari web archive specifically, you can search in Finder for name:.webarchive, select them all, right-click the selection and click Rename. In the Rename Finder items dialog, set it to Replace Text, enter one of the “bad” characters to Find, enter an appropriate replacement in Replace with, then press the Rename button. For most of OneDrive’s forbidden characters, I would replace them with a dash, double quotes could be replaced with single quotes but I would remove them or replace them with underscores, I would remove question marks.
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So they all allow the use of Unicode then, I suppose?
The interesting thing is that Apple allow most of these chars in filenames, while MS still don’t. I think Apple get around it better by substituting the public name you give a file with a private name the OS uses. I thought MS would have improved their version of how they handle this, but seemingly they still haven’t. Maybe they just can’t?
Or does he mean having his own iCloud ac, and a Family ac?
IMO, I think the reason they don’t offer more than 1TB on consumer accounts, is that they strongly dislike users storing their Dropbox folder location off the main drive. And given most users are typically not with more than 1TB in the age of SSD’s (ironically I’m actually the opposite with 2 TB SSD on both my Macs, though!), I recon they think offering higher storage plans would cause more users to move the Dropbox folder externally, then have issues with data not syncing on the slightest disconnect of said external drives, or worse; data loss.
I should also make people aware of a couple of things I just found:
-
If you need to update you password; it’ll throw the “3 devices” warning on the forth device. Meaning your then down to the three.
-
Rather than using their apps (especially on iOS, perhaps), you can still login to the browser on all devices, and access files there. Not as convenient, but doable in most circumstances.
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Not quite sure what your question is… This quick tip on ScreenCasts Online might help.
EDIT…
Andre said:
“unfortunately icloud does not allow family sharing, so there is no possiblity of using it with two icloud accounts.”
Tommy said:
"Hi Andre. If you have a Family Account, the account manager can share their 2Tb with other family members. This is what we do at home.
I have a monthly subscription (9.99 storage and 14.99 music) which is shared amongst the five of us."
jimthing then said:
“Or does he mean having his own iCloud ac, and a Family ac?”
i.e. What does he mean? As obviously iCloud family ac = sharing the data space you as a family pay for.
Presumably he actually means: cannot share files among a family within the family plan.