New Dropbox for 2017. What’s new? Should I use Dropbox now?

Dropbox has always been one of those road bumps I’ve used for online storage.  I say road bumps because I have used it in the past and still have a 1GB free online storage I use at home for documents, but will I use it as my bread-and-butter, go-to online storage account.  So, it was just an online backup road bump I used and then moved along the bumpy trail of solutions to test the next one.

Well, I haven’t used Dropbox for my primary online backup until this point.  But, the new 2017 Dropbox has new features that I explored which may have finally put me over the edge to become a real buyer of Dropbox.

Let’s take a look at the new features in 2017 for the new Dropbox:

Dropbox Paper

Teams can collaborate within this section.  It is a shared workspace to work on each other’s files.  You can brainstorm and take notes in here.  Pretty straightforward and really doesn’t need to be further discussed.

Smart Sync

Formerly Project Infinite, this feature allows users to store more files in Dropbox than they want to sync to computers they work with.  So, if you don’t want to sync your files across your computers, but just want to back it up, this allows that.  It takes a deeper step by allowing you to just store the file on your computer, either the MacOS Finder or Windows Explorer, instead of the DropBox web interface.  This allows you to easily tag what you want to back up and not sync.  Pretty cool feature since it used to drive me crazy when I wanted to save a backup and not have it change for new changes.  This is a good way to have multiple backups of an important file.

Great features, but I’m still sticking with my Google Drive tech support setup for my online backup. Sorry Dropbox.  I know you’ve contacted me for free trials to give to our customers, but if I’m not a total fan, I’m not going to pitch it to my customers.  There are better backups out there to guard against data recovery situations.  Plus, I still don’t like the issue of if a file is mistakenly deleted or corrupted on a computer, it may sync this way online.  I know there are backups up to 30 days or whatever it is nowadays, but we need backups that are careless-proof and act as real backups, not just a syncing mechanism.