I’m not a fan of Dropbox ever since it was clear they had deceived customers. I work on a freelance project where everyone uses Dropbox (after I go them hooked on it), and giving it up for that isn’t really an option. For everything else I was using Dropbox for, however, I long ago removed all of my files off their service.
Instead I’m using SpiderOak. Like Dropbox, SpiderOak is intended as tool to backup files to the cloud and then sync those files with other computers and devices such as smart phones.
What SpiderOak has that Dropbox doesn’t is the option for genuine encryption — my SpiderOak account is set up so that nobody, including SpiderOak employees, can access my files without my password. Dropbox promised users this capability, but it turned out they were not telling the truth and their employees could access user files at any time (or accidentally expose them for a couple hours to the entire Internet as they did earlier this year).
Of course with great power comes great complexity, and this is the major downside to SpiderOak. Dropbox is dead simple to install and use — it took me no time at all to get people who barely understood how to use their computer to install and use Dropbox with no problem. SpiderOak, on the other hand, requires a lot more thinking about what you’re doing.
So in SpiderOak, first you have to create a Backup set (for example, all files in a directory), and then the application backs that up. Then you need to go in and sync the backup, authorizing specific devices and/or specific directories or files. Don’t get me wrong — it is not that SpiderOak is obsessively complex, but rather that it is just not drop dead simple like Dropbox is.
On the other hand, SpiderOak is much cheaper than Dropbox — I’m currently paying $10/month for 100gb of space (and, like Dropbox, there is a free account with a 2gb limit).
The only other thing I’d add is that I think the Dropbox app for Android is crap. the SpiderOak app wasn’t much better until recently, but the latest version does a nice job of letting me pick and choose which files, directories, etc. I want my phone to keep in sync.