Dropbox has its own impenetrableness at times, too.)įortunately I’m perfectly happy to live with a small external drive affixed to my laptop.Connect to SFTP as a network drive on Mac or WindowsĮxpanDrive is the gold standard for mapping SFTP as a network drive on Mac and Windows. The Dropbox app, despite not being Apple Silicon native and despite being a terrible and poorly written app which I don’t feel great about having installed on my Mac, is at least more useful in telling me what Dropbox is doing, and giving me more control over the process. I’ll keep using it for Google Drive, for now, as my Google Drive needs are light, but I don’t think I’ll be using it for Dropbox, where I keep most of my life. Strongsync is like that, except for Dropbox. You know how when iCloud Drive works, it’s invisible and seamless, but when it works, there’s really nothing to do but hope that it will start working again? This time when Strongsync re-launched, it seemed to work fine. Then I relaunched Strongsync and restarted Finder again. I even quit the “StrongsyncFileProvider” process via Activity Monitor. I’ve unchecked all of the “Finder Extensions” for Strongsync. When that happened, there’s literally nothing that you can do.Įventually this message came from Finder: Tonight I tried to download a large folder from Dropbox with about 800 MB of video files in it. If that happens, this could be the best way to access cloud storage on the Mac… but at this point it’s very early, and definitely too early to tell. Two key assumptions / requirements: Apple has to keep supporting and maintaining this, and Strongsync needs to keep up with whatever changes happen to the services and with Apple’s APIs. I also think that Strongsync will work better than ExpanDrive, precisely because it is using Apple’s own technology rather than trying to “bolt on” this functionality. Once Strongsync supports all of the services that ExpanDrive supports, I don’t know why the developer would keep supporting both apps. I don’t know this for a fact, but I would be willing to believe that Strongsync could eventually replace ExpanDrive. I believe the app is completely new, or almost completely new, so I didn’t mind paying for a second app, assuming that the app succeeds and exists for as long as ExpanDrive does. If I’m honest, Strongsync seems more like a new generation of ExpanDrive. Even the Strongsync webpage still listed Dropbox support as ‘coming soon’. Last night when I went to the website looking for information about the Dropbox integration, there was none. They have information about ExpanDrive and Strongsync intermixed, so it’s easy to be looking for Strongsync info and suddenly realize you are reading something about ExpanDrive instead. The website and company is clearly set up to sell one product (ExpanDrive) and now they’ve added a second one, but you see ‘ExpanDrive’ in a lot of places where it should be ’Strongsync’ - including when you go to authorize it to Dropbox. For example, moving a large folder from one folder to another gives you a ‘progress bar’ which basically tells you nothing other than ‘please wait’ with no clue how long it will take to finish. I’m sure they’ll get there eventually, but will it be a week? A month? 6 months? Then again, Google Drive doesn’t work at all on M1 Macs. The problem is that now it has been awhile, and they still have nothing to show for it, not even a beta. has been completely silent on this issue makes me think they realize it’s going to be awhile. ( Side note: The fact that Dropbox is still not native on Apple Silicon and that Dropbox, Inc. The main benefit here is that you don’t need to have the Dropbox app installed, it’s native on Apple Silicon, and it is using Apple’s recommended “File Provider” APIs (or something, the point is that they’re doing this the way Apple wants you to do this). I started using this last night, so it isn’t a full review, just an initial impression.ĭropbox support in Strongsync seems to work every bit as well and as fast as Dropbox natively if you use “Smart Sync” and don’t have everything sync’d locally. The big question to me is - is there a meaningful benefit of Strongsync over Expandrive? Apparently now Strongsync supports Dropbox as well
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