While being easy to use is important, being reliable is equally critical. A cloud storage site does users little good if information goes missing or is inaccessible for hours at a time. So, who has better reliability: Dropbox or Google Drive?
According to a study reported on in March 2013, BoxFreeIT spent six months testing and monitoring Dropbox to find out exactly how reliable the company really was. They tracked the server for over 264,000 minutes. During that time, the cloud storage provider had approximately 412 minutes of down time, just under seven hours. Not a bad score for half a year.
However, they were concerned with determining whether or not there were any unconfirmed downtime events. When checked, they found an additional 574 minutes of abnormal recordings. These could be explained as downtime that was less than 10 minutes, and generally ignored as true offline instances. The company could have also been performing scheduled maintenance which they would also ignore in their reporting.
| Plan | Price Plan | Storage | Details |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dropbox Basic | Free | 2 GB | Free plan. Can be increased through referrals. |
| Dropbox Pro | $9.99 Monthly | 1000 GB | Pro version with more sharing options (password protected links, expiration dates) |
Even with including these new occurrences, Dropbox has an average uptime of 99.65 to 99.83%. These figures do take into account that Dropbox runs on Amazon S3 servers.
With that being said, there have been some issues lately with Dropbox’s sync folder not properly adding files, causing people to think things are backed up when they are not. The cloud company has supposedly fixed the issue, but not before many customers lost precious folders that they cannot get back. That incident alone would make some users question the reliability of their software.
When it comes to uptime reliability, Google Drive can easily go toe-to-toe with Dropbox. While we didn’t find a study that was as extensive as the other survey, we did manage to find some information on how good Google is about staying online.
In a study conducted by Pingdom, the group monitored Google Drive and some of their competitors over a 30 day period. During this time, the cloud storage company only experienced one minute of downtime. Because of the insignificant amount of time it was unavailable to clients, they awarded them with a 100% rating. (Dropbox was included in this study and they experienced 13 minutes of down time.)
Again, however, uptime is not the only thing that is considered a reliability issue. Google Drive has also experienced unexplained loss of files from their servers. Many users have complained that files were removed from their accounts without their knowledge. Seems like Google has a memory issue.
Winner: Dropbox, only because the lost files were due to syncing problems. Not the loss of currently residing data.