For a few weeks, it just didn’t work for me. Sometimes I could get one device to sync with the other temporarily but then a few hours later it would stop. I spent way too much time trying to troubleshoot it and ultimately concluded the problem was probably something server-based or software-based and entirely out of my control. I was like a tribesmen trying to forestall a solar eclipse by looking at chicken bones. I knew at some level that all of my attempts to sort things out was pointless yet I couldn’t stop myself because I needed these documents to synchronize for my work.
I haven’t experienced any of the problems that David describes in this post, but I have an extreme respect for David and his technical abilities. The fact that a power user like David has had problems with iCloud Drive (it just works…) says a lot of what other people out there might be experiencing.
iCloud Drive was not designed for geeks like us, and for that simple reason it should just work. It is inconceivable that documents don’t sync. Users like my mother simply cannot understand why the Numbers spreadsheet she’s looking at on her iPad doesn’t show the latest rows she’s added on her Mac.
For these users Apple needs to take action and fast. These are the users that inevitably, and with a genuine sense of disappointment, will tell you that things just don’t work as they used to.
Other services that I have taken into consideration but not used:
Amazon Drive
You may have noticed that I haven’t included Amazon Drive in this speed test. To my surprise I discovered that anymore:
The Cloud Drive desktop application is no longer available for download from the Amazon.com website. If you currently have the application installed on your computer, however, it will continue to upload files, photos, and videos to your Cloud Drive account.
Wuala
I meant to test Wuala too. However, when I installed the application, I was prompted to install the Java Runtime Environment as well. In 2014, the need to install further software in order to use an application is annoying, so I decided not to test this sync service and deleted the application straight away.
Copy.com
When registering for a free trial, I was unable to confirm the email address with the service. I tried doing it for two days in a row, and on the third I simply deleted the application from my Mac. Too bad.
Warning
I acknowledge that this testing methodology is far from being scientific.
My setup and test methods might have affected the results. Other people might even get different values, maybe opposite from what I am sharing in this post.
The results posted on this blog are for personal use only and do not constitute a definitive proof on what service is faster.
More tests, using different scenarios, different networks, and a systematic way to time events are needed to calculate average times, variance values and to draw some more informative conclusions.
In any case I hope you’ll find this post useful, happy reading.
Methodology
I have simply installed the Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, Box, SpiderOak and Syncplicity desktop applications on my Retina MacBook Pro 15″ and started uploading/deleting files.
I’ve used two different files for my tests.
AAC file
The song was The Miracle (Of Joey Ramone) by U2. Its size is 9.3MB. With this file I carried out two sets of tests:
An upload operation through the Finder by a simple copy/paste command. I did this three times for each service, on different days and at different times of the day to get more real world data.
A delete operation of the file from the services’ web interface. By executing this test, I wanted to measure how responsive the cloud service was to events triggered in the backend.
Dropbox and SpiderOak seem to be employing similar techniques to speed up multiple uploads of the same file. That is, the system checks the file’s hash and if it’s already present on the server then it simply retrieves that file from the backend instead of uploading it again. The result is that successive uploads of the same file are faster.
It also means that tests like mine fail because the second upload of the same file is always faster than the first one. Before each upload — in an effort to deceive the backend server — I edited the ID3 tags of the music file. That made the server think it was uploading a new file altogether, helping with the results of my test.
Directory with a complex folder/sub-folder structure
For this test I chose the CloudKit folder retrieved from Users –> [user] –> Library –> Caches. In my case this folder was 56.7MB in size.
The reason for using such a folder is because I wanted to assess the behaviour of all these cloud services when you try to sync a file with a deep folder/sub-folder structure.
In fact, in one of my previous tests Google Drive failed miserably when trying to sync these type of files.
Results
You invariably introduce errors when executing tests in this primitive way. For this reason I chose not to consider fractions of a second in my measurements. All data you see is rounded to the nearest second.
To minimize the effect of other applications accessing the Internet, before running my tests I also quit all browsers, Mail.app, RSS reader, Spotify, and stopped Time Machine.
– Broadband connection with 120 Mbit/s down, 10 Mbit/s up
AAC file upload speed
In this test the surprise was iCloud Drive and Syncplicity. Both services were on average the fastest to upload the 9.3MB aac file.
OneDrive’s results are bad because of the time it takes the applications to initiate the sync. In my tests it looks like the polling time for OneDrive is greater than 10 sec, which negatively impacts the overall results.
SpiderOak’s results are the worst of the bunch due to the client side encryption that this sync service carries out before uploading the file. In this case you cannot really blame SpiderOak. It all comes down to compromises: Security vs. speed.
Folder upload speed
I carried out this test only once for each service. Statistics theory says that you cannot draw any conclusion with one test only.
The reason for executing a test with a complex folder/sub-folder structure was to confirm some doubts I had after running a test a couple of years ago.
More specifically I believed that not all sync services work well with complex directory structures. The results above confirm my suspicion.
The fact that iCloud Drive is the fastest is probably a consequence of Apple optimizing this type of data transfer. All iCloud Drive data is stored as a very complex directory structure, so Apple was forced to optimize its service for it.
Google Drive on the other hand, shows the same problems I saw some time ago. It is unable to quickly upload folders with non-doc type of files and arranged in a complex way. It is obvious that Google doesn’t have any interest in optimizing this aspect of the data transfer, preferring to put its efforts on the upload of more common doc type files.
Delete speed
The delete speed test aimed at measuring how fast the desktop application responded to events started on the server. Again, iCloud Drive was among the fastest services together with Dropbox and Box.com. OneDrive and Google Drive were the two slowest services in this test.
The more I experimented with OneDrive and Google Drive and the more I thought that the desktop application for these two services is an afterthought. Something these companies had to develop but without putting too much love in it.
Conclusions
Despite the bad reputation that Apple’s cloud services have, iCloud Drive performed very well. It shows that it is tightly integrated with OS X as well.
Dropbox is the sync solution to choose if you don’t want to depend on Apple and if you need to work across platforms. Two of the biggest names in cloud computing Microsoft and Google also show that they decided to invest more on the server side of their solutions rather than on the OS X desktop application. I find OneDrive and Google Drive poor solutions even for basic use and I am not recommending them.
If security is your concern you should go with SpiderOak. The desktop application is not bad, but don’t expect the level of refinement that you can get with Dropbox. The speed is good too considering that every single file you upload is also encrypted before leaving your computer.
The pleasant surprise is Syncplicity. They give you a generous 10GB free plan and the service is backed by one of the big names in enterprise computing.
All in all the conclusion is simple. Stick with iCloud Drive if your life is in the Apple ecosystem. If you need more flexibility, need to share files, have access to past versions of your documents and not be tight with Apple, then go with Dropbox.
