The point I was trying to illustrate is that Dropbox is way more than just a sync service now with the Slack et al integration.
I don’t have much of a problem with the price increase because it includes the Smart Sync stuff. I am, however, taking an honest evaluation on if keeping Dropbox makes sense for me with the improvements to iCloud.
For me the big difference lies in reliability. My iCloud Drive stopped updating itself completely on my Macs in April last year. Apple didn’t know why and couldn’t fix it. Then it all started to work again in early January. Sometimes it syncs superfast, sometimes slower than a snail. Dropbox has never caused me any problem whatsoever.
Mmm. I’ve found iCloud sync to be rock solid on the four devices connected to it. The apps sync seamlessly, even when they’re open on different machines. I can’t really speak for the reliability of Dropbox as I don’t use it for anything other than Scrivener, My experience (especially with very large projects) is that the syncing is not exactly seamless (I have spent a good few hours sifting through files to sort clashes because I’d forgotten to sync on one device, or because Scrivener had been unable to shut itself down for some reason).
To be honest, I don’t really have much of a problem with Dropbox; it is what it is, and if the cost of iCloud syncing is a complete rewrite of Scrivener from the ground up (and I am certainly not saying that this is Apple’s fault) then I’m not sure if such a move would be worth just for iCloud syncing, especially if I still have to keep one eye on the syncing process while I’m trying to write.
Scrivener came about before Apple really knew what Cloud was. Apps such as Ulysses (the rebuilt version) had the advantage of being later to the game, just as Apple was getting its house in order, and Ulysses (and again, I’m not saying this is a bad thing) does much less.
If that is your problem with Dropbox, have you looked at the huge list of bloated things that iCloud handles? 
It sprawls as badly as iTunes.
iCloud is a complicated and over-engineered monster. I alluded to it above, but just because Apple hides this thing inside the operating system does not make it a slick, lightweight and cool. What that really means is that you have no choice in whether it is installed or not, and they can sprawl it deep into stuff that sync should have no business messing with in my opinion—and I state that as an ethical concern as well as a technical one. Just look at it this way: you have to give Dropbox permission to look at your photos. Did you give iCloud permission to do anything? Apple doesn’t ask permission, they just upload your address book to the Internet like that’s cool to do, whereas in most cases we’d call that spyware.
But Dropbox integrates with a development toolkit, so it is clunky and bloated—abandon ship. Sure, sure.
Now the 3-device account limit on their freebie service, yeah I get the grumbles there (despite the whole Gift Horse Mouth bit), and like I say I get the preference aspect, that is fine. But technical arguments for Dropbox being worse than iCloud just make my eyebrows rise.
Clearly, Apple is really good at selling stuff, while Dropbox does not care so much about that kind of thing. Now to a person like myself, that is actually not a point in Apple’s case; Bose is good at selling things too.
The problem to my mind, and the thing to pay attention to with this kind of technology, is not the affirmations of when it works correctly, but what happens when it does not. Because what happens when it fails is what we have to prepare for even when it seems to work fine for years. We post advisories about not using Google Drive even though the failure rates are a fraction of the people who use it (many of whom have used it for years). But because those fail states happen often enough, and because their condition is so catastrophic, we warn people away from the service entirely.
Now for iCloud, I can confirm some of the behaviour I have seen lunk describing (I have never used it long enough to see anything like extended outages). I have created isolated test accounts using iCloud throwaway accounts, and with a few simple steps, made in under two hours (mostly because iCloud was so slow that every test took ages) I was able to observe the following alarming or detrimental behaviours:
So yeah, that is kind of more seamless in the fact that you are not presented with the fruits of your own errors, but err… 
For myself, this kind of catastrophic failure over a rather common misuse scenario is something I have a “One Strike You’re Out” policy on. When I saw iCloud destroy data, that was it. I had no interest in that system and I never will. I have never seen any other sync technology do anything like that, and every other sync tool I have tested has extensive safety nets built in, like archival folders, versioning and trash-buffer systems. Maybe iCloud is better now than it was when I tested it—but like I say, at this point I do not care and I never will, because any system published with the flaws I saw has said enough about itself.
This is the same sort of thing you would have to do with iCloud if you messed up—but as I pointed out above, the experience is a whole lot more opaque and difficult to recover from.
Dropbox:
iCloud:
In neither case would I say these outcomes are evidence of a lack of reliability in either system. They are symptoms of improper usage of them, and their own individual mechanisms for coping with said usage. Neither case is going to be fun to recover from, but at least Dropbox lets you know precisely what went wrong instead of “hey, somewhere in this 80,000 file trove you have here, a sentence within one file triggered a conflict, have fun finding it”.
One thing worth noting is that rewriting Scrivener from the ground up is a euphemism for gutting pretty much all of the things that make it a unique tool for writers, with regards to large-scale research and text storage. We’re talking turning Scrivener into Yet Another Single File Text Editor, with all of the limitations that come with storing 200,000 words in a single file (and nothing much beyond those words, no research).
The other thing worth noting, and I see this misconception all over the place, is that unless Scrivener were gutted, then if we’re speaking of a hypothetical universe wherin Apple finally adds safe and simple support for bulk folder+file sync, using the iOS protocols—nothing would likely change about the procedure.
What people refer to as “clunky” with Dropbox is more the technical limitations of the platform they are choosing to write with: a scalable system that isn’t fettered by single-document limitations. They are in essence blaming the road for being bumpy while choosing to use a vehicle that uses tracks instead of wheels and suspension. If Scrivener supported iCloud as the tool that it is, then you would be driving on a different highway with a different Brand Name, but it likely wouldn’t feel any different, because in this vehicle driving on a road feels about about the same as driving over a field of boulders.
The point is: try doing the latter in a lightweight electric with 4cm of clearance. You can’t, and that’s why Scrivener is what it is and not a gutted version of itself solely so that it can use the A-50 as well as the AC-14 highway. Scrivener can hoist a 250gb repository of research that encompasses a 10-year project to write a 300,000 word box set. Try that in NovelWritr Xtremist, or whatever.
True, but it is even further back then that—you’ve been around since the beginning so you know. Scrivener came out before anyone on the planet started using that jargon to refer to a centralised synchronisation network that keeps local content updated. Scrivener beta (post Gold) begin in the summer of 2006, and the inventors of this genre, Dropbox, published in the summer of 2007, around half a year after Scrivener hit 1.0. At that point of course, only geeks were messing with this thing, and criticising it for basically being a simple rsync clone for dummies.
It wasn’t really until Snow Leopard hit shelves (literally, with people lined up around stores made of blocks of stone and other physical matter, to buy it) that this was something typical people were using. That’s about when we posted an advisory on how to use “cloud” technology safely.
Around this period of time, if you preferred Apple technology you were (a) utterly mad and (b) using a MobileMe service called iDisk which is just a WebDAV folder in a GUI wrapper that was notoriously, and in this case actually, unreliable. At this point Dropbox was already two years old, and the clones were starting to appear.
Apple seemingly still did not understand what Dropbox was when iCloud was announced. The first iteration, launched four years after Dropbox hit the scene, was best described as a complete misunderstanding of what made Dropbox popular. It was also unethically used as a tool to bludgeon developers into adopting the Mac App Store, and thus siphoning revenue meant for developers into their own pockets (but I digress).
I go a bit into the history here not only to point out the differences in the companies that bring these two services to the market, but to raise another point: since around 2008 or 9 or so, when people start using this technology with Scrivener (and Dropbox was pretty much the only game in town), I have not seen a single technical failure on their part. I have seen an awful lot of people causing conflicted files, and some of that may be down to Scrivener faults (like the shutdown bug you saw), etc. But Dropbox itself actually deleting files or damaging data? Nope—it is probably one of the most solid pieces of technology I’ve seen mass usage of.
In conclusion, and importantly, I have no love for Dropbox, lest anyone think I’m a champion of it. They have issues with how they store data without encryption for instance, and I don’t like how you have to use one monolithic sync folder (at least without geeky workarounds). I have to use Dropbox a little bit, and for that I have a command-line tool that is about as complicated as wget. It doesn’t run in the background, I tell it to list X folder as one command, download Y as another and upload Z as a third command. I don’t have Dropbox on any of my iOS devices, either as the little viewer they make or enabled in any my software that supports it.
So I don’t like Dropbox! But I trust it, as technology, a lot more than anything iCloud. The way it works is simple and elegant. iCloud Drive is a Rube Goldberg machine, like much of Apple’s technology. It does 100 things where a simple switch would suffice. Apple’s really good at putting all of that into a box and making you think it is simple—but here’s the funny thing: even the box is over-engineered (again, in typical Apple fashion). I have an automatic distrust of anything that has so many working parts within it to do something that should be pretty basic. With Dropbox and most other sync systems, you give it a file and it handles the file from that point on. With iCloud, your system is hijacked; files deleted locally; those that remain are moved into mysterious hidden folders with obfuscated naming schemes; Finder is subverted to make it look like they are where they were—but other tools won’t see them; no permissions asked to start uploading personal data, etc.
So yup—I don’t get it when I hear people going on about how great iCloud is and how clunky Dropbox is. All I can say is what I said before: Apple is really good at selling things (and with a good dose of people conflating industrial strength workflows with the highway being used to transmit them, too, and wishfully thinking that if they used a differently branded highway, their tank would magically become a bicycle, and not realising what all they would lose by asking us to stop making tanks).
This thread is becoming a “no good deed goes unpunished” kind of thing. Someone posted about why people feel Dropbox is “bloated” (tbh, I term I am not thrilled with), and I posted that a bunch of new changes are what probably are giving people that impression.
I don’t really have a problem with Dropbox, I used to pay for the $20/month plan and recently backed down to the Plus plan. If I keep Dropbox, I get the smart sync stuff so it’s a gain for me. I don’t have a problem with them knocking the free plan down, although I can see someone who just uses it to sync Scrivener across several computers (and their iPad), and nothing else not being thrilled with it.
However, my general preference is to go first party for syncing, so that means iCloud is my first choice, and if I was on Windows, I’d go OneDrive first. That preference doesn’t mean I don’t use other services. I have a lot of scanned PDFs I don’t care if they are on my local computer. Even the new iCloud doesn’t have a way to tell the whole folder to just live on the cloud like I can with Dropbox.
Apologies if I conflated your clarification in my response to the overall sentiment being expressed.
The short version of what I’m saying is: Dropbox might be have problems, but from where I’m sitting (as one who dislikes both options), iCloud does all of those problems as well, and then some. It just hides it better, and sells itself better.
Yeah that’s where I differ from most, in that I have an innate distrust of anything built into the OS. Just as with Internet Explorer, Safari, iTunes, Mail etc., I don’t think operating system development should be sprawling into consumer software and services because that inhibits innovation and growth of third-party development, and meanwhile it hampers and dillutes what OS developers should be spending their time on: the OS. First-party to me does not automatically spell “trustworthy”. It can be less trustworthy, such as the aforementioned lack of permission control and unfettered deep access to your entire system. There is alarm over how much Dropbox sees, but my goodness, what Apple sees goes all the way down to your fingerprint and tone of voice.
But where to draw that line can be a bit blurry, I’ll admit. Is automated backup something the OS should do? Well, maybe so. Is sync? Maybe so (though again I don’t trust corps with data, I use peer-to-peer for that or backups where I own the keys alone). Should they be messing with podcasts and email and stores that sell software? No, ew!
But as usual I’m going off topic. 
Saturday ramblings and all that.
This preference is mainly because if I were to place a long-term bet on if Dropbox or Apple/MS will be around in x years, I’d place the bet on the 1st party solution. Also, since the built-in solution is free. I see some cost savings. $12 a month for Dropbox is reasonable, but once a bunch of these subscriptions add up we are talking real money.
Hmm, on that score though, Apple does not have the best track record for sticking to what they started, or responsibly migrating users to their replacements when they move on. iTools, .Mac, MobileMe, iCloud, iCloud Drive—some of those transitions were not smooth, in some cases people got priced out by the replacement and lost access to their data, in other cases if you missed the memo you got your data deleted. There have been bugs, such as when Drive came out and clicking the checkbox to migrate your account would block access to your previously compartmentalised iCloud files.
So here as well I do not see an inherent level of trustworthiness simply because it is first party. It’s the party that matters.
But I think as pertinent to this topic, a good modern sync system should be maintaining your files on the disk, meaning the loss of that system is of no harm to you—all you remove is the automation. When I stopped using the Dropbox client several years ago, I was left with 100% of the data I had with it. The only material loss was that of convenience, and I no longer had that area of the drive updated automatically with any share folders.
Of course there is the “smart sync” model, or “optimisation” as Apple refers to it. In that case, one may well lose their files, or be faced with a lengthy download to retrieve them (and even confusing instructions on how to do so), and is likewise also no longer maintaining any backups of their data. So all around I’d say these smart sync options are a bad idea, save for stuff like collaborative file shares, where you may really have no need for everything in the share. In this realm I give the advantage to Dropbox. This potentially risky setting is opt-in and granular. Apple’s setting is opt-out by default, and is all-in, thus potentially risks all of your data (if you’re like the average user that puts everything into Documents or Desktop). Here is one of those areas where perceived simplicity can be end up leading to increased complexity (and heartache, say if your account is lost/hacked/et cetera).
Subscriptions are another matter. iCloud Drive isn’t free—at least not after a certain point, just like Dropbox. If you need more than the free level, Dropbox is €10/mo for 2TB and iCloud is €10/mo for the same. Slight advantage to iCloud for a higher base storage level for free—and neither free limit is anywhere near what a writer would consume if they mainly use it for storing writings. It’s mainly that device limit again, which I have no debate with it being a pity they went that route, especially at three. Where I kind of scratch my head though is that if one has four expensive electronic devices they need to sync all of the time, is €10/mo really the hill to die on?
Yeah, that’s a legitimate problem. I’ll gladly pay a fee for services I require. Substriptionware on the other hand gets no second glance from me, and I think that’s where things are getting a little out of hand. I avoid all of that, not only out of general principle, but so these service-level expenses remain below the threshold of, as you put, real money.
Sometimes I think you need to take up drinking with VicK as a hobby.I love to see the “ramblings” that would result from an all night bender with a hairy-arsed-welder or four.
I find it comforting that you only sometimes think that would be a good idea. :mrgreen:
To Cutty Sark.
I don’t think there is much to be gained by calling one system ‘bloated’ by comparing with another, when the two systems have different goals. iCloud is threaded throughout the operating system because Apple’s customer base would probably get quite annoyed if they had keep track of syncing activities across multiple devices. Having it tied throughout the OS means that they can implement stuff like storage optimisation and have all apps code that meet their coding guidelines work without too much of a headache. Of secondary concern to Apple is how the design would look to folk of a more technical bent, because people who are concerned about such things are not really their core user base. What they care about is that it starts up and it works, without having to manually sync.
I’m not familiar with how Google drive works, but these cloud systems are no different than local hard disks; they will fail, so always make sure you have a backup, but that is a different issue. When they work, then your average user expects them to work without regular intervention. For me, iCloud works without me worrying about what’s going on in the background, or how Apple has threaded iCloud throughout the operating system. It’s not an everyday problem because, for the most part, it works everyday. It even works when I share the editing of a document with someone else.
Forty-five minutes is definitely excessive, but I’m not sure it’s the norm, and if it’s not the norm then I certainly wouldn’t want Apple to implement manual syncing across the board to get around it. I would rather they found the problem and fixed it.
How difficult depends on what you’re doing. Apple’s own apps will alert you to a conflict and ask you to review and select a file. Not sure what other apps do, because, as I said, I don’t seem to see these problems.
The opaqueness of the file system is one of those design decisions you either agree or disagree with. Keeping the APIs as abstract as possible means they can do things like move millions of users to a new file system without any of them noticing.
That’s fair enough, but I think we may be digressing. You had problems, and threw the whole thing out the window. I have never had a problem, and have backups for when I do, so all I see is a lot of apps that sync seamlessly, and one that doesn’t.
Good example, but let’s see it from another perspective:
Dropbox:
You make sure that Scrivener is closed down on your Mac. You leave the house.
You open Scrivener on the bus, and wonder if you closed it down on your Mac. You put it out of your mind because you have the beginnings of a best seller you want to crack on with while you’re on the bus.
You wait anything between 15 seconds and 2 minutes for Scrivener to get ready.
You crack on.
You get home before you even start Scrivener, Dropbox tells you you have 18 file conflicts.
You open Scrivener, and it says you have somewhat less.
You spend fifteen minutes comparing files which are all the same, except one where you changed ‘their’ to ‘there’.
I understand your hatred of iCloud, and I will no doubt hate it too if I run into a problem, but I’m really just talking about a problem I’m seeing regularly, rather than one that hasn’t happened and for which I’m sort of prepared for.
You’re talking about the unreliability of iCloud.
I’m talking about the less than seamless workings of Scrivener syncing which I don’t see in other apps, for whatever reason.
Well, I was simply quoting your chief programmer from earlier on in this thread
Yes, I realised a while back that moving to iCloud would not solve the problem, which kind of brings me back to my original message (before I got myself sidetracked), I don’t think there is any point in blaming Apple or thinking they will change. I could be wrong but I suspect that they prefer that developers didn’t delve into low-level data structures any more; they’d rather they stick to the standard APIs and guidelines so that their apps won’t don’t get orphaned when the make sweepingly inconvenient moves – like changing the packaging structure altogether.
And if it’s fair to criticise Apple for burning iCloud into the OS, then it’s also fair to criticise building an app in such a way as to tie a key operation, and possibly its future, to one particular vendor.
I personally don’t make that criticism of Apple or L&L because I don’t really know the full technical details of why those decisions were made, so I assume that they were made to serve the majority of the users.
@AmberV, thank you for articulating exactly why I loathe iCloud and merely get annoyed at Dropbox. 
And—continuing to buy Apple hardware upgrades is a subscription fee, of sorts… not going to add to it by subscribing to more iCloud space or Apple Music.
exits grumbling to go to her writing group meeting
It has to be “only sometimes”. Otherwise there would be too many of us free to roam the forum sans a properly sober caretaker to clean up the monkey mess we’d make with our off-topic-ing-via-KIWCS-posts.
I bet that’s going to show up in the forum search log quite a bit over the next 24hr.
This is really interesting conversation.
But most interesting is the reaction from some of the posters who just refuse to see the world as it is.
L&L built a Mac app.
When iOS came into life some time after that, some users said: ”It’d be nice with an iOS companion app”
So L&L made one but also said: ”Here it is, but it has limitations because of technical reasons”
The users then said: ”No, we won’t accept any limitations. If you don’t fix it WE WILL USE SOME OTHER APP!!”
When L&L responded: ”Sorry, it is what it is” the users started screaming because they had no intention of abandoning the Mac app. Like spoiled children they were used to getting their wishes granted if they screamed long enough. They screamed and screamed, but the world is what it is, so eventually they had to accept reality and either accept the limitations or go for another app.
But which they chose, that’s another story.
In case someone lands here and gets the impression that syncing live projects is the only way to achieve an efficient Scrivener workflow, be aware that KB made other methods possible. Besides Scrivener manuals and knowledge base articles, some additional resources:
There’s AirDrop–– support.apple.com/en-us/HT203106
iTunes File Sharing–– support.apple.com/en-us/HT201301
Apple Files app––
(Apple general info) support.apple.com/en-us/HT206481
(Post by Scrivener developer, KB) https://forum.literatureandlatte.com/t/ios-11-support-of-files-app/37322/19
ZIP transfer––
(Post by L&L’s, AmberV, regarding the file manager, FileApp) https://forum.literatureandlatte.com/t/snapshot-questions/42033/11
(Post regarding Apple’s Shortcut app; includes info links) https://forum.literatureandlatte.com/t/big-dumb-question/45001/21
I have synced Scrivener Mac to Mac using iCloud Drive (didn’t use Desktop and Documents or Optimize features) and it worked flawlessly, other than an operator error(s). I did it just because. It was never something I planned on sticking with, especially for serious work. Why add complexity––more points of potential failure? I guess syncing (whichever service) live projects does save a little time, but after the habits to use time-stamped ZIP files are formed, it can’t be much. ZIPs can be mailed and/or stored in any number of places for online or offline purposes.
I’m not trying to convert anyone (well, maybe a little bit). The main point––if Scrivener’s design makes you productive, it’s important to remember that you’re not limited to syncing live projects, whether from Mac to Mac, Mac to iOS, iOS to Mac or iOS to iOS.
Folks, in case you missed it—and it was buried in AmberV’s long post—this means that if iCloud sync ever comes to iOS Scrivener, it will still not happen “seamlessly” in the background. Instead, we will get an iCloud-branded dialog box that shows syncing progress rather than a Dropbox-branded dialog box. This would be equally true for Box, Google Drive (Heaven forbid), or any other syncing service.
What AmberV said was that syncing will not happen in the background on iOS unless Scrivener is gutted. All platforms. Any sync service. End of story. If this is what you want, you are extremely unlikely to get it.
If what you want instead is a syncing alternative, any alternative, to Dropbox sync for iOS Scrivener, that may happen. It’s not feasible given the present state of APIs of other syncing services (including iCloud) but it’s conceivable that those APIs (including iCloud’s) might change to make it feasible. Until that happy day, our choices will be limited to Dropbox sync or some form of file transfer. @ScShrugged’s excellent post above lists file transfer solutions that have been devised to date by Scrivener developers and users.
Spoken like someone who has never tried to help a user whose data was “optimized” into the Bit Bucket, never to be seen again.
Katherine
Mac Scrivener has an auto-close option for exactly this reason. I use and recommend it to anyone who uses Scrivener across multiple devices.
If you routinely have dozens of file conflicts, there is probably an issue with your synchronization practices. If you used another system, either you would have the same reported conflicts or you would lose data. I would recommend finding the underlying cause rather than blaming the conduit.
Katherine
Nor does Microsoft. OS vendors are no more stable than third-party vendors when it comes to peripheral services.
I suspect that in time it won’t really matter whether Dropbox is the best solution for the current build of Scrivener or not: what will really determine the future is if Scrivener can maintain its marketshare while only offering Dropbox as a syncing solution. And perhaps even that won’t matter, as Keith, being the sole developer, clearly has the freedom to act as he wants, irrespective of any other concerns.
The underlying issue here is that Apple has not only moved the goalposts in recent years, but it has also ripped up the pitch, torn down the stadium, and changed the rules of the game. All of the pro-Dropbox points I have read in recent threads are all to do with how things were, not with how things are now or clearly will be in the future.
Apple has changed both the design language of apps and the ease-of-use that makes people choose Apple devices across OS platforms. For many users – and that’s a growing number of users in my experience – that means apps that mirror Apple’s design ethos and which use iCloud. Against that backdrop, Scrivener is increasingly seen as being behind the curve.
I know a young writer who has just signed a significant book deal. She used to use Scrivener, but she has dropped it in favour of Ulysses, as its design across OSes is far more in line with Apple’s core ethos and because iCloud works so well.
And this really is the issue: there is a group of long-term users on the forum who love Scrivener for what it was and is, and there is a growing swell of newer (or potential) users who just want to work the Apple way, without having to get a handle on Scrivener 3’s design ethic or larking around with Dropbox.
I think Amber is right: that means gutting Scrivener and rebuilding it again. And I suspect that is exactly what many Scrivener users want now and certainly what new users will expect in the future – we can’t forever live in the noughties.
I have no direct investment in this debate as I only use iCloud for syncing, and I no longer maintain a Dropbox account. If Scrivener’s design across iOS and macOS was consistent, and if syncing was offered through iCloud, I would purchase Scrivener for iOS. As it is, I stick with Scrivener on macOS and Writer for occasional needs on iOS, using external folder sync if necessary.
The founded-on-quicksand reasons presented so far for persisting with Dropbox really don’t have any merit as far as I am concerned, irrespective of how passionately they are presented: the tide is moving away from what we have now, and Scrivener is going to get left in its wake if it doesn’t jump on its surfboard soon and ride the wave. Personally, that’s fine with me as I am happy to choose Scrivener – as it presently is – above other design and syncing preferences. But I am definitely in a dwindling minority in terms of the writers around me, which wasn’t the case a few years ago. From that fact, everything else flows, blowing Dropbox out of the water, even if some people still love it and want to defend it.
My only reason for supporting any move to gut and rebuild Scrivener is that I think it will give Scrivener a longer lifespan, and that really would be ideal for me as I plan to write for at least another 50 years. Selfish, yes.
Just to be transparent: I have also dumped my fax machine and my DVD player. Radical that I am.
Slàinte mhòr.