Can Copy.com Unseat Dropbox?

The cloud storage space is becoming increasingly crowded with competitors. There are so many, in fact, that I’m sure I could piece together 200GB or more in cloud storage space just from the free tiers that most cloud services provide. One name still stands out from the throng; Dropbox. They were one of the earliest entrants to provide file sync capabilities, and now they've got a massive stable of over 100,000 apps that make use of their platform. Despite all that Dropbox does right, they’re still expensive. That leaves the door open for competitors, and one that recently caught my eye is Copy.com.

You may have read my Bitcasa post. If you did, you’ll know that despite Bitcasa’s unlimited storage, it doesn't have the all-important file sync capability necessary to replace Dropbox. Copy, on the other hand, most certainly does. At first blush, it seems to match Dropbox feature for feature at a price point that is less than half of what Dropbox charges. Read on to find out if I think Copy has what it takes to stop Dropbox’s huge momentum.

Dropbox, I Heart You

This is the first in a series of posts where I will take you through the technology I use every day and explain why it’s important to me. I’m starting things off with a service rather than a gadget, and the picture above does a good job of conveying how I feel about the cloud-based file storage service, Dropbox. 

It isn’t often that I feel an emotional attachment to a product or service. Typically, I view any company with a wary eye, and wonder if a scam to trick me out of my money is just around the corner. Dropbox, on the other hand, has somehow managed to make me fiercely loyal and actually evangelize their product for them.

What is Dropbox?

Before I get further into why I LOVE this service, I should probably explain what it is in case you aren't familiar with it. Dropbox is a very simple program that takes files placed in the “Dropbox” on your PC (Windows, Mac, or Linux) and creates a copy of those files online, or in other words, the “cloud.” Once in the cloud, you can access your files from any web browser in the world, from the Dropbox app on another PC, or through the Dropbox app on an iOS, Android, or BlackBerry device. Dropbox does a good job of explaining their service further in their online and colorfully illustrated tour.

Geekbit: (tidbit for geeks) The online storage used by the Dropbox service is really a series of data centers across the US that are operated by Amazon Simple Storage Solutions (AmazonS3).

While Dropbox could be simply be used as a solution for backing up files on your PC, its real killer feature is the ability to generate a URL for any individual file or folder in your Dropbox that you can share with any of your friends or colleagues. For example, here is a picture of a very young me (16) after having just completed my first solo flight, and here is different type of shareable link to the image you see at the top of this post. Both images are stored on the hard drive of my PC, but both are also duplicated  in the cloud and thus accessible to you with a simple link. The beauty of this becomes evident when you need to send a file to someone that is far larger than e-mail can handle.

Dropbox also differentiates itself from other basic online backup solutions in that files are synchronized between any PC that I have installed the application on. If I transfer a picture from my digital camera to my desktop, it is automatically uploaded to Dropbox, and downloaded to my laptop, my wife’s laptop, and the media center PC attached to our TV. Other backup solutions such as Mozy, Carbonite, Backblaze and CrashPlan (more on CrashPlan later) simply copy files from your PC to the cloud. They don’t permit multiple PCs to share access to the same files.