One important thing for me was being able to fix broken cloud storage paths that had become out of sync for whatever reason. This was a frequent-enough issue for my users of Google Drive, and to a lesser extent, OneDrive that I had built some tooling around it into our MDM. This worked by calling the subcommands `fileproviderctl materialize`, `fileproviderctl domain remove` and `fileproviderctl evict` to clear these broken paths and restore the sync to a working state. No longer possible.

It’s kind of sad that even after 15+ years, no one has caught up to Dropbox. None of the other cloud providers do proper block-level sync, and I hear much less about Dropbox breakage than other providers.

It does make sense because OneDrive, iCloud and Google Drive are tie-in services. If you use Microsoft 365 / Apple / Android you are “forced” to use them to gain access to certain features, meaning there is no competitive pressure.

Dropbox is still superior IMO. I have a Office365 subscription but OneDrive can make a huge a mess with default settings if you aren't careful when you set it up on anything but a new machine. It's just less slick overall - plus I really want first class Linux support.

I don't want to pay for two file storage systems though and the 3 host limit on Dropbox is a shame. Without it they'd be all but guaranteed to lock me in and I would (gladly) start paying again in a year or so for more space.

Instead I switched to syncthing, which is great but not as nice.

Yeah I have many different cloud storage subscriptions. And although I don’t like Dropbox as a company due to the things they did, it is the only thing that really works, all the time.

A “refuse” to “upgrade” to the fileprovider version, as I don’t want stupid&slow functionality like iCloud Drive.

OneDrive has had block level sync dor all files for 4 years.

Syncthing not only does block-level sync, it does it in a distributed fashion.

https://docs.syncthing.net/users/syncing.html

I'm not sure on what basis you came to your conclusion but I do not have my issues with OneDrive on Mac and gdrive on Windows for ages.

They mentioned a specific feature (delta sync) that not all providers support. Onedrive seems to after 2020, but I don't think Gdrive does.

It doesn't matter if you're just syncing a bunch of small files (code, documents, images) but can make a big difference in bigger files (compressed archives, large media assets, etc.)

https://www.cloudwards.net/block-level-file-copying/

Google Drive used to, maybe still does keep versioning metadata in file names