Dropbox Pro Gives Subscribers 1TB of Storage as Cloud Wars Heat Up

The cloud wars just got even more serious. Dropbox on Wednesday announced big changes to its Dropbox Pro offering, including more storage space and better sharing options.

The company’s new pricing matches similar moves by Google and Microsoft and makes Dropbox Pro one of the cheapest ways to get a terabyte of storage, though still more expensive than Microsoft OneDrive for Business.

Dropbox is simplifying its tiered pricing structure and offering one Dropbox Pro plan for $9.99 a month or $99 a year that includes 1 terabyte (TB) of storage. Previously, Dropbox Pro offered 100GB for that price of $9.99 a month, 200GB for $19.99 a month and 500GB for $49.99 a month.

So if you’re an existing Dropbox Pro customer, you just got a bunch of extra storage — and if you subscribed to a higher-tiered plan, you’ll get a reduction in monthly bill or a pro-rated refund for your service.

In fact, until now, Dropbox had actually become one of the more expensive services, at least priced per gigabyte.

Google Drive already offers 1TB for $9.99 a month, though without a $99 per year option. Microsoft OneDrive for Business seems to offer the best price for 1TB at $2.50 a month ($30 a year).

Back in June, Apple also announced that it will be drastically improving the storage offerings of its iCloud service to be more competitively aligned with others in the field.

Better sharing options

In addition to the 1TB of storage, Dropbox Pro users are also getting some new features that will make sharing and collaborating with others even better.

These include:

• Passwords for shared links — This means you can now password-protect a link you send out, adding an extra level of security to who can see what you share.
• Expirations for shared links — You can designate expiration dates for a shared link.
• View-only and edit permissions for shared folders — Now when you share a folder, you can choose whether the person you’re sharing with can edit the items inside or only view the files.
• Ability to remotely wipe machine or device’s Dropbox — Now when you remove a device from a Dropbox account, you also have the option to remotely wipe the device’s Dropbox folder.

  That means that if you lose your computer and are concerned about thieves accessing your files, you can disconnect Dropbox from that machine and send a message to wipe the contents of the Dropbox folder the next time that machine connects to the Internet.

Adding new features without new complexity

Dropbox tells us that it designed these features with simplicity in mind. In essence, the goal was to take features — such as folder permissions — that are often targeted at “enterprise” or “small business” customers and make them available to all users in a way that is easy to understand and use.

That focus is clear when looking at some of the new features, particularly with shared folder permissions. Other cloud services, including Microsoft, Box and Google, have offered users the ability to have “view-only” access to a file or folder for quite some time; the problem, at least in my experience, is that they do not necessarily work well when syncing back to a local file system.

In other words, if a user shares a folder with me and says I can only view the files inside — I can’t edit them — it can often be difficult for me to actually get access to that folder as it is updated and as it changes in real time, the same way I can with Dropbox. Instead, if a change is made by the owner of a file, I almost always have to manually sync or download additions, which can often defeat the purpose of sharing a folder and not simply sharing a web link. (I should note that an exception here is OneDrive on Windows 7 or Windows 8, which integrates perfectly with File Explorer. As a Mac user, however, this is of little use to me most of the time.)

What Dropbox Pro does is show a “lock” icon on files that users cannot edit, but it still provides real-time access to the file in the file system. Moreover, users can copy that file to another directory or folder for their own edits.

The same thought went into the way link expirations work. Dropbox has two preset options — 7 days or 30 days — that a user can select from a dropdown on the share page. If that is inadequate, however, power users can set a specific date for expiration.

Market differentiation

Although Dropbox is targeting Box and OneDrive more directly with its Dropbox for Business offerings, the company really seems to be trying to appeal to the common, everyday cloud user with Dropbox Pro.

In that sense, the company is competing more squarely with Google and Apple. The difference, at least from Dropbox’s perspective, is that its service works on virtually every platform, and it has best-in-class sync.

I won’t argue that. I have accounts with every major cloud storage and sync solution on the market, and Dropbox is still the best when it comes to sync and seamless integration with a computer’s file system. I imagine that the new iCloud Drive that will ship with OS X Yosemite will be as good as Dropbox, but it won’t work on my Linux servers or have Android apps.

Likewise, Google Drive can work well for users who spend most of their time in Android or Google Docs, but its file system integration is just not as good as what Dropbox offers (at least on OS X and Linux).

The sense I’m getting from the new Dropbox Pro is that the company wants to be the iCloud for everyone. With 1TB of space for Dropbox Pro accounts and improved sharing features, it’s a convincing argument.

SOURCE: MASHABLE