The company I work for is small, but growing. With a few of us in house designers, we’ve found that we are in need of a more efficient way of file sharing.
Ideally a cloud space that we all have access to with ample storage (one of us already has about 3TB of storage in use just for herself, honestly she could probably delete some very old files).
I thought that Adobe had a solution for this, and I think they use to, but they got rid of it. The Adobe libraries are good for keep assets conveniently at hand, but we need to carry a bit more in the files - and libraries would become chaotic very quickly.
We also considered Google drive, but they have a storage limitation that doesn’t suite our needs, and honestly none of us are big fans of the Google drive user interface.
We know there has to be something that other people/companies use to keep track of all of their project files for hundreds of different clients - and I have found a few online that look promising.
But I’m curious, what have you used in your experience? What are the pros and cons you found while using it? Anything you know of that you would strongly recommend?
We use Dropbox.
But we keep a dual backup on servers in two physical locations, just in case. You never know when a cloud service will go up in smoke.
They made some changes not too long ago that made it harder to use. At least the way I used it. But I adapted. Just a little more work for me. If you haven’t ever used it, starting with the new interface shouldn’t be a problem.
The only HUGE con is that it doesn’t flag new comments on shared files. I’ve only had that be an issue for one project where the client was trying to use it as a proofing mechanism. If you are just using it for project storage, it’s great, but if you are using it as a team share, that could be a big issue.
The other small issue is it’s cloud based. You don’t want to be syncing all the files stored on the cloud. You have to be choosy and stay on top of it or it’ll eat your hard drive space. I work with very large image files. Thankfully we have a top-notch internet connection with lots of bandwidth. I still have to wait sometimes many, many minutes for a large project to sync up.
When I split my time between the office and working at home, I used Dropbox because it was so incredibly seamless.
When I worked for the State of Utah, we had a contract with Google for email and other services, so we used Google Drive. It was clunky but workable once everyone got used to it.
When I worked for the University of Utah, the school used Box (not Dropbox) for cloud storage, backups, and file transfers. They told me it was configurable and secure in ways that met the needs of a big university. I remember it being very slick and seamless.
I use Google Drive at home for cloud storage because my ISP is Google Fiber, and they throw in several terabytes of space as part of the deal. Despite not liking Google Drive’s interface and its other limitations, I’ve gotten used to it.
The “all apps” Adobe package includes 1TB cloud storage per person. Which is great, and I know my co-workers forget even exists. I use it to keep some files available at home if I need them.
But it sounds like you need more. Dropbox is a great option, and very popular. I don’t know much about OneDrive but it is a thing. And some of our clients use Box for sharing files.
I work in a corporate environment that uses teams for communication. We use OneDrive/SharePoint. They integrate seamlessly with teams. They are all owned by Microsoft.
For personal use I use google drive, for freelance stuff I use drobox. Over the years through various tasks and promotions, I’ve accumulated quite a bit of space with these.
If you’re already gearing towards one ecosystem and you see a potential growth, I would go with that. You can eventually negotiate a better deal. For better or worse, our company uses MS for pretty much everything.