SugarSync vs. DropBox in 2011

Many of the reviews that I’ve read online that come up in searches are outdated reviews that no longer have accurate information. So, in an attempt to compare the two in 2011, I’m doing a very quick overview of the two online storage giants (the two biggest services of this type). I like them both, but I pay for SugarSync, and here’s why:

DropBox 2 GB Free 250 MB/referral 250 MB tutorial bonus $9.99/mo for 50 GB Single Folder Simplicity Faster Uploading (subjective)

SugarSync 5 GB Free 500 MB/referral 750 MB tutorial bonus $4.99/mo for 30 GB Single folder simplicity or custom folders Slower Uploading (subjective)

First thing to note is that even after I’ve gotten quite a few referrals, I’m only up to a little over 3 GB on DropBox, whereas I started with 5 GB w/ SugarSync. In addition to that, since I paid for the service, my wife (my referrer) and I will both get an extra 10GB just because I got a paid plan, which will help her store her photos on SugarSync without needing a paid plan herself. I’m not sure if this lasts forever or only while I have a paid account, but regardless, assume each paid plan is 10GB bigger than advertised (check SugarSync for details). Last but not least, after signing up for a free plan, I got e-mails for half off any yearly plan, which allowed me to get 60BG of storage for only $50.00 for a year.

The one category in which SugarSync did not win against DropBox was in the upload speed category. SugarSync does appear slower, but I have not done enough tests to say that this is always the case, and it was still fast enough to satisfy my needs, so I’m going with the option that provides me the most free space, the cheapest paid space, and the most configuration options so that I can organize my files the way I want to rather than having to drop them all into a DropBox folder.

A Reason to Stick with Subversion instead of Git

So, all the hype seems to be why you should switch to Git instead of SVN, and there are a LOT of reasons to switch to Git: It’s Distributed, it’s reportedly up to 30x lighter weight, easier branching/merging, etc. However, today I came across a reason to stick with Subversion, and that is: Sub-directory branching.

So, let’s say that you’re a small webshop and you have a custom CMS that you use for all your sites, but you also do some WordPress and BrochureWare sites that have some common files (e.g. CSS reset files, particular folder structure you want all your people to use, etc.). To simplify your life, you want this all under a single source control repository so that you can “branch” your templates for every website, and your structure looks something like this:

/Templates/CustomCMS
/Templates/WordPressTemplate
/Templates/BrochureWareTemplate
/Sites/WordPressImplementation
/Sites/BrochureImplementation
/Sites/CustomCMSImplementation

You can basically think of this as having 3 trunk/master folders in a single repository. With subversion this is extremely easy because every folder is essentially it’s own little repository. When you’re creating a new custom CMS site, you just branch the /Templates/CustomCMS/ to your Sites/SiteName folder and start working on it. If you find a bug in the custom CMS and fix it, you can merge it back up into your /Templates/CustomCMS folder. When you’re checking out code, you can also check out just a sub-directory rather than having to checkout the entire repository. With Git, this isn’t so easy. A Branch in Git is a branch of the ENTIRE repository. There are some tools for bringing external repositories into a subtree of a Git repository, but still not for branching off of that directory only. So, for similar functionality to the above folder layout, you’d have to have 3 separate repositories with Git.

For larger projects, where you only want a single repository for the entire project, Git seems to win out for me. However, for these much smaller projects that can kind of all be lumped together easily in a single repository in Subversion, Subversion is the winner.