Maximizing Your Cloud Storage Experience: A Comparison of Dropbox and Synology Drive

Mikael Hugg:
Which one is better to have like a synchronized cloud, system like Dropbox or Google Drive or, you know, whatever you got, or then have this like very complicated, very complex own, stack of, like a cloud service. And I don't like this. I think this is so obvious which one is going to win. I would say barely, you know, we don't even have to have, make the whole video.

Artem Daniliants:
Okay. So basically guys, today we have a really interesting topic: Cloud services provided by a big corporation like Dropbox, that makes everything easy for you or a self-hosted solution, meaning that you are actually owning your data, but you also own all the problems that come with it, right? Set up. Maybe a lot of problems.

Mikael Hugg:
All of that. A lot of problems .

Artem Daniliants:
Okay, so now you probably know what I'm gonna be talking about. I'm going to talk about self-hosted solution and Mikael, as he mentioned already, he will be defending the Dropbox owner, so this. So guys, let's get started and like before, I'll let you know start so that I can crush his arguments after the fact.

Mikael Hugg:
All right, so I mean, I'll share the screen so everybody knows. Please, let's see. Here we go. Well, you know, when it, when it comes to Dropbox, and by the way, Dropbox is not sponsoring us, although it would be nice to have it so. You know, contact us. We're gonna talk good things to you. Anyway, you know, super easy to use. I'm just saying it's so cheap, like you can actually get the free one. I think they have the free one still. They, I've been using Dropbox, I think maybe a year after they launched. So I've been using it, I don't know, 10 years or more. And it was in growth hack inside. They, they were very, you know, I mean like now it's really like obvious things what everybody's been copying Dropbox for years, how to get new clients and customers. But back in the days when they launched, nobody was doing it like they did. So they, they had this like, when you are doing certain tasks, then you are gonna get more space. So I'm like, you know, more gigabytes or whatever and when you are inviting other people to use and join, then you would, and also your friend would get extra memory. So, I mean, that was a pretty, pretty old printer. It was like two gigabytes. I think they still have it. It's probably somewhere here. Maybe I saw it already, but I just can spot it. But anyway, they have this always free plan, two gigabytes. And I don't know, that's usually good for some small stuff, but then I have also as personal, I have personally, I have this one

Artem Daniliants:
The cheapest one

Mikael Hugg:
Yeah. Like, yeah, because it, it costs like 100 years. So I think it's this one. Two terabytes. So that's like huge. I'll, I'll just put all my photos from my old phones. You know, they just have this continuous thing. And then when we have for, for the company, we have the professional, I think this one maybe, uh, most likely. So it's so good. Uh, also you get all other, you know, good stuff. You get the, um, capture, which is very good. You know, we've been using Loom for, uh, for some time now, uh, you know, capturing all the, all the, uh, you know, screen racks and, and meetings. But now we also have the capture.

I wouldn't say the capture is better than Loom though, but I mean, it comes with, uh, it comes with a professional package anyway, so kind of makes no sense to use any. Uh, it's not that much worse than Loom, but then you don't also have to pay more. Or maybe if you have to pay a little bit. I don't know. Yeah, actually it, it, it is included. So even better. Then you have all these other like signs. Why wouldn't, why would you even use any other, why would you make your own al Rack when you get all these? That's just, that, just what I'm asking. If you don't, can't afford 10 years a. Then you have a trouble with your life.

Artem Daniliants:
Okay. Okay. Okay. Good argument there. So if you can't afford 10 euros, then what are you doing with your life? Right?

Mikael Hugg:
Yeah. I mean, have, that's, you have to think through your, your, uh, life plan

Artem Daniliants:
So, okay. My counter argument is following. If you think about your business and uh, we are pretty much in the same business, right? We're doing marketing for our clients. You know, we do it from a different perspective. You have your niche, your, uh, specialization, and then I have my own. But in the end, still marketing.

So if you think about company assets, what do we really have? We have our personnel. That's definitely an asset. People are everything in the. But then we basically produce digital files. In the end, we produce digital files of some sort, marketing presentation, um, you know, Excel spreadsheets

Mikael Hugg:
Well, everything, god forbid, everything, yeah.

Artem Daniliants:
Power points. Yeah. So we produce digital assets. Where do we store those digital assets? In many cases we store them on our computer, and as you mentioned in the cloud we have something like Dropbox and uh, and uh, basically, you know, that's pretty much. If your computer breaks or somebody steals it, God forbid, um, you will have steel copies in the Dropbox. But if you think about it, your data is probably the most crucial part of your business.

Mikael Hugg:
Yeah.

Artem Daniliants:
And if it's gone, then it could have substantial, you know, implications for your business. If, for example, somebody wrote to Dropbox and said that you are hosting, you know,, because otherwise, you know, if you're gonna get money, then we are gonna de money.

Mikael Hugg:
Yeah.

Artem Daniliants:
I just realized, yeah. So if you, if somebody reports you that, hey, this guy, he has, you know, CP in his account or something, then you know, there might be a disturbance. Another thing that could happen is somebody could actually, you know, hack Dropbox that is possible. And what I can show you now, there is a very good website that I really like. Have I been pawned? Right? And basically, if I type my email address and now everybody will know my email address. But again, probably everybody knows who wants to know already. So if I type here my email address, you will see that I have been pawned, basically my data leaked, yeah, to the internet. And it leaked during Dropbox breach in 2012. Basically. There is an indication that Dropbox as every other cloud service, it's not immune to hacking, to losing your data and so forth. So basically, if you think about it, if you are putting everything basically that you create to Dropbox, you are making, basically, that's a huge risk and a huge liability for you.

Mikael Hugg:
Mm-hmm.

Artem Daniliants:
First of all, you probably signed like me, you probably signed like 1 million NDAs, right? Like NDA this, NDA that. And now if, if you store customers data on Dropbox and then for some reason Dropbox gets, and that data gets leaked, you might be held responsible because now you leak the data. You didn't. Precautions to encrypt it and so forth.

Mikael Hugg:
I think in the, yeah, theoretically, but like for real, if Dropbox is the, the corporate, then you as a user, because there's always in contrast that there, it limits your, you know, like, You, you can't be responsible of drop Dropbox's, uh, safety, so then most likely you wouldn't get sued. But yeah, that's, that's a valid point though. Yeah, it's, it's a fair point.

Artem Daniliants:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, at least you could lose a client, right? Maybe they don't sue you, but they will say like, Hey, like this, this is a big, you know, problem. You know, we are losing business because of you and whatever. So there is, there is an opportunity there. And what you said about year a month, you are absolutely correct, but once you start to have more and more employees, you will see that it wraps up, yeah, becomes very, very expensive. So if we go to Dropbox and just go to pricing, and first of all, I use Dropbox. You will soon see that I still use Dropbox, but the, but the way that I use it is very interesting. It may be different, uh, to the way that you use, but. If you go to the, um, to the pro features?

Mikael Hugg:
Yeah

Artem Daniliants:
Like professional features, that's about like 17 euros a month. And then if you have, for example, 25 people in your corporation, you have to multiply it by 25. Now it's, uh, it's hundreds of dollars a month easy.

Mikael Hugg:
But then, then we go, then, then we go to the thing. If you have 25 employees, you should have a problem by paying couple of hundreds. A month you should make more. More .

Artem Daniliants:
Yes. She's thinking of revenue. Revenue course.

Mikael Hugg:
Oh, that, that's still enough gonna be a problem. Like Yeah, I don't, it's, it's, uh,

Artem Daniliants:
Of course, a fucking course. Money course. Sorry.

Mikael Hugg:
Money understand .

Artem Daniliants:
Yes, I will, I will. Uh, but basically if you then add, uh, also Slack, right? Because you need some sort of communication inside your company, right?

Mikael Hugg:
Yeah, slack sucks.

Artem Daniliants:
Well that's, I use Slack, so maybe that's another episode right? Coming up.

Mikael Hugg:
Yeah. This is, is actually another one. We have to make Slack socks hard.

Artem Daniliants:
Yeah. Yeah. Slack versus whatever. What, what do you use, by the way, do you use Skype or WhatsApp? ,

Mikael Hugg:
I send these like actual letters and use smoke signals. Ah.

Artem Daniliants:
So, yes. Yes. Very good. Smokes, smoke signals is free.

Mikael Hugg:
Yeah. Pigeons. Exactly. No, I mean, no, you know, we use, we use, uh, Google Chat, which is not by far the best, but it comes with our plan. And, you know, slack is all right in, well, you know, we actually do, let's not go there.

Artem Daniliants:
We're, let's not go, let to make another one.

Mikael Hugg:
Yeah. I have a quick,

Artem Daniliants:
Yeah. We need to make another one about Slack versus whatever. Yeah. And then you add Slack, then you also add email, right. You add and then you are adding maybe calendar and other services. So all of a sudden, per employee, you are spending quite a lot. And of course you can build it into your cost and that's basically not a problem. But you still don't own your data. You still potentially. You know, could be held responsible for leaking the data. And in the end, also, you are enriching other businesses. So Google might use your data to train their ai, you know?

Mikael Hugg:
But is that a good thing? Is that, isn't that a good thing?

Artem Daniliants:
Well, it depends. It depends. Do you want control or do you want ease of use? In cloud services you are, you are basically paying for ease of use. But once you get to a certain point, it becomes more cost effective to, and also from the company perspective and risk management might be more cost effective to do a self hosted version. So now I will just tell you what I do so that you can maybe learn from it.

Mikael Hugg:
Yeah

Artem Daniliants:
And remember in the comments down below if you disagree. If you think Miguel is right, please let us know. If you think that I'm right or you want to know more, ask in the comments. But anyway, what I did actually in my, no

Mikael Hugg:
First stuff.

Artem Daniliants:
Very good. Very good. Basically, basically means that everybody, everybody will, uh, use thumbs up. Okay. So anyway, it thumbs down or maybe thumbs down. Yeah.

Mikael Hugg:
Yeah. We don't get any ears

Artem Daniliants:
Yes. But again, uh, guys just write in the comments. What do you think and what do you use for your business? We'd love to hear, you know, what are your solutions?

Mikael Hugg:
Yeah.

Artem Daniliants:
But basically after, you know, like looking at all the cost associated with each employee in my company, I decided to explore an interesting solution. And I stumbled upon chronology. And chronology is just one of the vendors. There are many vendors similar to ology, but Cology provides basically an idiot proof solution for people who want to own their own infrastructure that looks super expensive.

Mikael Hugg:
Basically looks, yeah, maybe it looks expensive, but I promise you, so when you

Artem Daniliants:
When goes, you have to pay hundreds of euros every month to have this

Mikael Hugg:
I think you have to pay like thousands of euros to have this one.

Artem Daniliants:
So, or maybe in 20 years it's gonna be cheaper. So basically, if you get started with a box like this. Sociology offers boxes, let's call them just like server computers. It's a powerful computer that can provide you all the services or most of the services your company needs out of your office, for example. So what basically I did is I bought a cheap mass solution, and when I talk cheap, we're talking maybe four to $700 without drives and I packed it.

Mikael Hugg:
Oh, without drives.

Artem Daniliants:
Okay. Without drives. So just R and then Yes, just, yeah, just, just the rig. And then I packed it with drives that I wanted to use, the capacity that I needed, and I got basically 10 terabytes for like, together with the rack. I got it for maybe, all in all, maybe I, I think it was like 800 or 900 euro or something similar. Okay, so we are not talking about very expensive purchase, but what I got in return, so I placed it in the office and I connected it to our office connection that is really quick. It's really speedy. It's about a gigabyte download and about 400 megabyte upload. What did I get?

I got VPN server for all of my team. Right away, out of the box. Anybody who wants VPN, they got it the box provides. Second we got alternative to Google Drive. So here we have our own, uh, you know, uh, Dropbox like experience that works on our domain is available outside of the office, and we can just go to any folder.

We can click, for example here, share, create a public link. Now you have similar experience to Dropbox. Now anybody ,you know, can share the link and they have also desktop solutions. So you can have Dropbox experience where the application is running in the background an synking documents to the server. So that's, that's pretty neat.

Mikael Hugg:
Oh yeah.

Artem Daniliants:
But what's most important is that you get this kind of interface once you set up the box and it takes about 20 minutes. Once you set up the box, you get this interface where a non-technical person can actually do everything. I can go to package manager and I can install services for my company that I needed. So if I need office, solution they have it for me, it's just one click and boom. I can do spreadsheets, I can do slides, I can do documents.

Mikael Hugg:
So is this Google drive experience, is this, uh, like, hold on. Is this like, uh, this is not, this is not a Microsoft office. That's their own.

Artem Daniliants:
Or no, no, no, it's not Microsoft Office. It's their own Google Drive kind of clone.

Mikael Hugg:
Ah

Artem Daniliants:
So basically it's like Google Sheets, Google Slides and so forth. Yeah.

Mikael Hugg:
Okay. But okay, so you, if you just put like words or Google sheets there, can you modify there straight in there or do you need to always download it?

Artem Daniliants:
Uh, no, no, no. You kind of have to live in their ecosystem if you want to use chronology, but what you can do is you have alternative to Google Calendar, right? That syncs and is available, uh, works on mobile devices, no problem. You have also opportunity to. You have also opportunity to use ology photos if you want to back up, for example, digital assets for your customer in photo format, you have evernote alternative, you have video station for video files. You have also cloud sync that I use. So for example, my Dropbox and my Google Drive and my Microsoft Drive get also backed up to our own server.

So if something happens with them, I don't care. It's just one click and I get all the files, I have access. My company can continue working. Um, they also have email server. So I can take care of, uh, you know, emails if I want to do, I can run virtual machines and also more. And if you look for example, at the storage, we have used 7 terabytes. And now, you know, like out of 10 terabytes. But if I want to expand storage, I can just buy a small expand storage box and I can expand it to another 30 terabytes or 50 terabytes.

Mikael Hugg:
But what's most, what the hell? You're storage there.

Artem Daniliants:
If you have 7 terabytes already used, seven terabytes. I think everything combined well, you know, we, with

Mikael Hugg:
My stuff, you know, I wouldn't even get close to.

Artem Daniliants:
Yeah. But then again, I have a lot of video files. You know, for example, when we're CP material and stuff like that. So , no, not . A A lot of video files.

Mikael Hugg:
You Google stuff you can't put on or no. Okay, now I get it.

Artem Daniliants:
Yeah.

Mikael Hugg:
That's why you have your own whole server.

Artem Daniliants:
This, this, this went in a totally different direction. So guys assure and,

Mikael Hugg:
Okay, fail, fill on his charges immediately.

Artem Daniliants:
So what, what I use is I use back blaze to back up everythyng to a cloud service. So I back up all of our storage in, in the drive, I back up to back place, because back blaze allows me to encrypt backups and then push encrypted backups to back, back blaze. And it's so freaking cheap. I mean, I don't remember like how expensive it is, but I pay, like, I basically pay like, almost like nothing pretty much. Um, I don't remember the exact, pricing, but it's like, it's ridiculously cheap and basically it's built in into the chronology. So basically anytime I make any changes, it automatically pushes those encrypted two back place so that if something happens, if the box catches on fire, I don't care.

I'm not gonna be losing any kind of data. We can continue working right. So that's another good thing, and the peace of mind that I get from, first of all, owning my data. Second, reducing costs. Because now for example, if we have 50 employees, my costs will not go up because chronology is already purchased. You know, that's it. It's already there. I just go to control panel, users, click create new user, and that it. Here, I create the user. Now I, I will give him access to certain applications and he will get access to all the applications that he needs. They also offer a Slack alternative called, um, uh, Sology Chat, which is pretty awesome because it works on mobile device as well. Let me just search for chat, chat, chat here. I think. Yeah, there we go. Chronology chat is basically a Slack alternative that in your phone, uh, server basically. So I think it's pretty, pretty damn, damn cool.

Mikael Hugg:
But then you can put any kind of interpretations because the only thing Slack is good, good is that you can add a lot of integrations with SAP or whatever tool. So this is kind, I think this kind of standalone stuff.

Artem Daniliants:
Yeah. So now let's talk what I like, what I don't like. So first of all what I like is that I own my data and I have access. I can do anything I want if I want to. Second, the cost becomes very, very, like it turns in my favor. Once you get past maybe 20 employees, for example.

So it becomes more cost effective to actually have something like Sonology. And then third, I like that. You know, it allows me to scale my business, you know, as the time goes by so I can ,you know, start purchasing additional hardware drives. You know, I can attach many different other options to it, but the negatives you mentioned, one, integration. Sociology is not integrated as well with other services. So if you want to use Zapier or you want to use make.dot.com or you want to integrate whatever teams into it is gonna be really hard because

Mikael Hugg:
Yeah

Artem Daniliants:
Synology is not yet so prophy. Amongst small companies and medium size enterprises that it's supported everywhere. Support is slowly coming, but it's not yet there. So if you need tight integrations, I don't think this is the right way for you. Second, if your internet connection goes down, or if yours Synology system catches on fire, basically, then there will be service disruption, so, so you should weigh the risks for your business. The files will be available because files are still on the computer of our employees.

So from that perspective, I don't think that's an issue for us. Nobody's gonna die. And what I also don't recommend doing is using Synology email service unless you can really, really be sure that your box is always up. It has amazing internet connection that is corporate, you know, level and so forth. So what I'm trying to say, if your company has more than 20 employees.

Mikael Hugg:
Mm-hmm.

Artem Daniliants:
Or if you work in a sector.

Mikael Hugg:
Yeah.

Artem Daniliants:
Where privacy is very important. So imagine if you work, for example, for military, I don't think they will be using Dropbox. Right. Or if you work for the president or banking sector. So if you work in a sector where privacy is very important, mission critical, then something like Sinology is amazing because you can actually put it in your office and block internet access so it can't even connect to internet and everybody can still use the service. And also if you have technical people within your company. So if you have technical people within your company, the system is so easy. Anybody can set it up, but still you need to have some small understanding what is terabite. Basically what is hard drive, how to put hard drive inside and so forth.

Mikael Hugg:
Have you plucked your, uh, power into the.

Artem Daniliants:
Yes, yes, yes, yes. And also, also I have ups, uh, uh, uninterrupted power supply, so I have like a huge battery connected to it. So even if the lights go down, the battery will still keep the server running for a while. And then if the battery is ending and light didn't come back, it'll automatically tell the server to shut down gracefully so that no data is lost. Basically, yeah, if you like tinkering, if you like, kind of like if you are geeky, this is amazing cause there is so much you can do and it just makes me happy. So in the end, for me personally, there are some use cases where something like this makes a lot of sense. It makes a lot of sense for us. But I will be still honest with you, we still use some of the cloud services and now we don't use all the services that ology offers , but we are slowly evaluating every single one.

And for example, Sinology Drive has been an amazing addition to our company because now we have 10 terabytes of space and we can have unlimited amount of users. We don't have to care, you know, because it doesn't bring any additional cost to our company. So yeah, that's basically, that's my piece. Yeah, that's my counter-argument.

Mikael Hugg:
Yeah. I mean like that's, uh, that. Pretty solid one. Uh, yeah, that's what I was also thinking, that now that I saw it kind of makes sense. I'm like, not just kind of really makes sense to use it. Especially when you have, I, I would say even maybe more than 10 people. Then I would say that it, it makes sense to use its, um, it, that is for sure the easiest way to, when, when you have want to get your own rig and do the setup. But then again, you know, you are from the coding side. I'm from the creative side, so for me, uh, Dropbox looks pretty, it's easy to press the button, and then that's, it's, uh, most like a Dropbox is not gonna set on fire, so should be All right, And, uh, but yeah, now that I'm thinking maybe when, you know, if you're grow. A bit bigger. I actually have to probably go to that solution as well. I'm not huge fan, fan of those, uh, technology birds and, and Excel stuff. Um, really like Google stuff. But I mean, for just putting data in, using it for, uh, because we have people in various countries right now as freelancers, so they need to have access to our stuff and Yemen. That's the way they can do it. So if, yeah, if you have a company more than 10, 10 or 20 people, then obviously Artem wins. In other cases, I have declared myself winner just because, you know, why wouldn't I So ?

Artem Daniliants:
Of course, of course. That makes a lot of sense. But definitely what I'm trying to say is that, um, when you want the easiest solution and you have a small company and you just want to focus on getting work, done. I think something like Dropbox or Google Drive is amazing, but

Mikael Hugg:
Yeah

Artem Daniliants:
Once you start to be more, start to be more corporate, then you, for example, if you have like 100 employees, then Dropbox becomes a huge cost, right? Oh, I mean, slack becomes huge cost and so forth.

Mikael Hugg:
Who even uses if you have like hundreds of people working who, who actually use Dropbox and et cetera? I don't, I don't think, well, actually, probably some are. That's very difficult. When I, I used to, I used to work in Dodger Bank years ago, and, uh, there you have your own these, uh, like server halls and Yeah. No, they, they were using any Dropbox or whatever. Uh, it's, uh, I, I think it's, it's many. Micro and small companies, maybe some random medium size companies, but for sure not above that can, you know?

Artem Daniliants:
Yeah, it will make sense. It would be weird, right? If Deutsche Bank, yeah, it'll be weird. DEU Trump like, yeah, we, we start. Yeah, we store all your, that sounds financial data in Dropbox. Yeah. Trust I not gonna ride. I would switch the bank. Yeah.

Mikael Hugg:
Trust us pro.

Artem Daniliants:
You know, everybody, all the cool kids are using Dropbox, so we're storing all the financial data in Dropbox as well.

Mikael Hugg:
Yeah.

Artem Daniliants:
It's protected by the American corporation.

Mikael Hugg:
Yeah, very true.

Artem Daniliants:
So basically, guys, I think we can wind down our episode. What I can say is that, uh, Mikael is definitely right. If you are a small company or you are not very technical, Dropbox is very, very good. But once you start accumulating employees, just keep your mind open, see other solutions that are available. And I think we are now entering era where, you know, the honeymoon phase of cloud services is kind of like over and people are starting to really see the cost of cloud services in terms of security, privacy, and of course their financial cost. So I think we will be going back at least some companies will be looking at getting those servers back at the office for the sake of privacy, performance and obviously cost. So, yeah, and definitely check out Sinology if you're interesting. If you go down that rabbit hole, I can guarantee you're gonna have a lot of time, a lot of fun time. I spent two weeks basically doing nothing else but just reading what amazing things I can do with Sinology. So I'm pretty impressed, pretty happy after using it for over a year.

So that's it guys. And remember, if you think Mikael wins, let us know by the thumbs up. If you think I won don't do the thumbs down. Just writing comments. So, yeah, and if you have other suggestions, please let us know. Uh, but I think the next episode will maybe focus on Slack. Cause I think we already started talking about it, so we might as well consider, uh, talking about.

Mikael Hugg:
For sure, Slack anyway.

Artem Daniliants:
Yeah, guys, absolutely. Thank you so much Mikael. Thank you a lot for your company for joining, for helping me and uh, creating something really, really, really cool that I'm looking forward to every second week.

Mikael Hugg:
Awesome.

Artem Daniliants:
Thank you guys on the next one. Have a wonderful day.