Cloud Storages Compared - Part 2

  In Part 1, I go through the various pros and cons of a select few cloud providers, and what I discover as I'm test using the services. Read Part 1 first and then let's continue our discovery here.

STATUS ICONS macOS DESKTOP APP

 I have to correct myself about kDrive not visually signaling the difference between offline and online files with status icons, it actually works. I noticed he same phenomena happening with DropBox status icons which are similar looking. Grey cloud icon, file in the cloud only, free checkmark, file on local drive and in the cloud.

 The problem according to Infomaniak (makers of kDrive), is that too many File Providers create confusion on the whole system, and status icons tend to disappear. If you turn other apps File Providers off and on again, the kDrive/DropBox status icons appears. It's kind of random.

 It is weird that this affects every file and folder on the Mac considering each provider should only be concerned by their dedicated sync folder, not the folders of their peers. I suppose Apple has only implemented an all or nothing function at this point. This needs improvements.

 (*) Note that Mega nor Jotta have a cloud only option, so the status icons are only there to indicate upload in progress (red), or file fully uploaded to the cloud (green.)

 (**) pCloud always mounts the whole cloud drive as a virtual drive, with all of its content offline. The status icons serve the same purpose of indicating upload in progress, or file fully uploaded to the cloud.

USER SPECIFIED FOLDER macOS

 iCloud, OneDrive, GoogleDrive, and Internxt do not let user specify a local folder. Instead the sync folder goes to: User/youruser/Library/CloudStorage. You cannot change the location. I don't fully understand this behavior, but it sounds like Apple is imposing this new way of syncing cloud drives to the Mac. Google explanation as to how this is supposed to work makes it even more confusing. DropBox too is migrating to the File Provider way, but for now at least you can still use it the old way, and specify which folder gets synced. Depending on your needs, having or not having a user specified folder might work or not work for you. DropBox decided to update on my machine, so now it's managed by File Provider.

OK, I guess.

Cloud Provider	Status Icons	User Specified Folder	Movies Preview	Rename Extension	Detailed Info
iCloud	Yes	No	Yes	No	Basic
OneDrive	Yes	No	Bad	No	Basic+
Mega	Yes*	Yes	Yes	Yes	Basic
GoogleDrive	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Basic
Internxt	Yes	No	Limited (***)	No	Basic
kDrive	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Basic
DropBox	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Best
Drime	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Basic
JottaCloud	Yes (*)	Yes	Yes	Yes	Basic
pCloud	Yes (**)	No	Yes	Yes	Basic

MOVIES PREVIEWS

 Common encoding schemes like h264 are recognized, but others (like ProRes) are not, and so there is no preview for these less common codecs across the board.

 OneDrive previews are an abomination, they look awful like they are over compressed (for the sake of quick access I suppose), which makes the experience borderline useless.

(***)  Internxt systematically fails at previewing most movie files, including ".mov" and common codecs. Only previews that work seem to be h264 ".mp4".

Same thing happens with IceDrive and iDrive by the way. A h264 ".mov" file will not preview, but renaming the file ".mp4" will preview fine.

The worse is Sync.com, it has no preview for any kind of movie

RENAME EXTENSION (Web App behavior)

 iCloud, OneDrive, Internxt do not allow you to change the extension of a file in the web app. You cannot rename a ".mov" file as ".mp4" for example. I do not like that limitation.

DETAILED INFO

 Most providers only provide basic information, type of file, size, location. OneDrive gives you some useful info like frame size. DropBox is by far the best with info about capturing device, resolution, frame rate, color space, and even codec. All the others are pale in comparison.