Migrating from Dropbox to iCloud Drive

[Jashue]

Since Dropbox has decided to limit the service to three devices without paying ($11.99 for what for me is the all-important fourth), I have decided to make use of iCloud Drive for all the things that I loved Dropbox for.

A few hours in, and I find it to be a confusing mess. The ONLY thing I want on iDrive is ONE DESIGNATED FOLDER folder which contains stuff relevant to my job. I want access to that on my iMac, MBP, iPhone and iPad. What I have is a slew of documents and folders from God only knows where (some from one machine-- some from another-- many of which could and probably should be deleted-- but I have neither the time nor the inclination to do that now. It seems that there is no way to designate what one wants there. In preferences there is an option for Desktop & Documents, but that's it. I don't want to sift through a desktop folder and the myriad of screenshots and other junk contained therein.

I don't need iCloud Drive as a means of backup. I utilize Time Machine as well as redundant backups.

Am I missing something? Can this service really be that limited?

 

[Rigby]

What you see are probably directories created by apps that have iCloud enabled. You can clean that up a bit by disabling iCloud for apps that don't really need it and then deleting the folders.

But personally I don't see the big issue unless the number of folders becomes overwhelming. Nothing prevents you from creating your own files and folders in the top-level iCloud Drive directory. Personally I use a couple of directories that start with an underscore (which causes them to be at the top in the Files app and in Finder when sorting by name) to store files manually.

 

[riverfreak]

As a dropbox user, you may also be annoyed by iClouds rather infuriating behavior of deciding what is most important to you. In my experience, iCloud does a great job of offloading the files you need the most.

The lack of manual selective sync, the rather opaque indicators of status in Finder (as opposed to the super clear check marks in Dropbox), and a number of other things make iCloud Drive a rather poor substitute for Dropbox.