Our editorial staff evaluates products and services independently, but Best Review Guide may earn money when you click on links. Read our advertising disclosure.
PROS:
CONS:
Dropbox Pro is a reliable online backup and storage service with an affordable price range for an individual, or households with up to five PCs. It was incredibly fast while backing up data to its servers, but significantly slower when it was restoring the same files. The desktop app you use to operate Dropbox is well designed but it lacks some essential features for a better ease-of-use. Dropbox is among the few in our review to exclude the option of creating a unique encryption key.
Dropbox is one of the most recognizable names when it comes to file sharing and online data backup services. With Dropbox you can share your files, sync across all your devices with ease and upload your files to an online cloud. The Dropbox Pro plan allows for 1TB of storage for an unlimited number of devices. The service got its place among our best online backup services ranking by satisfying the industry standard when it came to value for money evaluation for the storage of 1TB of data. We made sure that each service in our review has a good overall value for families with three to five PCs as well as single users.
Value for money
Dropbox Pro falls in the online data backup service with a medium price range. For 1TB of storage, you will have to set aside $99 per year or if you prefer paying in monthly installments, $9.99 per month. The month-to-month option comes out a bit more expensive with an annual cost of about $120. If you have a large family with up to five computers that would use Dropbox Pro, the service would cost around $20 per computer annually which isn’t the best result in our review but it’s still cheaper than the industry average. For a smaller household of no more than three PCs, Dropbox Pro would go for about $35 per year. A single user would pay $99 yearly for 1TB of storage data. For its overall value, the service received a solid B for being affordable for all groups.
Price: $99.99
Backup
One of the most important aspects of any online backup service is its backup speed. Dropbox left us in awe after we conducted our tests. To make sure we got the most optimal results, we ran multiple backup sets at various hours and days in order to measure the average MB/min speed at which 1TB of data transferred to Dropbox’s servers. It took a little more than 4.5 days for the complete transfer to finish and this result put Dropbox and its online backup service at the very top of our review. Comparably, the industry average for backing up this much data is around 21 days. Running the backup process in the desktop app is relatively simple as the main sync folder is clean and uncluttered with unnecessary, confusing options.
Restoration
Despite the incredible backup speed results, Dropbox fell a bit short when it came to speedy file-restoration. It barely reached the industry average score, so it received a B- in this area. Unfortunately, running a restoration process isn’t as easy as it was with the backup. To initiate file restoration you have to manually log into the Dropbox website, select the files you wish to download and then transfer them to your PC compressed in a ZIP file. There is really no actual reason why the file restoration option wouldn’t be integrated in the main desktop app like the backup option so easily was. With 11 steps needed to perform the restoration process from the website, restoring files from Dropbox can be very challenging for novice users.
Protection
Dropbox has come under a lot of scrutiny about its privacy level since Edward Snowden called the company out on not securing the data you store with them adequately. Unfortunately, this was also our conclusion. Even though Dropbox secures your files with 256-bit encryption during any transfers as well as while they’re stored on its servers, the service doesn’t allow for the creation of a unique, personal encryption key. Without this feature, even though your data is encrypted while stored on the servers, it can still be accessed without your knowledge. One of the reasons for excluding this option might be that this kind of file encryption slows down the backup and syncing of the files.
Dropbox was the fastest online backup service we reviewed. Restoring data is a little slower but it’s still above the industry average. The desktop app doesn’t allow you to start the file-restoration process so this seriously impairs the overall evaluation of it. Dropbox Pro has an average price and it’s affordable for all groups we looked at.
Email: In order to contact Dropbox support via email you need to fill out a request form through this link: www.dropbox.com/contact
Phone number: Phone support is available for Business users only.
Support page: www.dropbox.com/help
Forum: www.dropboxforum.com
Website: www.dropbox.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/Dropbox
Dropbox’s website is one of the most helpful ones we’ve come across. When you go the support page you will see a clear overview of the most common issues customers have with clickable symbolic icons that will take you to the area of the site with information about it. There is also a FAQ section with information about the questions most commonly asked. Contacting tech support requires a bit more effort since you need to log in online, go to the support page and follow several steps before you are welcomed by a representative. If you want to exchange opinions with other Dropbox users, there is a great community forum with many tech representatives active daily ready to answer any problems you might encounter.
Our editorial staff evaluates products and services independently, but Best Review Guide may earn money when you click on links. Read our advertising disclosure.
By: Kurtis | Last updated June 5, 2017 
