Dropbox has a fixed set of features, most people care about some other set, and there will be some intersection and some things that are needed that are outside of Dropbox feature set, that will need to be implemented by the user anyway (like encryption, automation, etc.). There will also be some things that will go against the user's use case, and compromise it.
So compared to Dropbox, having two external hard drives and using rsync regularly will get you way faster point in time backups, faster access in case of recovery, privacy, transparent encryption (that you'll not have to care about during access to files), no worries about losing access/account takeover, one-time fixed payment for the drive that will last you probably more than 5 years, instead of subscription (where you'll pay after 1 year more than you'd pay for the drive alone), etc.
Having always connected extra internal backup drives will also give you some other options. Like if you're a heavy user of PostgreSQL, you can setup cluster replication locally with synchronous replicas on different drives, and you'll have your databases backed up. Better than dropbox in this use case, too.
OTOH, if your use case is collaboration, Dropbox may be better. But if you include encrpytion of individual files you want to collaborate on, it may be again more cumbersome. I don't know.
> So compared to Dropbox, having two external hard drives and using rsync regularly will get you way faster point in time backups, faster access in case of recovery, privacy, transparent encryption (that you'll not have to care about during access to files), no worries about losing access/account takeover, one-time fixed payment for the drive that will last you probably more than 5 years, instead of subscription (where you'll pay after 1 year more than you'd pay for the drive alone), etc.
The fact that you think this list of inaccurate claims supports rather than refutes your original post suggests you should spend more time learning about what Dropbox does and calculating the operational overhead of supporting a homegrown solution. In particular, thinking about what ease of access means with an external drive could lead you to insights about correlated failure modes such as what happens when the same thief/power surge/accident takes your laptop and the drive sitting next to it, and you realize that if you’d used Dropbox you wouldn’t have lost more than a few seconds of work. Similarly, your scheme has no versioning, bitrot protection, etc. which people always discount until the first time they lose data.
