> 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.
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.