Dropbox vs Google Drive vs OneDrive vs Proton Drive: Why We Ended Up Owning the Disks (2026)
Twenty years of cloud storage in one story: Dropbox, then Google, then OneDrive installed itself. Where our files actually live now, who can read them, and when you should just stay put.
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The short version
We have used all three of the big cloud drives over about two decades, and we have left two of them. Not because the sync broke or the price was outrageous, but because the companies behind them kept changing the deal. Services closed. Free tiers turned into invoices. One of them installed itself on a new machine and quietly moved our working folders without asking.
Where we ended up is a server in the house with the disks in it, which is not the answer most people want to hear and is not the answer for everyone. So this is the honest version: what each of the three did to lose us, what Proton Drive is for if you would rather pay someone else, what we actually run now, and the case for staying exactly where you are.
If you want one sentence: the storage itself was never the problem. The terms were, and the terms change.
Dropbox, then Google, for the reasons everyone had
Dropbox first, because for a while it was the only thing that worked. A folder that was the same on every machine was genuinely new, and the free tier was enough for documents. Nothing went wrong with it. We left because we had a Gmail account and Google Drive came with it, and everything linked up with almost no effort. That is not a criticism of Dropbox. It is just what convenience does.
Google Drive then became the default for years, and for a long time it earned that. Docs and Sheets are still, in our view, the best collaborative office tools available, and Drive is the storage layer under them. If all you ever did was open a document from an email and edit it with a client, you would never have a reason to look elsewhere.
The problem with Google was never Drive. It was everything around it.
The Google problem: services that stop existing
We had a personal domain on the free tier of Google Workspace, back when that existed. Over a few years Google restricted it to a single address, then withdrew the free tier altogether and told everyone to start paying. We are on a legacy arrangement now that we fully expect to be closed at some point, and we plan around that.
Before that, there was Google Play Music, which let you upload your entire music collection to their cloud. We did. Then they closed it. The migration path was to a different product with different rules, and the lesson landed: a service you depend on is only as durable as the company's interest in running it. It is not only consumer products, either. Keyword Planner was a free, open tool for years; then it started showing only vague ranges unless you were spending money on ads. The free thing became the door to the paid thing, which is a pattern once you have seen it three times.
And yet we are still semi-tied to Google, and it is worth saying that plainly because it is true for most people reading this. Two decades of Google sign-ins, shared documents, calendar invites and old email do not move in an afternoon. This is what lock-in actually feels like from the inside. It is not a wall. It is a thousand small threads, and every one of them is individually reasonable.
The practical consequence is that we no longer put anything in Google that we would be upset to lose access to on ninety days' notice. Working files, no. Documents we are actively co-editing with someone, yes, because that is the one thing Google still does better than anyone.
The OneDrive problem: storage you did not choose
OneDrive is different. We never signed up for it. It arrived with Windows.
On a new Windows 11 machine, the setup flow routes your Desktop, Documents and Pictures folders through OneDrive unless you notice the option and decline it, and the option is not prominent. The result is that files you save "to Documents" are actually saving to a cloud folder that syncs to Microsoft, and the local copy can be reclaimed to free up space when the machine decides to. We noticed when a project folder was slow to open because half of it was not on the disk any more.
So we uninstalled it. It came back. We stopped it launching at startup. It started at startup. We moved the folders back to local paths, and on the next feature update some of them had quietly moved again. This went on for the better part of a year on one machine. None of it is malicious in the sense of losing data; it is just software that will not take no for an answer, and that is its own kind of problem when the thing it is doing is deciding where your files live.
If you are on Windows and you did not choose OneDrive, check where your Documents folder actually points. Right-click it, Properties, Location. If the path has OneDrive in it, that is where your work has been going.
Who can read your files, and the AI question
The question people ask about cloud storage in 2026 is not "is it backed up" but "is it being used to train something." It is the right question and it has an unsatisfying answer: it depends on the terms, and the terms change.
In late 2023 Dropbox shipped a setting that allowed third-party AI features to access file content, and it was switched on by default. Dropbox said the data was only sent when you actively used those features. That was probably true. It was also a default that most users never saw, on a product whose entire value is that you do not think about it. The specifics of any one provider's policy today matter less than the shape of that event: the setting was added, it defaulted on, and you found out from the news.
Every provider that can read your files has a policy about what it does with them. Every policy has been revised at least once. If you are the kind of person who moved a personal domain off Google because the deal kept changing, you already know how much weight to put on a policy page.
There are exactly two arrangements where the question is moot. End-to-end encryption, where the provider holds ciphertext and cannot read the content regardless of what its terms say. And your own disks, where there is no provider. Everything else is a promise, and the value of a promise is the track record of the person making it.
Proton Drive: if you want to pay someone, pay someone who cannot read it
We have not run Proton Drive ourselves, so treat this as researched rather than lived. It is the obvious candidate if you want hosted cloud storage and you want the encryption question settled by design rather than by policy. Files are end-to-end encrypted on your device before upload, which means Proton cannot read them, cannot scan them, and cannot hand them to anything that trains on them, whatever their terms say this year or next.
The free tier is small, at 5GB. A standalone Drive Plus plan (200GB) is $3.99 a month billed yearly, and the bigger plans bundle Drive with Mail, Pass and the rest of the Proton suite, which is either good value or paying for things you do not need depending on where you already are. If you are already on Proton Mail, Drive is close to free. If you are not, you are buying into an ecosystem, and this whole article is partly about being careful with ecosystems.
The honest trade-off is the one every end-to-end product has: because the provider cannot read the files, the provider also cannot do clever things with them. No full-text search across documents from the web interface, no collaborative editing that rivals Docs, fewer integrations. You are trading convenience for the certainty that nobody else is looking.
If we decided tomorrow to stop running our own storage and pay a company instead, this is where we would go, for the reason above. It is the one hosted option where the answer to "who can read my files" does not depend on trusting anyone.
What we actually run: the disks are in the house
Our working files live on an Unraid server at home. Unraid is a home-server operating system built around pooling ordinary hard drives with parity protection, and it runs the same Docker containers we use everywhere else. The drives are mapped as network shares on the desktop, so saving a file feels exactly like saving to a local folder. Tailscale gives us a secure route in from outside the house, though in practice we rarely need it.
It is not just a file share. Two applications running on the same box have replaced two Google services outright. Immich handles photos and is a genuinely good alternative to Google Photos: automatic upload from the phone, face and object recognition done locally, a timeline that works. Paperless-ngx is where scanned documents and PDFs go; it OCRs them and makes them searchable. We have not finished setting Paperless up, and we say so because "we run it" and "it is fully configured" are different claims.
The honest gap: some files are still in Google Drive, because we have not yet found a replacement for Docs and Sheets that we would actually use. Collaborative editing of a .docx or a spreadsheet, with someone outside the house, is the one job the home server does not do. That is a future article, and until we have written it, Google keeps that one job and nothing else.
The cost is the hardware, which we already had for other reasons, and the electricity, which is small. The cost that matters is attention. A home server is a thing you own, and things you own occasionally need you. If that sentence makes you tired, read the last section.
Nextcloud: the one we did not finish
Nextcloud is the self-hosted answer to this whole article, in theory. Files, sync clients, share links, calendar, contacts, and an office suite, all on your own server. If it worked the way its feature list reads, this article would be shorter.
We tried it, and it went badly in a way that is worth being specific about. Nextcloud is more involved to set up than most of what we run, and partway through, while sorting out how it should access the existing media on the server, we changed file permissions in a way that locked us out of our own media library. Not Nextcloud's access to it. Ours. Unpicking that took months, in the sense that it kept resurfacing: a folder that would not open here, a share that had silently lost write access there, each one traced back to that afternoon.
That one is on us, and a more patient setup would have avoided it. But it is also what Nextcloud asks of you: it wants to own the files it serves, and if you point it at a library that other things also use, you are managing Linux permissions across two systems that have different opinions about who should own what. That is a real skill, it is learnable, and it is not what most people signed up for when they wanted "Dropbox, but mine".
So we did not finish, and it is still on the list, because the sync client and the share links are genuinely the missing pieces in our setup. If those matter to you, Nextcloud is the tool. Budget a weekend, not an evening, keep it away from any files you cannot afford to lose access to until you understand the permissions model, and take a snapshot of the server before you start.
When to stay exactly where you are
If you already pay for Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, you already pay for a terabyte of storage. A second storage bill on top of that is money for a problem you do not have. Use what you are paying for, know what the terms say, and keep a local copy of anything you would be upset to lose. That is a perfectly sensible position and most businesses are in it.
If the share link is the feature, stay hosted. Sending a client a link that just works, on any device, with no account, is something the big three do effortlessly and a home server does not do at all without Nextcloud or similar. We still use hosted storage for exactly this.
If the idea of a server that occasionally needs attention makes you tired, that is real information about what you should run. Owning the disks is the right answer for us because we already had the box and we care about the encryption question more than most. It is the wrong answer for someone who wants storage to be invisible, and there is no shame in that.
The only advice that applies to everyone: find out where your Documents folder actually points, and do not keep the only copy of anything important inside a service whose terms you have not read since you signed up.
Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive all store files perfectly well. We left two of them because the deal kept changing, and one of them installed itself. If you want hosted storage without the question of who can read it, Proton Drive settles that by design. If you already own a server, put the disks in it. If you already pay for Microsoft or Google, use what you pay for and keep a local copy. Whatever you choose, know where your files actually are.
Frequently Asked Questions
Google's published position is that consumer and Workspace content is not used to train its foundation models without permission, and Workspace has contractual commitments on this. The practical point is that this is a policy, policies get revised, and you find out afterwards. If the question matters to you, the only arrangements that settle it are end-to-end encryption, where the provider cannot read the content, or storage you own.
Check where the folder points first: right-click Documents, Properties, Location. If the path includes OneDrive, use the Location tab to move it back to a local path under your user folder, then in OneDrive settings turn off folder backup for Desktop, Documents and Pictures, and unlink the account. Expect to check again after major Windows updates; in our experience it does not always stay put.
For privacy, yes, structurally: Proton Drive is end-to-end encrypted, so Proton cannot read your files, and that does not depend on their terms. For collaboration, no: Google Docs and Sheets remain the best real-time editing tools available, and end-to-end encryption prevents that kind of feature. Which is better depends on whether you are storing files or co-editing them.
Nextcloud is the direct equivalent: files, sync clients, share links and an office suite on your own server. It is capable but the setup is involved; we tried it, locked ourselves out of our own media library with a permissions change, and did not finish. A simpler route is a home server such as Unraid with network shares for files, plus purpose-built apps for specific jobs: Immich for photos, Paperless-ngx for documents. You lose share links and sync clients, and gain simplicity and control.
Only if you already want to run a server for other reasons and the privacy question matters to you more than convenience. If you are paying for Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, the storage is already included. If sending clients share links is a daily task, hosted storage does that far better. Self-hosting is the right answer for a specific kind of person, and it is fine not to be that person.