At least for now, Dropbox wins with better software and features. Google drive has crapped out on me several times in the last years, forcing me to re-download everything from the server to my local box. I've also had cases where it couldn't resolve a sync issue and split a file into two versions. Neither of these has happened with dropbox.
Given Google's obvious prowess with servers, I'm actually amazed Google drive isn't better than it is.
Google is great with server stuff, but they've never been as good at end user software. (And they're awful at support across the board.) Witness all the folks that now regularly lose their Chrome extensions and data if they don't login to Google due to a new security feature.
I agree with you that DropBox is the gold standard in "it just works" but I have been using Google Drive for about a year now on a 1 TB plan consuming 850 GB of space without a single issue.
I store everything on there including JPGs, AVCHD videos, TrueCrypt volumes and every other kind of file type. Never had a single sync issue or slow sync speed.
OneDrive (formerly SkyDrive) on the other hand... That constantly left filename.machinename split versions and the sync speed was uselessly slow.
I tried Google Drive about a year ago, and it appeared to choke on large files (I had a couple of 4Gb VMs), and pausing during attempted uploads always resulted in having to start over the upload from scratch. Still sticking with CrashPlan for now.
Try https://www.insynchq.com/ . I am not affiliated with them whatsoever, but for work I am sorta forced to use Google Drive. And to my surprise I have found insync client to be far superior than google's own. Among many things, insync works beautifully on Linux.
One can easily argue though that, Google Drive may make a change which breaks insync - but for past year and half, I have had zero problems.
Insync seems nice, but I personally never did manage to get it to work. It just spent over a week "synchronizing" and not a single file appeared on my PC.
Indeed. I wanted to switch to Google Drive a couple of times because cheaper storage. But the client is always slow and crashes regularly for me (without any notice).
Also, Google Drive misses some basic functionality, like getting an actual list of of shared folders and with whom they were shared [1]. Instead you have to check every folder manually.
I pay for extra Google Drive storage, but I do NOT use their client. I use their web interface to basically use GD as a date stamped deep backup for my stuff.
And all things being equal, for some reason, Dropbox syncing is much faster than Google Drive.
If I empty out both drives and start from scratch, then put the same files in both, it seems to take Google Drive around 350% time to sync the same files.
Dropbox is a resource hog. Unless i want my windows machine to fireup on RAM, fan speed, hard disk usage and stall, I avoid running Dropbox in background. Onedrive works better for me!
I've always viewed Google drive as a checklist item to compete with others. Cloud storage? Check!
Gets the job done but not a main focus.
The OS X client is passable, and the fact that you can't do things like LAN sync or rate limit the upload speed make it no good for many clients of mine.
Given Google's obvious prowess with servers, I'm actually amazed Google drive isn't better than it is.