I’ve been disappointed in my 3 year old laptop’s battery life. It should be getting roughly 8 hours of battery life, but I was getting only about 3 hours of battery. A friend asked me about Dropbox, so I turned it off. Sure enough, the battery life went back up to 7 hours.
Dropbox is basically a second operating system. You can share any file on your computer with other people through Dropbox – it’s not just limited to files in the Dropbox folder. This is really powerful and convenient, but it also means it has to scan your whole system constantly. OneDrive and iCloud don’t work this way; you can only share things from those actual folders. They don’t have to monitor the whole file system for changes and shared status.
At this point, given the power of iCloud, I could almost abandon Dropbox. I still use Dropbox for syncing Scrivener, and sharing files with certain people. So I’m left launching and quitting the Dropbox app to sync things up and then stop the process.