Premium Dropbox
I finally bit the bullet and upgraded my 6GB or so Dropbox free account to a 100GB, first level premium account. Having my own home office, I wanted to make sure that all my essential files, while still being backed up, were available from all my other machines and sufficiently recoverable in case of hardware failures. Being a push-the-envelope overclocker, I try to reduce my hardware exposure as much as possible.
It was $9.99/month plus $3.99 a month for unlimited undo history, which is pretty dang cheap. If you pay for the year upfront they give you a 17% discount.
It seems like a really reasonable cost to me.
It's amazing to me that Dropbox is dominating here.
Google should be able to undercut them on price, but won't.
Apple should be able to undercut them on ease of use, but can't.
Amazon should be able to easily do what they do. But doesn't.
Dropbox is a company that shouldn't exist. But does.
icloud is 2.4 times as expensive and 1/5th as useful. I pay for the imatch thingy, but my icloud account is pretty useless (for reasons discussed previously). imatch is $25/year and well worth it, though technically it's not really storage, more of just a download and song escrow service.
My Google Apps portal is $50/year and includes all the online services I need--mostly 25GB email storage and a few other things.
icloud costs are this:
10GB
$20/year
15GB total iCloud storage
20GB
$40/year
25GB total iCloud storage
50GB
$100/year
55GB total iCloud storage
Apple doesn't want to help you sync your files across every device, just Apple devides.
I do. 10 years of R&D, 20 years of my own personal Internet news media research archive, 4 startups, job searches and resumes, 3 company folders as employees, 16 folders for startups that I am or have advised, (one lawsuit), all the material for two dozen patents and even more provisionals, all signed contracts, employee agreements, complete source code for all projects I've worked on, a few drivers for recovery, some family documents, etc.
All in all it's about 30G so far.
Wow, that's in addition to all the information you have stored in your brain!
That's one of my favorite quotes:
After stepping into Einstein's office, he asked me to sit down. He saw my befuddlement as I looked around for a vacant surface that wasn't filled up with notebooks, binders, dis-arrayed papers. He said, "If you think it's cluttered in here, you should see what it looks like up here" (pointing to his head).
Once you're on Dropbox Pro, how hard would it be to migrate to another solution?
Easy, other than copying 30G and re-uploading it someplace else, though you could probably copy it remote-server to remote-server, not that hard. You have a complete copy on your own local disk and complete Web access and remote controls.
Well you've convinced me. I RAID backup my files but Dropbox seems like a good backup to the backups.
I've been really happy with Dropbox. I have the 100GB plan (used to be 50GB). I only use about 25GB of that right now, and some of it I could definitely clean out, so realistically I probably have about 17GB of actually used data in there. Much of that is shared folders for work.
I symlinked my ~/Sites directory there, so all the work I do in there is automatically backed up *and versioned*. The versioning isn't often mentioned with Dropbox, but it's a really killer feature for stuff you're editing a lot, especially stuff you're sharing with other people. Versioning has saved my ass more than once.
I don't consider it a replacement for Backups, but it's a good first line of defense.
Brilliant! I agree wrt backups. I have a backup strategy (which didn't really include offsite other than my core google apps account info). The unlimited "pack rat" option, which is versioning, is probably their most valuable feature.
Ed and Greg, thanks. I'll think of it as something in addition to backups, not instead of backups.
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