Why I use Dropbox, and why you should too: a (free) cloud-computing backup service
About once every 12 months I get genuinely excited about some technology or piece of software, and I hit the apex of that cycle yesterday. If you have a self-structured working schedule,tend to write for our businesses/sites/studies/etc. from a variety of locations or you just love techie things; you should be getting excited too.
My biggest challenge (or at least a major one) over the last two and a half years of my PhD and online projects has been keeping my files in sync across my work computer, home computer and my travel laptop. I’ve tried a number of things such as working from a USB stick and using a software-style versioning control (ala CVS or Subversion). All methods I’ve tried have sucked.
USB sucks, because the idea of having all of your critical files on something that is inherently lose-able (esp. if you are me) is a bad idea. The stop-gap solution is to copy files from USB to HDD and back: Good luck keeping that all in sync.
CVS/Subversion suck because I am trying to clumsily use a software versioning system for a task that it is not optimised for. These technologies don’t handle file system structural changes too well, and forgetting to commit a change can screw things up royally.
I figured that I would look in to the cloud computing side of things, as the idea of having a centralised ‘cloud’ of files that my various computers (satellite cloudettes) had a synchronised copy of seemed ideal.
I tried a few different services, including Ubuntu One, and settled with Dropbox. It offers the same usage allowance as Ubuntu One, but has clients for Mac (incl. iPhone app), Windows and various Linux distros, whereas Ubuntu One is only for Ubuntu installations.
I also have an Android-based phone (HTC Magic) and an Android app for Dropbox is coming out in the next couple of months.
Anyway, the deal is that there is a free account that will allow you to sync 2Gb of files, $10/month for 50Gb and $20/month for 100Gb. Needless to say, for most peoples (e.g. me) needs 2Gb is more than adequate. You choose which folders on your computer(s) are on the cloud.
Obviously all files are also stored offline allowing you to access them, which also keeps your data pretty safe. You can even store files in a special ‘public’ folder, allowing you to give people a http URL to download the file from. Pretty stylin’.
Anyway, here is an invite link to try it out. This link will give both you and me an extra 250Mb allowance, which is a nice little bonus to get started with!
Chris is a shining example of how, in a world where abortion is not as easily obtained as a leg of fried chicken, an ounce of prevention can be worth more than its weight in gold. He is currently completing a PhD in Bioinformatics which he hopes may one day help him get out of a speeding ticket.