I’m an enthusiastic user and advocate of Dropbox. Of course, it’s not the only cloud-based storage solution, and the benefits described in this article apply to solutions from other providers too (“Google Drive”, Microsoft’s “One Drive” etc) but I’m going to refer to Dropbox throughout, because that’s the solution I chose, primarily based on price and ease of use. If this article causes you to spring into action, just remember that you don’t have to go with Dropbox: do your own due diligence before signing up with any provider.
So, what’s the problem?
Here’s a couple of problem scenarios to illustrate why we all need a solution:
- You’re working on an important document (essay, musical masterpiece etc) on your laptop. You’re actually organised enough to keep a manual, weekly, back-up on an external drive of your laptop’s hard drive; every Saturday. But, one day… your laptop crashes with an irrecoverable hard drive (this has happened to me!). If this happens on a Friday, you’ve lost 6 days of work since your previous backup (from the preceding weekend). Let’s make the scenario worse: you discover that your external drive is also corrupted (this has also happened to me, at exactly the same time as the laptop hard drive crashed… yes, seriously!).
- You’re careful enough to keep receipts in a box file for the significant (let’s say $250+) items you’ve bought over the years, and have appropriate household insurance to cover the value of these items. But, one day… your apartment is flooded and/or catches fire (or both, thanks to the fire brigade’s use of water to put out fires), resulting in a burnt mulch of paper in your carefully-maintained box file for you to somehow present to the insurance company as evidence for your claim. This hasn’t quite happened to me, but a flooded apartment a few years ago was halfway there.
- You lose your passport on holiday, and need (ideally) a photographic image of it to prove your identity. Or, more commonly, someone requests that you email them a copy of your birth certificate, passport, driving licence, degree certificate etc, for whatever reason, when you’re in a location with no access to the original documents.
- You have an enormous file to share with a friend; a file that’s clearly too big to send by email.
Ah. Right. So, how does Dropbox solve the problem?
- Back-ups are automatic (so you can “set and forget”): Dropbox provides cloud-based (i.e. on their servers, via the internet) backups of any directories on your laptop that you nominate, automatically, and the backups happen in real time as you save the latest versions of the files on your laptop (of course, depending on your upload speed, and the size of the items you’re backing up, this may take a few seconds/minutes to complete).
- Your important data becomes available anywhere you have internet access: once backed up, you can use the Dropbox smartphone application to access your data, from anywhere.
- It’s cheap: I used to pay around $100 for 100 GB storage. A few years ago, Dropbox emailed me to say that my $100 subscription now meant that I could backup 10x that amount: 1 TB!
- It works across all devices: Mac, Android, iPhone, iPAD, Windows Phone.
- You can share files you’ve backed up on Dropbox with other people by sending them a link (rather than trying to email them the file itself).
Okay, I get it. Next steps?
Signing up for Dropbox gives you a free 2GB of storage (writing as at Jan 2017). This free storage allocation is quickly used up as you make use of the service to backup your important files, but is a great starting point to try Dropbox out before you consider paying money for additional storage.
This is how I make use of around 20% (200GB) of my 1TB maximum:
Under the “Dropbox” folder on my MACbook Pro laptop, I have folders for:
- Music: containing subfolders “iTunes” (all of my iTunes music, unsurprisingly), and “Logic” (for the music I compose using Logic Pro on my laptop).
- Pictures: containing subfolders for “Lightroom” (photo editing software image catalogue files) and the Apple “Photos Library”.
- Important Documents: containing subfolders: “Personal” and “Insurance”. Under “Personal” I have two documents: “Important Documents” (a PDF file containing images of my birth certificate, degree certificates, driving licences, and Singapore Identity Card) and “Course Certificates” (a PDF file containing a variety of other minor qualification certificates that I would generally file in a drawer rather than bothering to frame). Under “Insurance” I have a “Receipts” PDF file of scanned receipts for items over a certain $ value and a “Significant Insurance Items” spreadsheet containing details for those items: purchase date, vendor, currency/cost, description, serial number. The values in the spreadsheet are totalled at the bottom so that I can ensure that I continue to have adequate household insurance cover as I accumulate more stuff (generally, guitars!).
Any gotchas?
There is some reasonable concern around the confidentiality of data stored in the cloud. I therefore make a point of not backing up any data to Dropbox that could be easily exploited (i.e. passwords, credit card details etc… I have another, better, solution for these!), in case someone manages to get access to the files I have on Dropbox. Other than that, I can’t think of any tangible downsides to this fantastic service: it provides real peace of mind to know that the important documents on your laptop are being backed up automatically (and as soon as you save them), and that whatever you deem important enough to be backed up in this way is available to you anywhere and anytime via an app on your phone, tablet, or via the Dropbox website on a borrowed PC.
And finally…
If you have a lot of data that you think is appropriate for backup then there is, admittedly, a bit of effort to get started in terms of backing up that initial mass of data for the first time. In my case, the uploading process took many days to complete (which simply meant that I had to leave the laptop on for that time, to allow it to continue uploading). But, once that first mass-upload is done, subsequent backups should take a matter of seconds (or minutes, at worst) as you create new files (e.g. by saving new photos on your laptop, or creating a new document under a backed-up folder). Personally, I feel that it’s particularly reassuring to be armed with a securely offline copy of all necessary insurance details in case of theft, fire, flood etc. Setting up this facility is therefore something I would highly recommend to anyone with important data which they 1) don’t want to lose, and 2) want to have easy access to, when away from home. Actually… isn’t that everyone?!
