Hey all. Does anyone else do their actual writing right in a dropbox folder? Maybe I'm a bit paranoid of losing work, but I always have a folder on the desktop on each computer I work on that I work in and then when I'm done working, I compare differences to what I have in dropbox using a compare tool and copy my new work into Dropbox. Do you think this is even necessary? Should I just do all my work in Dropbox or do you think there are a lot of risks there? What is your take on Dropbox? Thanks!
Anything in your Dropbox folder is in the cloud AND on the hard drive of each computer you have connected to Dropbox. So I save directly into my Dropbox folder, which automatically gives me four copies of everything - three on my own computers and one on the Dropbox server.
So I was making it harder on myself! Thanks! I'll just start working in the Dropbox folder and save myself all the extra work.
The other thing I do, which is probably overkill, is that I backup my Documents folder (which is also where my Dropbox folder is) to an external hard drive about once a week
I have Mac's Time Machine that backs up my computer every hour and saves multiple copies going back months. And I have a copy saved on 3 separate flash drives that I update whenever I hear thunder, and more often when I get paranoid about my computer crashing. I really should look into cloud storage.
I backup by copying my files to Dropbox every day, but hadn't thought about working with the actual files in the Dropbox. It occurs to me that if you were to accidentally delete the file from the Dropbox, would it not then be deleted from all your computers?
These all sound wonderful, but I'd beware of putting all my eggs into one basket, whatever that basket might be. The problem with Cloud storage is twofold. A) It's quite new, and has not stood the test of time, and B) You don't control it. If they pull it, or start charging you an arm and a leg to use it, you're screwed. By all means use it if you want, but don't make it your ONLY storage method. Save in a variety of formats, and back up frequently. And make a hard copy too! I've had to rely on a hard copy at least twice, when my document itself got corrupted (and consequently so did the latest backup.) Another way to save - works best for finished pieces - is to email them to somebody. If you've got web based email (which most people do these days, I reckon) like Yahoo, then you can access these anywhere. You'll have a copy in your 'sent' folder, which you can access from anywhere. This may all sound quite paranoid, but anybody who has lost work through lazy or single-track backups will soon become paranoid.
With Dropbox, you maintain local copies on all of the computers on which you use Dropbox, so even if the service went down, either temporarily or permanently, the files are available to you. They are not only in the cloud.
