I admit it, I’m in love. Joel and Dropbox, sitting in a tree…yadda yadda. I am in love with Dropbox (getdropbox.com). If you’re not familiar with it, Dropbox is a little program that lets you sync a folder on your computer with 1) a drive online in the “cloud” and 2) any number of other PCs you own. You get 2GB of online storage for free, and can pay for more if you want.
With Dropbox, I can plunk files I’m working on into my “My Dropbox” folder, and at the speed of the Internet all my other PCs at home and at work will have that file available. If I delete it off one, it’s gone from all of them. If I accidentally delete it (and clear my PC’s Recycle Bin), I can find the file on the web interface.
One of the coolest features I’ve found is the ability to share folders with others. Here at the office we have a shared Dropbox folder that we can all edit. If I need a file for a presentation, I just put it on the shared folder and it’s available on the conference room computer or on anyone’s else’s PC in the building. It’s like having a file server, but much, much easier.
A related program that I’ve been using religiously is Sugarsync. Sugarsync works in much the same way as Dropbox, but it allows you to sync multiple, existing folders on your PC. I’ve set it up so I have my “Music”, “Pictures”, “Videos”, and “Documents” folders all sync’ed separately, so I can choose which folders to sync to which PCs – for instance, I don’t need to have all my media on my work PC, so I only sync my Documents folder to it. If I need a video or picture, I can always download it from the Sugarsync website. I upgraded my Sugarsync to the 100GB plan so I can sync every file I have to the remote server. Awesome benefit of doing this – no need to do backups anymore. I can get my files on any of my PCs, and I don’t have to backup any of them. Computing nirvana! (Yeah, I’m a geek.)
The only thing I’ve had trouble with on SS is when you delete large numbers of files – SS puts these into a Recycle Bin of their own, and those files contribute to your storage quota. I once deleted 30GB of files just to move them somewhere else, and I went over my quota because those files were still in the online Recycle Bin. And, unfortunately, there’s no “Empty Recycle Bin” feature…hopefully they will address this soon. UPDATE: Sugarsync contacted me after this blog post, and let me know that: “In the desktop client, you can right click on the Deleted Items folder and select Empty Deleted Files.”
So currently I use Dropbox for the small number of files I need to work on all the time or just for transferring files between computers, and Sugarsync for my comprehensive file backup and sync solution, and it’s been working great. I don’t worry about PCs crashing or accidentally wiping my hard drives anymore. Let me tell you, it’s a very freeing feeling for those of us paranoid about losing years of our digital history. Kudos to the product folks at both companies, and I’m sure both will do well.
What syncing or backup solutions have tried?
