Posted on
April 8, 2009 in
With hurricane season approaching, now’s a good time to start thinking about how you will keep your practice viable after a disaster.
I use Dropbox to back up my critical files to the cloud. I have a folder on my hard drive that the Dropbox software keeps seamlessly synchronized — when I change a file in the folder, it’s uploaded to the cloud, where it’s encrypted with AES-256 and stored. Actually, I have the same folder on multiple hard drives; when a file is changed on one of them, it’s uploaded to the cloud and then downloaded to the others.
My blog images and PDFs are stored in my “public” folder in my Dropbox folder. If I move a file into the public folder, I can right-click to get a public link to that file.
I can also share a particular Dropbox folder with someone else who has Dropbox. So, for example, when I needed my virtual assistant in Alaska to summarize a batch of PDFs, I put them in a folder and gave her access to it (but not to the rest of my Dropbox folder).
Dropbox provides 2 gigabytes of storage for free. If you use the link to sign up, you’ll get an additional 250 megabytes, and I’ll get a free 500 megabytes.
Hey, it works under Linux! Several flavors too.
Okay, I created an account, you are now 500 megs richer!
Thanks for the tip, working flawlessly under Ubuntu 8.10.
Signed up!
I’ve been using Dropbox for a while now under Linux. It really is as awesome as you guys say. It runs natively on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X, which makes it an excellent share drive between your computers no matter what OS they’re running.
Just to put it out there, though – offline backups are a good idea as well. If your backup solution is just a mirror of your data into multiple physical manifestations, it doesn’t protect from a piece of software that overwrites your critical data – the damage will propagate to each copy, probably before you even notice anything is wrong. I suppose an analogy would be opening up a Word document, deleting the text, and saving onto the old filename. The original file isn’t going to be sitting in your recycle bin.
Learn from others’ mistakes – mirroring is not backup.
Me, too; it’s pretty neat.