Dropbox for offsite backup
I’ve recently been using Dropbox. Its a free offsite backup service, which works with Windows, Linux and Mac and gives you 2Gb of space for free. You can pay for more if you need it. Here’s what I like about it:
- It just works. Drop your files into a folder and forget about it.
- You can join more than one computer to the same account and the files sync between both computers. eg one at work, one at home.
- If you’re away from you computer and you need a file, you can get it from the web interface. (But of course you’d only do this on computers you trust
- There are different levels of privacy. Private files are only seen by you. However you can share files with certain people, by supplying their email addresses. You also have Public files which can be downloaded by anyone at all with the given URL. Much more control than senduit.com for example.
- Photos put in the photo folder are instantly made into galleries. Neat.
- You can roll back to a previous version of a file if you make a mistake.
Having said all that, I wouldn’t trust super secret work or personal documents to it, but for keeping a backup of photos and non-sensitive personal docuements, it works a treat.
Also, there’s a referral program on at the moment, so if you sign up via the link below, you get an extra 250Mb of space. And so do I as well … go on … its free, and you’ll be glad you did.
https://www.getdropbox.com/referrals/NTI3NDkwMDk
July 23rd, 2009 at 4:43 am
I would NOT reommend a service, which does not encryptz your files on the CLIENT! The only service known to me that DOES it the right way is wuala.org
July 23rd, 2009 at 11:36 am
Hi Gorgonzo.
Of course, I wouldn’t recommend storing sensitive files on any service which didn’t use encryption – I alluded to that in the post.
I did try wuala before I tried dropbox, and as I use Linux it was still very much in beta and just didn’t work for me at the time. There was no gui, and a lot of tinkering with the command line, which although I’m happy to do myself, I can’t recommend to other people. Perhaps they have got things working better for the linux client now …
But if you wanted to use Dropbox for sensitive files, in the same way as Wuala, that would be pretty easy: You’d just have to mount the Dropbox directory using encfs, so the copy which is synced to their server is the encrypted one. Maybe I’ll look into this sometime.
Thanks for the comments.