In the past year I have gone through four hard drives in my laptop. I was being pushed to a state of paranoia about my computer files being backed up. That was until Dropbox or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Back Up My Files.
It was always one of those things in the back of my mind. “Make sure your files are backed up.” The voice in my head would say. “You never know when that hard drive might fail.” In my 15 years of owning computers I had experienced one hard drive failure until this past year. Luckily that was a desktop and most of the files on it were backed up. I vowed from that day forward to keep my data safe and backed up.
Flash forward several years and I am working at TrippNT. I am about three months into using my shiny new laptop. Suddenly one day the hard drive up and died on me. Instantly my mind is sent into a panic. “Oh no! Nearly 3 months of work was just flushed down the drain.” I dimmly thought to myself. “How am I going to explain this to my boss.” In my switch to the mobility of a laptop I had forgotten my cardinal rule of backup.
Ultimately it is up to each employee to know if his data is backed up. My failure to have the organization to do so had now set me and my company back in time, productivity and ultimately money.
After my machine had been repaired I went forth with renewed determination to find a better solutions; not just to backing up my files but to make sure this didn’t happen to anyone else in my company.
The key is to engineer this backup solution to be as simple and pain free as possible. It must create a redundancy that will ensure that if one backup fails there is another source to retrieve your data from.
I thought back to a piece of software I had played with several months before: Dropbox! It would be the key to my data backup salvation.
Dropbox is a peice of software that creates a virtual clone of the files you put in it on other computers that are linked to your account. These files are also kept on Dropbox’s secure servers. The program runs in the background and uploads changes to your files as you make them. So in actuality I have 3 copies of my files at any given time (my laptop, my home computer and dropbox’s server). “But what if I save over a file accidentally?” Well dropbox has you covered there too. You can access up to about 10 previous versions of that file off of dropbox’s server.
Starting out with 4 gigabytes of space for free and very affordable 50 and 100 gigabyte plans, it was a simple hands free solution to my problems. So when my hard drive died again several months later I was covered. There was barely a hiccup in my productivity.
The organization and automation that dropbox provides has brought me a great deal of security and reliability that allows me and my co-workers to spend more time keeping business rolling and less fretting over if our data is backed up.
If you decide to give Dropbox a try let me know what you think about it and how it has changed the way you think about organizing and backing up your files.
Jason Gross is the Director of Marketing for TrippNT
