leviticus.me

So, I had a post on here a while back that detailed how to take a centralized network storage location and redirecting the desktop and ‘my documents’ path of a given profile so that you could essentially have roaming profiles without a domain controller.

This works pretty good, until you take in the absolutely horrible job that windows does of maintaining offline files & connectivity to the central network resource. In addition, the solution I had did nothing for backup. (Any files you don’t have backed up, you don’t care about.)

Recently I’ve changed my tune on making files available on more than one computer, and I’m going with Dropbox. (For people wanting to just utilize online cloud backup with one computer, Mozy & Carbonite offer unlimited volume for reasonable prices.)

The setup is pretty simple (this is on XP – I’ll try some things with Win 7 soon)..

• when installing dropbox on the computer, put your dropbox on the root of the drive (c:\) – dropbox automatically creates the ‘dropbox’ folder during the install, so just select the hard drive, and don’t create a folder unless you want to get ‘C:\dropbox\dropbox\’
• Once set up, create a ‘\my documents\’ folder in the dropbox folder
• go to your ‘my documents’ icon, right click, and hit ‘properties’ and change the ‘target’ to ‘C:\My Dropbox\My Documents’
• Once you click OK, it will ask if you want to move the contents of your my documents folder… just click yes and it will copy it over, at which point, the dropbox app will start automatically uploading the files to the dropbox cloud.

You can do this on whatever computers you want the get to the same ‘my documents’ folder on. (e.g. – if you had a desktop in the office and a laptop elsewhere – it’s nice to have files synchronized.) The sync option works very well with dropbox, and I actually haven’t seen a conflict come up, so I’m not entirely sure how conflict resolution works (this could be the lynch pin in this whole thing, so just be aware of that – especially with things like iTunes.)

Dropbox offers 2GB free, but that won’t be enough for most people, but their 50GB plan is pretty reasonable.

The thing about Dropbox over other cloud backup options is that I can get to my files from any computer by logging into the web interface. They even have an iPhone app (of course).

Oh, and on a similar note: For those people who think an external hard drive is effective backup or that you don’t need backup… I was wrong and you are wrong.

Give Dropbox a shot… hell, it’s free to try and waste 2GB of someone else’s space with your digital hoarding