Dropbox is a great service. I’ve been using it for a few years (as a free user with 16GB of space after sending quite a lot of invites) and I’m really happy with it, but let’s face it, Dropbox is a sharing tool, not a backup tool.
I’ve been wanting to have a good, regularly updated backup of my computer for quite some time now, but I wasn’t finding any solution that worked well for me. The best thing I had found so far was a WD external hard drive. WD has some good backup software built into their discs, and as long as you have one connected to your machine it will make a real time backup of all your files. The problem with this was that having a laptop and working from many different places the hard drive ended up rarely being plugged in…
Some people suggested I used Dropbox for backups (the pro version of course), but that didn’t work for me either because you must have anything you want to sync inside your Dropbox folder and I just didn’t want to… I like to have my pictures folder were my pictures folder is, my music folder were my music folder is… what the F, I like to have everything I’m working on on my desktop, I don’t want to have it in my Dropbox folder, no matter how accessible you can make that folder…
That all changed when I founded the Dropbox Folder Sync Addon created by Satyadeep Karnati. This addon allows you to move any folder on your computer to your Dropbox folder while creating a “link folder” in its original location with just a right click on you mosue, that way all your content is accessible from where it usually was but in reality it’s being stored inside your Dropbox folder, and therefore being synced.
Now even the files and folders on my desktop get the Dropbox icon showing if they are already synced or being synced, and I can say, for the first time, that I have a real time backup copy of my machine.
:)