Five reasons I went all in on Dropbox.
Hi everyone. Leo Notenboom
here for askleo.com.
There's a lot of discussion around cloud storage and which service should you use?
Is it Dropbox or One Drive or Google Drive or any of a number of others.
I want to talk about what matters to me.
One of the reasons, five reasons as a matter of fact.
I went all in on Dropbox.
But I also would like you to look at this at a slightly higher level because I also
get a lot of pushback on cloud storage, all of these services in general.
And I think that by understanding what it
is that makes them useful and how you can use them safely,
you may find that, you know what, leo's reasons for Dropbox don't apply to me.
However, they may apply to one drive or they may
apply to Google Drive, or they may apply to one of the other services.
So have a look, see what I'm doing and see what applies to you and see if it will
help you make some decisions about what cloud storage provider you want to use.
I want to start with, well, the beginning,
what I was doing before I went all in on Dropbox.
I use Amazon Web services, AWS,
as it's commonly referred to for a number of things.
And in fact, the Asclio.com server,
as I record this, is in fact on an AWS machine.
I also use their simple storage services, s Three as it's called.
That's basically just that, cloud storage.
Unfortunately, S Three is not particularly user friendly.
It's not something you would see recommended for the average consumer,
but it's massive and you only pay for what you use.
I use a lot.
In fact, I have probably by now over a terabyte of photographs.
I've scanned photographs from old albums, I've got all my old slides done.
I've been taking photos for many years
and they all just get dumped into this collection of photographs.
As it turns out, like I said,
S Three is somewhat difficult to use, but I make it work.
I started looking at costs
because a terabyte, as it turns out, is a fair amount of storage.
And with Amazon's pricing structure, you only pay for what you use.
But if you use a lot, you can end up paying a lot.
Now, as a Microsoft 365 subscriber,
I also have access to a terabyte of OneDrive.
In fact, if I organize things properly, I actually have something like five
terabytes available, although they'd be separated across multiple accounts.
I could make that work and it becomes pretty cost effective given
that Microsoft 365 subscription is only $100 a year right now.
The problem is, it wasn't quite everything that I needed.
It didn't actually check all
the checkboxes that I'll be talking about, but I do use OneDrive.
I use it primarily for sharing a few files
amongst some of my assistants and others, I also use Google Drive.
Google Drive turns out to be one of those
things that's very easy to hook up to the back end of websites.
Many of the backup services that I use
for my WordPress websites will dump directly into my Google Drive.
Makes life pretty easy.
And as we'll see in a moment,
google Drive actually is pretty costeffective for the amount of storage.
But I've had dropbox forever.
And even though I do use all three of Dropbox, and OneDrive and Google Drive
and probably a few other things, I think icloud is even in the mix.
There somewhere I wanted to settle on.
One to be the primary the day today service that I would use.
These are the criteria that I looked at.
One, Dropbox is everywhere I want to be.
And I mean that pretty literally.
It's on windows.
It's on the mac.
I have a Dropbox app on my phone for Android.
There's a Dropbox app for your iPhone.
You can run Dropbox on your Linux box if
you're so inclined, and you don't even have to have anything installed.
Dropbox is also a website that you can use to upload, download, share, and edit,
deal with the files that you want to store there.
So it's everywhere.
And literally, it's everywhere on all of my machines.
It's one of the very first things that I
install when I set up a new machine, because it also contains the way I use it.
It happens to contain a number
of the tools that I want to make available on all of my machines.
Second dropbox.
Synchronization just works.
Now, by that I mean when I update a file
in one place, I've got Dropbox installed on all these other places.
When I update a file in one place, it just sort of magically gets updated
in all of those other places within just a few minutes.
In fact, if the machine is on the same
network, I believe they also optimize the transfer.
So it's not necessarily limited by your Internet bandwidth,
but rather by your local bandwidth, which is typically much faster.
So it just works. It's great.
For me.
The way that I end up using it is that I may do something.
I may work on a document,
or I may do something here on my desktop and then decide I want to go sit outside,
take my laptop, or go to a different room or travel.
Things are available everywhere because I happen to have them in Dropbox.
I also use it for backing up.
The reverse is very true.
I do have my terabyte of photos in Dropbox.
But what that means is that while I'm traveling, when I take photographs,
all I need to do is copy the photographs into the appropriate Dropbox folder
and then magically, without my having to do another thing,
all of those photos get uploaded Dropbox, and then download it to all
of the machines on which the photos are also present number three.
This is actually pretty cool,
and I haven't relied on it very often, but it sure is a nice safety net.
Dropbox includes 120 days of file history.
So if I change a file and change a file
and change a file and then I suddenly realized that that's
not the change I wanted, I didn't mean to do that.
It's essentially a big old recycle bin.
It's 120 days worth of history.
And I could retrieve the file as it was 120 days ago.
Very, very handy.
It's also one of the great recovery mechanisms for ransomware.
By keeping file history, you have the ability to say, you know what?
On this day, all of my files were encrypted by ransomware.
Here Dropbox.
Would you do me a favor and restore all of those files to the day before?
All of a sudden you're done.
Ransomware didn't affect you.
Obviously, this is after you've removed
the malware from your machine, and you're not going to get it infected again.
But the bottom line is that it's wonderful
protection from things happening to your files that you didn't intend.
Now, I do want to be clear.
I'm using the Dropbox Professional plan, which gives me 120 days of history.
The basic free and the plus plans include 30 days.
Honestly, 30 days is plenty. It really is.
I'd be surprised if I ever needed to go more than that, but it is one of the perks
you get of a slightly more expensive subscription.
Dropbox Professional also includes what's called selective sync.
Remember I said I have a terabyte
of Photos, but my laptop hard drive is a terabyte?
How do I deal with that?
How do I use Dropbox on that laptop?
Well, selective Sync lets you say, make this folder visible on the machine,
but don't download the files until I actually use them.
That's very cool because what it means is that you can see everything that's in your
Dropbox in your Dropbox folder on every machine.
It's just not taking up the space unless you need it, too.
And yeah, I don't need all terabyte of my photos on absolutely every machine.
I will turn selective Sync off on certain
machines to make sure that absolutely everything is replicated on those
machines, for backup purposes mostly, but on the machines that don't need
to have absolutely everything, I just don't have absolutely everything.
Taking up a space.
Now, Dropbox is cost effective for me.
That's the fifth item.
And I say that because and I have
to include the for me because it's not the cheapest.
The cheapest, as I were, to look at things right now, today,
microsoft Office is probably the most cost effective one.
In general, you get Office for $100 a year plus a terabyte or more of storage.
As one of my assistants has already said, it's actually almost worth paying $100
a year for the storage and getting Microsoft Office for free.
Either way, it's a really good deal.
And it's one of the deals that I strongly suggest you consider.
Google Drive tends to be cheaper.
It is, again, given the current pricing, which can change, of course.
I calculate it out to be about $50 per
terabyte per year, which is, like I said, pretty cheap.
The Office calculation gets a little bit
weird because you might think it's $100 per terabyte per year,
but you're also getting Office, and you can share with other accounts.
So you could actually have other accounts that could share up to five terabytes.
It gets complicated, right?
Microsoft Office you kind of have to look at as something more than just storage.
But with Google One, as they call it now,
$50 per terabyte per year is probably one of the better deals out there.
The math for Dropbox,
the way that I look at it, I'm paying roughly $66 per terabyte per year.
I have three terabytes of storage
in my current plan, amazon S Three, where I started with all
of this, and you'll understand very quickly why I moved away from it.
$282 per terabyte per year.
It has its place in the world,
and maybe if you're a huge company, you can get better pricing for S Three.
But in my case, the way that I was using it, it just wasn't cost effective.
Now, what's really interesting about
Amazon S Three is that even if you're not using it, you're probably using it.
So much of our infrastructure and so many
of these applications are, in fact, built on Amazon's infrastructure.
So you may be using S Three without even realizing it.
I don't know where Dropbox puts its files.
I don't know where other storage services put their files, but they very well could
be using Amazon's S Three as their storage mechanism.
Like I said, they're probably getting
a much bigger deal or a much better deal than someone like I could.
But it's just interesting to realize that Amazon is pretty much everywhere.
The one last thing I want to touch on is
when people say, I don't want to put my files in the cloud
because they're in the cloud, anybody could get them.
Well, first of all, no, anybody cannot get them.
The people in the data centers, technically, theoretically, they could.
But as long as you keep your account secure, which you should be doing anyway,
because whether or not you use cloud storage,
the chances of someone actually getting at your data is extremely, extremely low.
For the most part, they don't care about your data.
But say you do have something very secure,
very sensitive, that you would use in cloud storage if you trusted it.
The answer there is actually fairly simple encryption.
I happen to use Boxcryptor, which is designed for exactly this scenario.
Roughly half of the folders I have in my Dropbox are encrypted by Boxcrypter.
It's completely transparent, very secure, and I have no problems putting sensitive
information into my dropbox using that technology.
An alternative is something called cryptomater.
Basically the same idea.
It's on the fly encryption profile
that you then put in your online or your cloud storage provider.
Works with Dropbox, works with OneDrive, works with Google Drive,
basically works with all of the major cloud storage providers because this is
exactly what these encryption tools were designed to do.
So before you say no cloud storage for me, look into something like Box Crypto or
Cryptomater to make sure you feel comfortable putting data into the cloud.
You can I do.
For updates, for comments, for related links and more, visit askleocom.
I'm Leo Notenboom.
And this is
Askleo.com, thanks for watching.