I don’t usually advertise on my website, but when I do, it’s a product that I personally endorse and that I feel improves my life.
If you’ve never heard of Dropbox, it’s pretty much a secret box floating around inside the Internet that belongs to you. You can take files from your computer and put them in your Dropbox. That way, you can access this folder even when you’re not at your computer, and you can add to this folder from another computer and access the folders when you’re back at your home computer again.
I use Dropbox as an online backup. That way, if something happens to my laptop — like crashing, contracting a deadly virus, getting stolen, or getting thrown in a pool — I still have all of my pictures, blog post drafts, electronic journal entries, and other important files from the past 5 or so years of my life.
A lot of people also use Dropbox to share folders with other people. It’s good for sharing pictures without worrying about how big they are in an email, or sharing documents for your business.
I recommend Dropbox especially for college students, people who have a lot of files they want to share with others, or people who use multiple computers often. It’s completely free, and you can’t misplace it like a thumb drive (I’ve lost many a thumb drive in my day…).
If you’re interested in getting a Dropbox and don’t already have one, please click this link (there’s no viruses on this link — promise). If you use this link to download Dropbox (instead of just going to the website), it will actually give both of us 2 GB of extra space for free (you get 2 GB to start and 2 GB extra for every time you refer to others).
If you already have a Dropbox, or just downloaded it, let us know how you like it in a comment.
Just a small caution: Dropbox is awesome for moving between computers and backing up stuff, but it is not super secure. They’ve been working on getting better security and such, but there have been several data breeches recently. With that in mind, please do not store any sensitive info in your dropbox. Since it is stored online outside of your control, passwords, credit card info, bills, tax return backups, anything with your identity in it, etc is not going to be safe there. If you need to store that stuff, use an external hard drive (highly recommended) or at least put it in an encrypted folder before dumping it into Dropbox. (You can google how to do that.) I don’t want to scare you or your readers, I just want to make sure everyone is interneting safely. 🙂
Thanks for the warning and suggestions, Steph. 🙂 An Internet drive is good if you’re protecting your information from physical damage, but external hard drives are great if you’re protecting yourself from the Internet. Maybe it’s good to use both depending on the type of information you’re storing?
After I posted this, I was also thinking about Google Drive. I use this program to store and share backups of websites. Do you know if Google Drive is any more secure?
I would say Dropbox is better than Drive now that they have been called out on their security. I also think that Google Drive Terms of Service may claim some ownership of your stuff or at least use it for mining data if you utilize it. I remember some outrage about it when Drive first popped up, but you’d have to fact check me. You are definitely correct in saying that cloud storage is good for protecting from physical loss and a physical backup is good for protecting from the internet. Your best bet is always redundancy by backing up your most important things in several different ways and keeping your personal data on lockdown under your own control as much as possible. Computers and security can always fail when you least expect it.
Thanks for the info and advice!