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Comment by clemesha | Hacker News Reader

In his third response (when he gives "a few ideas") "speedy" basically describes Dropbox:

  Don't you wish you never had to worry about your  
  computer crashing or hard disk dying?  
  An idiot proof backup, and one where I don't have 
  to set _anything_ would be nice.

I bet Dropbox is making a million bucks.

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With 24 employees and > 1PB of storage to manage, I'd certainly hope so ;-) Assuming the now-old number of ~3M customers (http://gigaom.com/2009/11/24/dropbox-raises-7-25m-crosses-3m...) it wouldn't be untoward to figure 4% are paying $10-25 a month, netting over a million a month in all.

No, he describes Time Machine for Windows, which has almost nothing to do with Dropbox.

Or Time Machine :-)

Dropbox is not a backup.

Backblaze is.

Can you elaborate? I use dropbox as a quick and instant document backup. It works great.

I think paid accounts could be used as a document backup service as you get access to unlimited history but with free accounts I believe backups are only stored for 30 days.

The important bit is "one where I don't have to set _anything_"—you do have to put the files you want synchronized into your Dropbox folder. (This is the part I've found hard to explain to people that just save things to wherever the Save dialog opens.)

This could actually be worked around; once Dropbox enables per-folder sync, they could also provide a daemon (as an option) that automatically finds and sets up sync for any folder you seem to be making personal use of. Kind of like how Picasa works with pictures, but with everything on your computer that's yours.

Dropbox most definitely backs up your files to their servers as well, even for free accounts. For paid account's, it's perpetual.

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