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Comment by peteforde | Hacker News Reader

I'm a passionate amateur photographer, and after a bad crash where I lost years of work I became really neurotic about my multi-site recovery plan. Today I have Drobos and Time Capsules spread around my house and office, plus Dropbox and even a few rsync cron jobs all keeping me calm.

Today, my Aperture library is 109GB, because I work with archival scans from medium format film.

TL;DR: 100GB is a very small limit. How can I pay you more?

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But do you really want to pull down 109GB on every laptop you install Dropbox on? Or would you manage that via multiple Dropbox accounts? From what I can tell, Dropbox hasn't yet tried out the "backup solutions" space, but I'm also hoping they will, as most of my machines are constantly running out of disk space.

One of the best (and yet seemingly little-known) tricks that Dropbox uses is that it will sync over a local LAN before attempting to download from S3.

Between the tight OS integration and the hash table lookups (it checks to see if that MP3 is already in their storage cloud, leading to regular "instant upload" scenarios) I believe that Dropbox is the best new software tool of the decade.

I'm not talking about upload/download, I'm talking about 109 gigs of movies on my 120/160GB SSD drive on both my home/work laptops, respectively. Or is everyone else walking around with multi-TB spinning drives in their laptops?

> From what I can tell, Dropbox hasn't yet tried out the "backup solutions" space ...

I'd really love to see this too. Like a feature where you could choose whether you wanted to sync specific data or just back it up or something.

There is a new feature called selective sync, which is available in the pre-release (>0.8) version of Dropbox [1].

https://www.dropbox.com/help/175

Tried that, but my preferences have no "advanced" tab: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/404957/no_advanced.png

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