My life is in my Dropbox (and yours should be too)

blog.schneidmaster.com

2 points·schneidmaster··3 comments

You're assuming

A. You will always have internet access.

B. You will always have unlimited internet access.

C. You will always have very fast internet access.

D. Dropbox will always be online when you are.

I stopped using Dropbox 3 years ago for these and other reasons. Backup to a local external USB disk, and backup to an offsite file-server that you also control. You only need incremental backups, so your throughput is low.

Basically, I'm assuming my current environment will continue (having fast Internet, and having Dropbox exist and have high uptime). It's not like I'm screwed if one of these factors suddenly changes- all of my files are still on my computer and on my occasional hard drive backups. I would just have to find a different backup method or back up to my HDD more regularly.

> backup to an offsite file-server that you also control

This doesn't help with problems A, B, or C in your list. It's not like Dropbox uses an order of magnitude more bandwidth than an offsite fileserver. And in that case, I'm depending on my fileserver host to continue to exist.

I'd also be relying on my own ability to configure and maintain a secure fileserver and keep it up-to-date with security patches, etc. While I can certainly do that, my time is worth money to me. I'd rather pay $10/mo to people who do it full-time for a living.

I thought Dropbox was the answer to all my desires early in 2011. Then I travelled to a rural area in a foreign country and my only internet connection was an expensive 2 gig per month USB dongle which was lucky to reach anything more than EDGE (about 30 kbytes/sec) transfer speeds.

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