I switched to DropBox when I got my new Windows 7 laptop and found that Microsoft, bless their hearts, had decided to move everything around – thereby breaking all of my Backer 6 jobs that I had been using to synchronize files across my home network. As long as it was just Windows XP running on my laptop and my tower, Backer 6 worked great. Unfortunately, adding Windows 7, Ubuntu (which is my platform of choice for everything having been pissed of yet one more time by Microsoft), and Mac (which is the only platform that runs my new writing software (Scrivener) pretty much eliminated Backer 6 (which I loved BTW) as a solution.

I’ve also been thinking for months that I needed an offsite backup solution anyway. A friend suggested DropBox.

Now, with a few exceptions, I keep most of my stuff in the My Dropbox folder which is directly under My Documents (or under my home folder on Linux and Mac). The two exceptions are my music collection (which would put me over the limits of my 50GB plan) and private stuff (journal, Quicken and TurboTax, etc.).

For private files, I either keep them on a single computer, or I keep them in a Truecrypt volume. The Truecrypt volume is stored on the disc as a data file which you can mount just like you would mount another disk or a network share. While this file can’t be in My DropBox (Truecrypt needs exclusive access to it which DropBox will not allow), I can, after dismounting the volume, drag a copy of the data file to My DropBox for backup. Be forewarned, keep these volume small. My 2GB disk image takes about 40 minutes to upload. Fortunately, DropBox is smart enough to redirect all my other machines so synchronization on my local network is done via system to system transfers on the local network instead of multiple downloads from the DropBox servers.

I love that fact that I can change a file on any platform (WinXP, Win7, Mac, or Ubuntu running on physical hardware or as a virtual machine) and the change is quickly reflected across all my running systems.