Ever since I deleted the only copy of my hon­ours the­sis, one week before it was due to be handed in, I’ve been obses­sive about back­ups, often to the amuse­ment of my fam­ily and col­leagues. But every time one of them loses a file or has a hard-​​disk fail, the smiles fade and they ask for advice.

I’ve used many sys­tems over the years, each one a lit­tle bet­ter than the last. Cur­rently, I have two com­put­ers — one at home and one at work. These are kept per­fectly in sync. Every file on one is avail­able on the other. So if my house burns down, I haven’t lost my life’s work (or at least not the elec­tronic files).

The sim­plest way to keep them in sync is to use an online back-​​up sys­tem. I use Drop­box, a truly awe­some piece of soft­ware. Every time I save a file on either PC, a copy goes fly­ing off into the clouds to be stored on my Drop­box account. So every file I have is also online, giv­ing me three copies in three loca­tions. Even when the uni­ver­sity is destroyed in a ter­ror­ist attack on the same night that my hard disk fails at home, all is not lost — I can still get the files from Drop­box. The prob­a­bil­ity of Dropbox’s data ware­house in the US being destroyed in a tor­nado on the same night that Monash Uni­ver­sity is destroyed in a ter­ror­ist attack and my home PC fails is so small that I’m happy to live with it. Besides, if all three did occur at once I would con­clude that God wanted me to do some­thing else with my life.

When I turn on either PC, Drop­box will do a quick check against the online ver­sion of my files and down­load any­thing that has been updated. So I don’t even have to do any work to keep them in sync — Drop­box does it all for me.

If you have less than 2Gb and only 1 or 2 PCs, the ser­vice is com­pletely free. I have paid for 50Gb which costs me $99 per year — not bad given the time it saves and the peace of mind it brings.

One great fea­ture of Drop­box is that it keeps pre­vi­ous ver­sions of each file. Occa­sion­ally I will stuff up and want to go back to a file as it was yes­ter­day. No prob­lems. Just hop on to my Drop­box account and down­load the ver­sion saved yesterday.

Another fea­ture that I haven’t yet used is that I can share a folder with another Drop­box user. So we can both have access to the same files with­out hav­ing to send copies back­wards and for­wards by email. The only trap here is that both peo­ple can’t edit the same file at the same time.

By the way, I did get my hon­ours the­sis back, but not before feel­ing nau­seous for about 10 min­utes, and only because I’d for­tu­itously installed some neat file recov­ery soft­ware the week before. (This was in the dark old days of DOS before there ever was a Recy­cle Bin or Trash Can.)

Related Posts:

• In praise of Dropbox
• That sync­ing feeling
• Expand your Drop­box space for free
• Use Mende­ley to man­age your references
• Back­ing up Gmail