Backup

Finally, after so many years of waiting, I suddenly realised that quite by accident I have solved one of those great problems of the computer generation:

What, you didn't have those files backed up?

Now I've suffered one substantial (and self-inflicted) data loss in my life, and you'd think that would be enough to keep me on my toes. But let's be honest here, maintaining backups is a drag, isn't it?


Well I'm glad you're baring with me, even though this post does seem to be turning a little dubious I assure you it is me! So yes fairly recently I was introduced to a service called Dropbox, which on the face of it is just another way to share legally re-distributable data with your friends.
However after exploring their service a little more I discovered two key features, which came together in a realisation:

The desktop component (available for Linux, OS X, Windows and everything else) takes care of synchronising changes automatically.

The web interface shows the contents of your Dropbox directory. It provides 30 days of access to previous versions and deleted files.

This is all seemed rather cool, until I discovered that you can only 'mount' your Dropbox account to one location on your file system. Now that's a pain because I only want to have some directories automatically back up, but not everything.
But wait! Apparently you can do that!

So there you have it, no excuses, for the sake of five minutes effort you can ensure you never suffer that feeling in your stomach (oh how I remember it) when you realise what you've just done.

Convinced?
Then I'd ask you to sign up using this link, because then I get some more free space (and so do you!) for being a referrer :)