How can I take advantage of 1 TB cloud storage if I have a 256 GB HD?

August 27, 2014 6:55 PM

I'm a dropbox pro user and they upgraded everyone to 1 TB of storage. I have plenty of stuff I could put in the cloud from external drives, but my laptop's hard drive is only a 256 GB SSD.

I don't want to put my dropbox folder on an external drive, because there are some files I always want immediate access to on my laptop. So what are some ideas to take advantage of this space?

posted by jModug to Technology (8 answers total)

To me, just the insurance that you have the space if you need it is great. Space does not need to be filled. If I had excess space I would consider uploading all my music collection.
posted by 724A at 7:10 PM on August 27, 2014

The iOs/Android Dropbox app, or the Dropbox Carousel app, will take all of your photos off your phone and upload it to Dropbox -- which makes backing up phone photos a non-issue.

Also, keep in mind that you can use Selective Sync to 'swap' in and out folders that you want immediate access to. When you uncheck a folder from the Selective Sync menu, it disappears from your computer, but stays on Dropbox - so it's as if you do have 1TB of storage.
posted by suedehead at 7:15 PM on August 27, 2014 [1 favorite]

You know about selective sync right?
posted by bitdamaged at 7:16 PM on August 27, 2014 [1 favorite]

The iOs/Android Dropbox app, or the Dropbox Carousel app, will take all of your photos off your phone and upload it to Dropbox -- which makes backing up phone photos a non-issue.

One copy of something is not a backup. It is a single instance of that data. Dropbox is great, but it is a sync service, not a backup. One could argue it is the opposite of a backup as syncing inherently increases risk of lost data.

I recommend backing that data on the external drives up to 2 backups, one local (time machine for example) and one remote (CrashPlan for example).
posted by ridogi at 9:04 PM on August 27, 2014 [2 favorites]

Don't use CrashPlan though - it's extremely slow to back up.
posted by univac at 10:51 PM on August 27, 2014

You could try mounting Dropbox as a remote file share. I have never used this app, but it seems legit. Apparently there other services that use the webdav protocol, but they look clunky by comparison.
posted by roygbv at 3:21 AM on August 28, 2014 [1 favorite]

So what are some ideas to take advantage of this space?

In addition to selective sync, this blog post mentions several other ways to store things other than just files on your small hard drive on dropbox.

Don't use CrashPlan though - it's extremely slow to back up.

Your experiences do not match mine nor others I know. I get 15+ mbps to crashplan consistently on my 101 down/35 up mbps connection.

Have you configured it to use maximum CPU? If you have a large backup set, have you increased the RAM from the default 1 GB? If you're CPU bound (i.e., it's taking 100% of one core), have you reconfigured the dedupe?
posted by Brian Puccio at 6:13 AM on August 28, 2014

I use expandrive (the product univac links to). I have hosted space and dropbox. I prefer to mount DB as a drive because then I essentially have access to all my files, but don't have to have it swap my MacBook Air drive.
posted by cjorgensen at 11:47 AM on August 28, 2014