Dropbox and Evernote

[Dionysus]

Dropbox and Evernote: two of the most useful things I have on my 'puter. There's a lot of hype about 'the cloud' these days, but these two services execute on the concept really well.

I have the 100 GB Dropbox account for $20/month and I have barely used half of it so far, but it complements my local backup strategy with an offsite option. I have 15,000+ photos, along with many documents and videos in Dropbox, so I'm about as data-redundant as I can be.

Evernote is so cool for capturing digital miscellanea and whatnot, email receipts, web site clippings, sounds, pictures, videos, etc. You even get a personal Evernote email address so you can email anything into your Evernote database. Create your own tags for easy lookup and cross-reference, and you can create multiple Evernote databases and selectively share one out with other users.

Mac and PC versions available so everybody gets some. I use them every day. Both work on the Fremium model: a free but limited version is available, or a full-featured paid option with lots of storage. Desktop app and mobile versions for iPhone, iPad, Android, Blackberry, Palm Pre, WinMo.

I'm not affiliated with either, just a happy user who felt like spreading some digital love.

 

[bevo barry]

From a computer newbie: What is the difference between these and that SuperDuper that you have posted about before?

 

[HatDaddy]

we use Dropbox for our insurance agency.
No complaints so far.
Very easy to use.
haven't used Evernote though.

 

[Dionysus]

Barry: SuperDuper is a Mac application for making local backup copies and clones of your hard drive for recovery purposes - for example, if your hard drive were to have a serious crash and wipe out all of your data, you could use your SuperDuper clone (copy) to boot your Mac from, or restore to a new drive without any data loss. The downside to a local backup is if your house burns or some other serious damage occurs there, your backup drive could also be destroyed, and there goes your data. SuperDuper has saved my bacon a few times.

Dropbox is a cloud (web-based server) solution that provides an off-site backup. Basically, you just install Dropbox and it puts a folder on your computer. Everything that goes inside that folder - including other folders and subfolders and all the files in those - is automatically synced to the offsite location. Your files and data still reside on your hard drive, but they're also copied up to Dropbox as well, in real time. When you make a change to a file and save it, it saves to your computer and to Dropbox both, immediately. If your house burns down and destroys your computer and your local backups, you can restore things later from Dropbox. It is dead simple to use and for me, so far, has been rock solid. I have about 45 GB of data on there now, and a shared folder that my wife has access to on her Mac so we can exchange files back and forth. We also have the Dropbox app on our iPhones so we can get to a file practically anytime we need to.

Evernote is a little harder to describe. It's a personal database that you can put things in and categorize them and retrieve later. For example, whenever I buy something online and get an email confirmation and receipt, I forward that to my Evernote account and tag it as a Receipt, so I can always get back to it very easily. I keep info about our cars in there (maintenance, etc), lists of films I want to see and books I want to read, serial numbers, software registration info, etc. You can add bits of text, important notes you want to keep, web links, portions of web pages that you want to save (the web page could go away or change so a bookmark may not be helpful), images, sounds, PDF files, instructions, whatever. Like Dropbox it's a cloud service, so your Evernote database resides on your computer and also syncs up to your web account, so there's always an offsite copy of your data. And there are Evernote apps for smartphones so you can get to your database from wherever you are.

I'm rambling, but these two apps are just great.

 

[mcbrett]

We use dropbox at our company- and personally I like it a lot but we do have some issues. The head of our company uses an IPAD, and synchs up with dropbox often- the problem is- many of his files either don't synch or they take 1-2 days to fully synch. I always tell him it's his internet connection, and his IPAD with the issue- and not dropbox- but, nonetheless this issue keeps coming back to haunt us- and sometimes from other computers with wired connections.

98% of the time- dropbox works well- Do any other dropbox users have this issue?

 

[Dionysus]

I haven't seen the issue but I rarely access Dropbox from my iPad - usually just on the Mac and iPhone. Sounds like it could be something with the iPad app because it's essentially the same iOS as the iPhone.

 

[pasotex]

I love Dropbox. It can be little slow to upload large files at times (on slow networks), but it is a fantastic way for me to review large files especially on my iPad. I think I am going to upgrade soon to the larger capacity.

I have Evernote, but do not have it up and running yet.

 

[wherzwaldo]

Dropbox is good as a have-your-files-anywhere type of service, but as a pure online backup I much prefer CrashPlan and not just because I have 170GB backed up. I have unlimited storage for all of my computers and it's only costing me about $6/month (although I got in before they raised their prices).

 

[Dionysus]

wherzwaldo, thanks for the CrashPlan info. How's their application and performance? Dropbox has done a great job of making things really simple. Do you know how CrashPlan matches up? Their pricing and plans look good to me.

 

[wherzwaldo]

CrashPlan is pretty easy to use - just tell it what folders/drives to backup and it goes. With CrashPlan+ you can tell it to only backup on certain days/times, and can throttle CPU and bandwidth usage based on whether or not you are using the computer at the time. Obviously the initial backup takes a long time (mine took about two weeks of it working around the clock) but that is the fault of your ISP's upload speed. You can also have it e-mail you backup alerts daily, weekly, etc.

I did run into one problem recently where I reformatted my main computer's C drive (its 150GB of data was on another drive). When I reinstalled CrashPlan, I didn't want it to reupload all that data over again, and in that situation CrashPlan allows you to "replace" the "old" computer on your account with the "new" one (in my case, they were the same). However, for some reason, it's now in the process of reuploading everything again. I'm not super upset about it or anything, but it is annoying.

It should be noted that CrashPlan is NOT a replacement for Dropbox - this doesn't make your files portable like Dropbox does, it just backs them up. You can log into the web site and do a web restore of your files (delivery via zip file) but they don't have apps for smartphones.

 

[Dionysus]

Good to know, thanks. I'm hypersensitive about backups, and especially an offsite strategy, so these services are great and will only get better over time.