Fredrik Averpil

  1. Adding external folders to Dropbox as a short-term backup solution

    How to use Dropbox as a backup for external files and folders outside of your Dropbox folder.

    Like many others, I have an external hard drive to keep a long-term backup. I simply back up my stuff by manually arranging files and folders onto it, for personal archiving. However, if my laptop would be stolen or experience a hard drive crash, what would happen to all working files and documents sitting on the hard drive?

    – This is where Dropbox comes into the picture, along with a little hack.

    For short-term backup for any files currently sitting on my laptop’s hard drive (in case of fire, flooding, hard drive crash etc) I simply use Dropbox, which automatically uploads all new files and any modified files to the secure location in the Amazon S3 cloud (SSL and AES-256 bit encryption, US data centers).

    Setting up Dropbox for short-term cloud backup

    Rather than keeping all of my computer’s files inside of the Dropbox folder, I manually add the ones of interest to Dropbox via a Mac OS X terminal command, linking a folder of interest into the Dropbox folder. Please note that this does not mean that the folder is copied to the Dropbox folder, it is simply linked to it, thus not taking up any extra disk space.

    In the example below, I am adding my Pictures folder into Dropbox, thus making it backup all my recently shot RAW photos:

    1. Launch the Terminal application
    2. Type the following and replace fredrik with your Mac OS X account’s user name

    Example:

    ln -s /Users/fredrik/Pictures /Users/fredrik/Dropbox/Macbackup/Pictures

    Just for personal future reference, I back up the following folders into my Dropbox:

    • /Users/fredrik/Desktop
    • /Users/fredrik/Documents
    • /Users/fredrik/Pictures
    • /Users/fredrik/Virtual Machines (this is where I keep my VirtualBox virtual Windows machine)
    • /Users/fredrik/Library/Fonts (oh, so many times fonts have gotten lost in machine re-installs…)

    Since I use Google Mail for both personal and professional purposes, all my email, contacts and calendars are stored online, and I do not care to include this in my Dropbox backup. However, if you would like to back up any of these, make sure to back up the following:

    • /Users/fredrik/Library/Mail
    • /Users/fredrik/Library/Calendars
    • /Users/fredrik/Library/Application Support/AddressBook

    Stay away from aliases

    It is important to understand that making an “alias” (right-click a file and you will be able to create an alias) is not the same thing in Mac OS X as creating a link. If you create aliases of folders in your Dropbox folder, their contents will not be backed up properly.

    Retrieving a backup after re-installation of Mac OS X

    Having recently setup a clean install of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, I relied upon Dropbox to download back some hefty ~40 GB of data, and it did just that without hiccups or permissions problems, except for one thing…

    I noticed that after having re-installed Dropbox on the fresh install of Mac OS X, the linked folders were re-created on my drive as regular folders, thus not placing any contents in the linked target locations. I manually had to move the files into its corresponding folder (i.e. move the fonts files from my Dropbox folder to /Users/fredrik/Library/Fonts).

    Then I had to re-create the links to each folder I wanted to perform a backup of. It seems, however that Dropbox recognizes that I am trying to back up files and folders already backed up and it will not require you to upload all of those files again.

    Well, after all, this is a hack – and problematic scenarios would arise quickly if Dropbox were to put e.g. mail back into your mail folders automatically, overwriting potentially newer files. So, all in all, I think it is a good thing that you will have to move the backed up files and folders into place after a fresh OS install.

    Storage space, speeds and pricing

    Dropbox comes with 2 GB of disk space for free. This is not even nearly enough for my backups, so I have purchased the subscription alternative where you get 100 GB of space. I’m very happy with the price of $19.99 per month and I definitively think it is worth the money in order to keep all my data safe and backed up in case of e.g. hard drive failure. It just works.

    Speeds are great when uploading and downloading through Dropbox/Amazon S3, even though I am located in Northern Europe. I am getting an average speed of 450kb/s both upstream and downstream.

    Dropbox is available for Mac OS X, Windows, Linux as well as mobile devices such as iPhone, iPad, Android and Blackberry – which makes it possible to access all your backed up data from e.g. your phone.

    There are probably both cheaper and better suited backup solutions out there (please add links and your thoughts on any such services in the comments below) but since I use Dropbox anyway, I might as well just use what is already installed on my machine.