(updated 4/9/17)
A few years ago, right around report card time, my laptop got one of those horrible trojan worm viruses. It hid all of my files and I couldn’t access anything even though I could see the files were somewhat still there. It took me hours to do research and figure out how to bring them back. Shout out to Bleeping Computer for helping me solve this awful problem!
But back to my story… After this I went out and bought an external hard drive, for fear of losing my files again. I had eight years of digital photos and all of my teaching and personal files on that computer! The hard drive worked great, right up until a month or two after the warranty and then for some reason it stopped turning! We took it to Best Buy and they said it could not be fixed for any reasonable amount of money. It would be a couple thousand dollars to recover the data! That’s was the last straw! I also had lost about a 100 ebooks from Scholastic (that luckily they reloaded for me on their website, but now I have to take the time again to download them!). I would not be relying on an external hard drive or any device again!
I had heard of Dropbox, but had never tried it. I decided it was worth looking into. With Dropbox Basic, a cloud storage solution, you can get 2 GB of space for free. You can then earn more free space by referring others and sharing Dropbox via social networking sites and completing other activities. However, even with that extra space, it was not enough to store all of our files and photos.
With Dropbox Plus for $9.99 a month, I get 1 TB, which is more than enough. However, there are higher plans that can accommodate more space. They also have business plans for multiple users.
Why should you try it?
- Gives you the peace of mind that all of your files are protected and backed up.
- You have the ability to share files and folders with others. This has been great for accessing my husband’s files. He doesn’t need to keep sending me certain files I need when he updates them; I just click on the link on the first email he sent me with that file. I also use them for school to share photos with parents and to share photos to be used for our newsletters.
- It is easy to set up.
- It works without you doing much. You just put everything you want to be backed up in your “Dropbox” folder on your computer. It backs up files any time you create new ones, make changes, delete files, etc.
- You don’t have to remember to back up your computer on a certain schedule. It does it every time your computer is on.
Definitely worth that $9.99 a month! Give it a try and let me know what you think! FYI – I am using a PC; I hear from friends with Macs that backing up your information is done differently.
Note: I am not working for Dropbox and receive no benefits from posting this information!
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Surviving on a tight budget 
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