Dropbox

[abortrephrase]

I've been using Dropbox as a document-backup tool for a fair while now, and I'm really happy with it. Local cache of ~300MB of documents on all my machines, plus accessible from my phone and iPad, and it's been nice and reliable.

Am considering paying for a 100GB account (US$20/month) as an offsite backup of my music collection. It'd take ~2 weeks to seed (I have 82GB of music at present). Almost none of my music purchases over the last couple of years have been on physical media, so it's probably time to sort out something.

$240/year is fairly hefty -- I could buy a pair of 1TB disks and mirror them for that kind of money, but then it's on-site or I'm mucking about with manually moving disks around.

Going direct to S3 and bypassing Dropbox (who, as I understand it, are using S3 anyway) would approximately halve the cost (using the less-redundant storage option) but I'd have to roll-my-own access tools -- JungleDisk does okay for desktop access, but mobile client, cache management, and web access are all things that may be worth paying the extra ~$100/year.

Anyone got any compelling reason not to do it this way?

Comments

[ideological_cuddle]

Thought about it some more and decided to just take the plunge. US$199 for a year of 100GB isn't too shabby, and the client knows how to handle symlinks gracefully, as well as exclude directories from the sync on specific clients.

So the music collection is syncing from the MBP to Dropbox, but not back down to any of the other machines in the house.

The Android client knows how to play music files, though it would be nifty if a future version were able to stream rather than download the whole thing before playing.

[eagle]

Might be worth taking a look at the just-announced Amazon Cloud Drive / Cloud Player stuff. It looks like a rebranding and additional service layered on top of S3 specific for music. I'm not sure if the pricing is competitive with Dropbox, but it includes the mobile and computer client streaming access for music, and any music you buy from Amazon can be stored in the same account but doesn't count against the quota. (Of course, you'll probably still want to download it to have a second copy.)

[ideological_cuddle]

Problem is that's US-only. Reading about it is what made me think again about putting this stuff on Dropbox.

[eagle]

Oh, duh, yeah -- should have figured.

[ideological_cuddle]

For buying online music outside the US, iTunes is pretty much the only game in town. Which is annoying, as I'd rather buy from Amazon.

Same goes for the Amazon App Store, which makes even less sense.

[reddragdiva]

Get the TB disk as well. Never Trust The Cloud.

[ideological_cuddle]

I already have that for on-site backup. Mirrored, even. This is for the "house burns down", "some bastard nicks my stuff", and "all the hardware mysteriously fails at the same time" scenarios.

[thorfinn]

Dropbox is good. I'm using the free one for my small stuff, and some work related doco (which isn't that big).

For cloud backup I went with Crashplan.org on a family unlimited plan, in part because I want to share backups to other places I control (e.g. I'm pushing my tertius.net.au server backup down to the drobo at home) as well as The Cloud, and crashplan does that well.

Dropbox is much much simpler than any of the other options, by a very long way, which is a good thing.

As for music, http://bandcamp.com/ are good if the artist(s) in question are on there... but it's very much independent types only.