Dropbox is a PC builder’s best friend

In 2018 I bet my reputation and self-worth on a huge crowdfunded game design project. It could have been a failure for many reasons, but the one I became most worried about was losing all of the work that was stored locally on my home-built PC — a scenario that would have left a lot of people very upset and placed me in deep trouble. I wasn’t irresponsible, I had local backups, but at some point I found myself in custody of so many important files that it scared me. And no matter how many redundancies I could build at home, they’d all still be in the same place — a risky bet. So I bought a subscription to Dropbox. Years later, it’s still one of the best software subscriptions that I happily renew each year.

It was great to have all that work backed up in the cloud — both for peace of mind and because it made working with collaborators breezier, letting them upload stuff directly to my drive, and letting me transfer files up to 50GB in size. In quick order I had built a trove of incredible artwork and complicated InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator files. The original goal for my Dropbox configuration was to make sure I wouldn’t lose any data in a worst-case scenario, so I set it up to mirror everything living on my work partition. Eventually, I ran smack into a worst-case scenario. Not once, but twice.

I’m still not sure why, but my latest home-built PC chewed through two separate 2TB Samsung 970 Evo SSDs. It’s difficult to tell what went wrong with them, but in each case I woke up one morning to find when I tried to boot up that no drive could be detected. I can still feel my stomach trying to sink into the floor when I press that power button these days, never knowing if my drive had died in its sleep.

Fortunately, both times, after some process-of-elimination testing I learned that just the drive had gone bad and everything else in my system was A-OK. Maybe I should have ditched Samsung after the second disaster, but I’m now on an 2TB 990 Evo Plus. Knock on wood, this thing better not fail. That drive now costs almost twice what I originally paid for it thanks to our new outrageously priced world of parts.

My Dropbox bill is about $204 a year for a family plan ($17 a month), which includes up to six members. If you’re just in it for yourself you can get it for $9.99 a month billed yearly (about $120 a year), which comes with 2TB of storage. You can upgrade to 3TB for around $143 a year. That might be a tough sell for people who already have dozens of subscriptions, but I find it to be a decent price for excellent digital insurance.

There are other powerful options out there, especially for professionals working with heavy files or complicated workflows. Backblaze, for example, has a personal backup plan with unlimited data for $99 a year and no restrictions on file size. And, of course, if you live on the Mac, Apple iCloud Plus isn’t a bad option — especially if you’re already paying for an Apple One subscription. Even Adobe offers file backups through Creative Cloud if that’s your jam, but I would not recommend using that clunky software suite for anything other than doing the work you need to do.

I prefer Dropbox because the software works consistently well across multiple operating systems and is usually neither seen nor heard. The Windows client is snappy and I’ve found with a fast internet connection that its real-time syncing is efficient and painless. Anytime a file is modified in the partition I have mirrored in the cloud, Dropbox quietly begins uploading it and making changes to my mirrored files in the cloud. After using it for about eight years now I can’t recall a single time the service failed or faltered. It’s so fast and reliable I often forget it’s even there.

Now, for the important caveat: This might not work for you if you have poor internet speeds. It really depends on how much data you’re regularly moving around on your computer and how quickly you make changes to it. This could particularly be a problem for asymmetrical data plans that commonly boast lightning-fast download speeds while offering pathetic upload speeds. I’ve done fine averaging only about 20Mbps upload, but if you’re on something even lower you should try a free trial for a backup plan before committing. You can also find plenty of download time calculators online; at my gigabit download speed it usually takes around two hours to download the 1TB of files I have synced in the cloud.

And one more caveat: Putting everything (or even just many things) on your computer in the cloud isn’t for everyone, and I completely understand why many folks wouldn’t or shouldn’t do that for sensitive files. I once built local RAID drives and even airgapped storage systems to avoid having everything online. These things are still possible but getting more expensive by the day as storage prices spike. You’re the best judge of how and where your data should be protected.

That sinking feeling of potentially losing my whole PC? It was immediately followed each time by the assurance that I’d only lost a computer’s body and not its soul. When I got my PC back up and running with new storage, it ended up taking less time to resync all my files than it did to troubleshoot and install new hardware. I can almost hear Billy Crudup doing a Mastercard commercial in my head: New solid state drive, three hundred eighty-nine dollars. Yearly Dropbox subscription, two hundred and three dollars. Never worrying about losing your data? Priceless.