The Syncing Nightmare of Too Many Computers, Backups and Cloud Drives!

The Problems:

• I have three home computers, three work computers, four external hard drives, and six cloud drive accounts, with tens of thousands of original files that are multiplied into hundreds of thousands stored on backup and cloud drives.
• I have personal files and work files but often I want access to both kinds no matter where I’m at.
• If I delete a file from the computer I’m working on, it’s not deleted from all the backed up copies.
• Every time I look at a different drive I have to constantly decide again if I want to keep or delete a file.
• Because I have 4 PCs, 1 Mac and 1 Linux machine I really don’t have a primary My Documents folder.
• I have copied files in so many locations that I’m not sure which is the primary backup anymore.
• I had a 1.5 TB drive fail and lost 200+ documentaries I was saving.
• I have too many files from using personal computers for over 30 years.

The Goals:

• I want two perfectly organized Master Filing Systems, one personal, one work.
• I want the easiest system possible for maintaining order and security.
• I want to get rid of the external hard drives.
• I want the fewest copies that equals the maximum security.
• I want each of my Master Filing Systems to be backed up.
• I want the files to have an organization structure that makes it obvious where everything is and belongs.
• I want this to be my last file reorganization that will last me the rest of my life.
• I want to clean out all the clutter and ancient files I no longer need.

Questions to Consider:

• Can I trust a cloud drive like Dropbox or SkyDrive to be my Master Filing System?   This certainly would make using six computers and my mobile devices the easiest to use.
• Would it be practical to use a cloud drive as my Master Filing System, and then use software to mirror the  cloud to local computers as backups?
• Which cloud drive service is worthy of being my Master File Location?
• How do I handle deleted files so the deleted files are removed from all the backups, but yet stored somewhere for long term recovery?
• Do I need to worry about music files now that I have Amazon Cloud Player, Google Music, Rdio, and Rhapsody?
• How do I keep my photos organized in my Master File Location and in-sync with gallery sites like Picasa?
• What’s the best place to store emails?
• Should I have a Master Deleted File System?
• Does any cloud drive service offer a journaling file system?
• When I create a Master Filing System, what folder structure should I use?
• Are some file types too large to save permanently?
• Can Dropbox or SkyDrive work like a roaming profile/home drive on a Windows Server?

Some Answers to Help Decide:

• Dropbox offers it’s Packrat feature of unlimited undeletes for $39/yr. 
• Using Dropbox means spending $139 a year minimum – the price of an external drive, but external drives take power, eventually, die, fill full of clutter, and take work to move from computer to computer.
• Dropbox and SkyDrive have virtual drives making them easier to use than Amazon Cloud Drive, and allowing software like Second Copy to access them.
• Dropbox virtual drives are available for all my my computers and devices.
• Second Copy would let me replicate files from cloud drives to my PCs, thus making them the backups and not the cloud drives.
• I could buy Dropbox for my personal Master File System and use SkyDrive for my work Master File System.  (I have a 25gb SkyDrive account because of work).
• I have a 50gb Amazon Cloud Drive account that I could use as a cloud backup.
• If I use Dropbox as my Master Filing System I could go around to all my computers, backups and other cloud drives and re-file all the files I want into it.  That might be the easiest way to create a Master Filing System.
• For $25 a year Amazon keeps up to 250,000 songs for me in their Cloud Player and a copy in the Cloud Drive.  They also give me 50 GB of cloud space for other files.  Is this secure enough for maintaining my music library?

Are Some Files Too Big To Store Permanently?

When I lost the 1.5 TB of documentaries from my HTPC I began to wonder if some files are too large to save permanently.  At Dropbox’s rates, I’d have to spend $1500 a year to have maintained my documentary collection online.  I’m not going to do that.  Nor do I want to run a home server with backups to support such a library.  Maintaining 140 GB of music files is annoying enough, with copies on my main computer, two other computers, two external drives and at Amazon and Google.  But keeping a perfect copy of my music library in sync is a nightmare.  Then I have a large library of audiobook files scattered across several computers to worry about.  Are they even worth the worry when I spend 99.9% of time listening to books from Audible.com?

The solution here is just to live with what Netflix, Audible and Rdio provides to me, and not try to own my own library of movies, music and audiobooks.  This would certainly simplify a good deal of file management.

Conclusions:

Writing all of this helped me to think things through.  I’ve decided to make Dropbox my Master Filing System for personal files.  Currently I have 13 GB of free space, but I might have to up it to 100 GB ($99/year).  I haven’t decided if I want to spring for the $39/year Packrat feature, but it’s tempting.  It will probably take me months of going through all my file locations and filing what I want to save into my new Master Filing System.  I certainly hope that Dropbox doesn’t go out of business.

I’ve been using Dropbox for a while now, but as a test, I’ll start using it as my primary My Documents folder for all my devices to see what happens.

For a backup to my Master Filing System, I’ll use Second Copy to replicate Dropbox to a folder on my local hard drive.  I haven’t decided if I’ll replicate to two different machines or not.

I might reduce my home computers from three to two and get rid of all the external hard drives.  Since I’d run Windows Media Center on both of them, I might mirror my recorded shows to both machines, but this means maintaining 2 TB drives on both machines, and I’m not sure I like that.  I’m awful tempted to give up trying to save recorded video or even collecting DVDs.

If I succeed with using Dropbox as my Master Filing System and I get a new computer, it will be very easy to set up and start working.  Just install Dropbox client and my software.  Then create a backup folder and start replicating Dropbox files to it as the new primary backup.

Settling on Dropbox means my home files will be available at work, but also on my iPad and iPod touch or even any computer I sit down to use as long as it’s on the internet.  Let’s hope this works out.

JWH – 8/3/12