Surely many of you have wondered if they should store their photos (and not only) in the cloud, with a service like Dropbox, but not somewhere locally.
Dropbox's main job is to sync your files across multiple computers and devices. The idea is that your files exist both locally (on hard drive or SSD) and in the cloud (on servers ). If you use another computer and launch your Dropbox account at the same time, your files will sync there too!
Because your files are stored in two different places, Dropbox also provides a kind of makeshift backup tool. It can even let you restore previous versions of an edited file.
Dropbox has a feature called Selective Syncthat allows you to save the contents of selected folders only to the cloud. The contents of these folders will remain in the cloud, but will not be synced. You can delete these folders locally and they will not be lost online.
But instead of telling you how this can be done (if you really want to know, check out Dropbox's instructions), I'll give you four reasons why you shouldn't do it:
- Files stored on a single cloud service may not be properly backed up. It's best to keep a local copy as well. (Yes, Dropbox does back up to its servers, but it's even safer to have a copy that you're responsible for.)
- Depending on the conditions, your internet access may be slow.
- If you're offline—perhaps if the Internet is down or you're on a plane—you can't access your files that are in the cloud.
- Dropbox charges $100 a year for 1TB of storage. You can buy a 2TB hard drive for less than $75 and it will probably last you well over a year!
