Why I Love Web Based File Storage

I should have known that trying to upgrade to OSX Lion would have caused some problems. Early last week I chose to do that and it resulted in a trashed hard drive and over a week without any access to files I needed to be working on. To clarify, Lion didn’t kill my hard drive. As it was installing it located a bad spot on the hard drive the current operating system hadn’t gotten to yet. 

So, I was stuck using our old MacBook that hasn’t been updated in several operating systems but is still running strong, and after this recent incident, won’t be getting upgraded anytime soon. Since it hasn’t been updated in awhile, many of my “cloud based" programs I use, like Evernote, wouldn’t work which made working on things a little harder. Other than the MacBook, I had my iPad. This last week proved to me that I wasn’t quite established to rely on an iPad as a solid alternative to my current MacBook Pro. It could be, but you really have to be using cloud based programs and purchased programs like Pages or Keynote to do that. 

This past week made me realize how much online storage companies, like Dropbox, can make a huge impact on small companies, like NeighborLink. I’m an avid fan and use Dropbox all the time for large file transfers and collaborative projects, however I haven’t quite gotten used to using it as an actual hard drive alternative for working documents. I wish I would have because last week I was without several documents that I could have been working on…I needed to be working on. Fortunately, I have been using Time Machine to backup my hard drive on a regular basis so I didn’t loose anything. Highly recommend you do that if you’re not. External hard drives are so cheap now, you can’t afford not to do that. 

I’ll be looking into and considering paying for more storage on Dropbox in order to leave my working docs in a place I can always access them regardless of what machine I’m on. Regardless, I’ll be using Dropbox in a whole new way. 

Lesson Learned