The significance of the move by Dropbox.com

Apparently my recent post entitled, "Dropbox shutdown foreshadows Cloud storage issues" caused some considerable online comment. First of all, nothing is happening to Dropbox.com per se. The change involved the discontinuance of two programs offered by the company. However, I rightly used this change to illustrate the fact that online data storage is not immune to commercial business decisions. Free or paid, online storage is just one of several ways data can be preserved. There are no guarantees that any one company will remain in business. Online storage, in whatever form or format, is just as vulnerable to problems as any other form of storage.

Just yesterday, while I was writing the post about Dropbox.com, I was backing up my own backup and discovered that several dozens important files had somehow migrated to the trash. Fortunately, I could retrieve them from the trash and restore them to an active file, but then I had to carefully go through hundreds of files to make sure all of them were backed up and then backed up a second time to my secondary backup drive. I am presently using three hard drives for backup; a 3 Terabyte drive that backs up everything on my computer's internal drive and two 4 Terabyte backup drives for specific files that will not fit on my computer's main drive.

I spent most of the day, off and on, transferring files and did not finish making sure all the files had been properly transferred until well into the night. This was only a relatively small number of my entire files, but I also went online and purchased another hard drive, this time an 8 Terabyte drive and it is my intention to transfer and sort out all of the files onto this new drive when it arrives. This process takes approximately three days of files transfers to accomplish. So I know what I will be doing once the BYU Library closed for Christmas vacation.

If you read my post and were motivated to think about backing up your data, my post had the desired effect.