// THE VERGE — HARDWARE & GADGET
Dropbox is a PC builder’s best friend
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When catastrophe strikes, having your whole computer in the cloud makes recovery a breeze.
When catastrophe strikes, having your whole computer in the cloud makes recovery a breeze.
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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.