It's been a while since I've written something for this blog. That's primarily because of a change in jobs. My old job was as a Windows Server Engineer. I fixed stuff, so I encountered weird problems from time to time and liked sharing that info. The new position is as Situational Lead. My company has adopted ITIL protocols and my new job concerns incident management. In a nutshell, when there's a big outage, it's my job to gather the team together who will get it fixed and manage the incident until service is restored. I don't fix much anymore.
So, that means I won't be talking as much about technical stuff, I have other ideas in mind. But, for now, I wanted to talk a little bit about some services that have been around for some time now that I'm just getting around to exploring: cloud storage. Like a lot of people these days, I've got a USB flash drive I carry everywhere. Actually, I've got two: a 4G one and a 1Gigger. Sometimes it's very useful to get files back and forth to the office, and it's a whole lot easier carrying a USB stick than taking my whole laptop home with me. The big problem, though, is making sure the files you need on there actually ARE on there. Recently, my company has implemented desktop drive encryption, with it being forced for removable drives. If I want to copy from my computer to the USB drive, it has to be encrypted (there's no such restriction for USB -> Computer transfers).
Recently, my friends and I have started up a PBeM game of Trail of Cthulhu. For a while, I had been storing the rule books, which are in digital format, in my e-mail, but it started to become cumbersome with the number of files I had to maintain, plus notes files, etc. It was looking like a flash drive was the way to go when I remembered about companies like Dropbox, iDriveSync and Box.net. For a reasonable monthly fee, these companies will give you fairly large amounts of storage space that you can use however you want. For free, the first two give you 2G and Box.net gives you one. 2G is a nice chunk of space, so I decided to sign up for Dropbox and see if I might get some use out of it.
That was last Friday. Since then I've used the hell out of these things! Firstly, the first two offer extensions you can install on your computer that will match an ordinary folder on your computer with the online storage. This means managing files is as easy as it already is in Explorer. Drag files into the special folder, they're automatically synced with your storage. If you've got the client installed on multiple machines, all of them are synced simultaneously. Now, if I need to get a file to the office, I just drop it into my Dropbox folder at home and it'll be on my office PC before I get there.
But, the real beauty of these services lies beyond their ability to assist you in moving files. They're a great way of getting large files to other people. I had a digital copy of a video a friend of mine wanted to see, but it was way too big to send via e-mail. No problem, I copied it into to my Dropbox folder. I right-clicked the file in Explorer and selected "Copy Public URL". This placed in my clipboard a URL I could send my friend who could then just click the link and download the file. No fuss, no muss, no setting things up. And, since the file was downloading from Dropbox' servers, it was fast! A whole lot faster than if I'd tried to setup an FTP site on my home computer or something.
You get all of that, plus you can access those files yourself at any time, from any computer, by just logging into the website. Keep a copy of an anti-virus program you like to have available for when you go to a friend's house, but forgot your USB drive? No problem. I really have gotten a lot of use out of these services in just the last week alone, and highly recommend them to anyone who works with files in multiple locations. A few tips, though:
- Dropbox has a referral program. If you click the link in the preceding sentence, you'll be able to sign up for the service using me as a referral. Doing so means you and I will each get an extra 250M of storage space. It's not much, but you can go up to a full 8G of free additional space if you get enough referrals. That's not too shabby!
- I'm not a fan of having personal stuff on my work computer. That's not to say I don't, just that I don't like it. At any time, my computer could get audited, and I don't think I'd get a lot of crap for having Trail of Cthulhu rulebooks on it, but why take that chance? What I did was installed Truecrypt. I then created a 2G volume and pointed Dropbox at that. Now, whatever is in my Dropbox is encrypted when on my work PC. This has the added benefit in that when mounted, the volume shows up as a drive. All I have to do is look at how much free space is available on that drive and I know instantly how much free space I have in Dropbox. Of course, I now have a couple of referrals, so I'll have to create a new volume to match the size.
- Within my Dropbox, I've got a folder called "Move Off". I have a script that runs once an hour on my machine at home that monitors that folder. If something shows up in it, it's moved off into another location. I use my Dropbox for non-private, but still personal data. If, for example, I want to get the pictures off my iPhone while in the office, I can do so. I just put them into Move Off and they're whisked away soon after.
These companies provide a great service to you and I and I highly recommend checking them out. I'm even considering paying for one of them, once I've decided who gives most consistently high level of availability! Oh, and did I mention that some have iPhone apps that allow you to view and manage your files on the road, too?
So, that means I won't be talking as much about technical stuff, I have other ideas in mind. But, for now, I wanted to talk a little bit about some services that have been around for some time now that I'm just getting around to exploring: cloud storage. Like a lot of people these days, I've got a USB flash drive I carry everywhere. Actually, I've got two: a 4G one and a 1Gigger. Sometimes it's very useful to get files back and forth to the office, and it's a whole lot easier carrying a USB stick than taking my whole laptop home with me. The big problem, though, is making sure the files you need on there actually ARE on there. Recently, my company has implemented desktop drive encryption, with it being forced for removable drives. If I want to copy from my computer to the USB drive, it has to be encrypted (there's no such restriction for USB -> Computer transfers).
Recently, my friends and I have started up a PBeM game of Trail of Cthulhu. For a while, I had been storing the rule books, which are in digital format, in my e-mail, but it started to become cumbersome with the number of files I had to maintain, plus notes files, etc. It was looking like a flash drive was the way to go when I remembered about companies like Dropbox, iDriveSync and Box.net. For a reasonable monthly fee, these companies will give you fairly large amounts of storage space that you can use however you want. For free, the first two give you 2G and Box.net gives you one. 2G is a nice chunk of space, so I decided to sign up for Dropbox and see if I might get some use out of it.
That was last Friday. Since then I've used the hell out of these things! Firstly, the first two offer extensions you can install on your computer that will match an ordinary folder on your computer with the online storage. This means managing files is as easy as it already is in Explorer. Drag files into the special folder, they're automatically synced with your storage. If you've got the client installed on multiple machines, all of them are synced simultaneously. Now, if I need to get a file to the office, I just drop it into my Dropbox folder at home and it'll be on my office PC before I get there.
But, the real beauty of these services lies beyond their ability to assist you in moving files. They're a great way of getting large files to other people. I had a digital copy of a video a friend of mine wanted to see, but it was way too big to send via e-mail. No problem, I copied it into to my Dropbox folder. I right-clicked the file in Explorer and selected "Copy Public URL". This placed in my clipboard a URL I could send my friend who could then just click the link and download the file. No fuss, no muss, no setting things up. And, since the file was downloading from Dropbox' servers, it was fast! A whole lot faster than if I'd tried to setup an FTP site on my home computer or something.
You get all of that, plus you can access those files yourself at any time, from any computer, by just logging into the website. Keep a copy of an anti-virus program you like to have available for when you go to a friend's house, but forgot your USB drive? No problem. I really have gotten a lot of use out of these services in just the last week alone, and highly recommend them to anyone who works with files in multiple locations. A few tips, though:
- Dropbox has a referral program. If you click the link in the preceding sentence, you'll be able to sign up for the service using me as a referral. Doing so means you and I will each get an extra 250M of storage space. It's not much, but you can go up to a full 8G of free additional space if you get enough referrals. That's not too shabby!
- I'm not a fan of having personal stuff on my work computer. That's not to say I don't, just that I don't like it. At any time, my computer could get audited, and I don't think I'd get a lot of crap for having Trail of Cthulhu rulebooks on it, but why take that chance? What I did was installed Truecrypt. I then created a 2G volume and pointed Dropbox at that. Now, whatever is in my Dropbox is encrypted when on my work PC. This has the added benefit in that when mounted, the volume shows up as a drive. All I have to do is look at how much free space is available on that drive and I know instantly how much free space I have in Dropbox. Of course, I now have a couple of referrals, so I'll have to create a new volume to match the size.
- Within my Dropbox, I've got a folder called "Move Off". I have a script that runs once an hour on my machine at home that monitors that folder. If something shows up in it, it's moved off into another location. I use my Dropbox for non-private, but still personal data. If, for example, I want to get the pictures off my iPhone while in the office, I can do so. I just put them into Move Off and they're whisked away soon after.
These companies provide a great service to you and I and I highly recommend checking them out. I'm even considering paying for one of them, once I've decided who gives most consistently high level of availability! Oh, and did I mention that some have iPhone apps that allow you to view and manage your files on the road, too?
[...] talked about Dropbox before, but it still never ceases to amaze me how many times I find new uses for it. Let’s look at a [...]
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