I was explaining my tortured setup for computer files and whatnot to my friend Alex recently, and I realized it’s very very crazy and thought it would be fun to document here.
Dropbox
I got an iPad junior year of college, and loved it desperately. But that added a new challenge I hadn’t considered: now I have 2 computers (my laptop and iPad) and a shifting schedule of classes, clubs, etc, so I need all of my files to be accessible on both devices.
I had been using Dropbox since the start of college (getting my free gigabytes of storage for my .edu email address, thanks 2012!) but this is the moment I went all in: if a file is important, it now has to live in Dropbox.
That’s continued ever since! While I now leave the house way less often than I did in college, or even pre-pandemic, I still love doing stuff on my iPads (and increasingly, on my phone.) So the real foundation of my file system is: I pay $120/year for a 2tb Dropbox plan.
Dropbox is the file system in that everything that matters (other than work stuff, which lives on the work computer1) has to live in Dropbox. If it’s stored on just one device, then it’s by definition ephemeral and un-important. Currently I use 1.5tb of my 2tb limit.
My main computer is a 2021 iMac with only 500gb of storage. You’ll notice 500gb is much smaller than 1.5tb!!
On any secondary devices I’ll use selective sync or online-only files to download just a subset of necessary files, depending on what the device is for and how much space there is. But on the main iMac I run the full downloaded Dropbox contents. To do this, I use a 2tb external SSD that’s permanently plugged into the iMac.
Two big problems with this: first, external drives can fail! That in fact happened to me last year, where the drive I’d been using died after about 4 years. So I had to buy a new one and re-download everything from Dropbox, which was annoying and took a while. Second, theoretically accessing files off the external drive is slightly slower than accessing files direct from the internal SSD. In practice, I’ve never noticed any issues with it, even using apps like Logic or Xcode. Maybe if I did video editing or played games I’d see it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The big benefit to this is first that external SSDs are about 1/10th the price of optioning the 2tb of internal storage space, and second: I can use this for a loophole in my backup system.
Backblaze
I bought Backblaze half a decade ago off some podcast ad or another, and this is my primary cloud backup. Technically I guess Dropbox (the cloud service) could serve as a backup, but I place more faith in a dedicated service just for backup purposes (vs Dropbox being primarily file syncing and sharing.) Also, since everything is in Dropbox, I am a little nervous about if Dropbox one day gets trigger-happy and (rightly or wrongly) determines I’ve done some TOS violation and kills my account. With a second backup, at least my data will be recoverable.
The loophole is my Backblaze plan will cover unlimited backups for any size of data for one computer….. and whatever external drives are physically plugged into it.
So, by doing Dropbox as iMac + external drive, I get to use Backblaze as my dedicated backup for everything in Dropbox (which is everything.) Technically it backs up my iMac as well, but that’s basically bonus. If my iMac died but my Dropbox contents were fine, I wouldn’t lose anything of value.
Synology
I recently (~8 months ago) bought a Synology NAS, as a little treat. I have it set with 8tb of storage, split into two 3tb sections (one for me, one for Som-Mai.) In my chunk, the primary thing is….. another copy of my Dropbox.
This in an of itself would be a huge waste: there’s no need for yet another copy of the same data. I could get rid of the external SSD on the iMac and have the real Dropbox source be the Synology, but Backblaze specifically excludes NASes and any other network drives from my backup plan2. So for now, the external drive stays.
The real primary use for my NAS is that I have a lot of totally legally acquired files of movies and tv shows and plays (stored in Dropbox, naturally.) To watch that stuff on my TV, I used to run a Plex server off my iMac, but now I’m running a Jellyfin sever off the Synology3. I also run a VPN and may start doing some 🤮 smart home stuff off the Synology as well. But for now, Synology is mostly Jellyfin server + yet another redundant copy of Dropbox.
Photos
Photos are in some ways the same as everything else: at the end of the day they make it into Dropbox. I have not taken a photo with a camera that wasn’t an iPhone in I think a literal decade, so the workflow is primarily that I use the Dropbox app’s camera upload feature to sync up everything in my phone’s camera roll. I have a Hazel script that automatically moves them out of Dropbox’s “Camera Uploads” folder into a specific iPhone photo folder4.
As a double-backup then (or really, for those keeping up at home, quadruple backup, after Dropbox + Backblaze + Synology) I also pay like $1 a month for Google photos. These are lower quality backups than what’s in Dropbox (I do the “Data saver” version rather than full quality) and I was clinging on for years using just my free space Google gave me, but I finally buckled last year and paid the $1. This is partly as a, again, quadruple backup, since I really would like to not lose photos (and again, in the worst case, if these companies do a random shutdown of any of my accounts, at least the photos are split between 3 different companies without any common account or common ownership.) But also Google photos is far and away the best at being able to search for a person or a place or a photo, so I use it when I need to hunt down something specific.
So, that’s the general overview:
2tb Dropbox plan that has everything non-ephemeral
Main copy of Dropbox is an external SSD connected to my iMac
The iMac and Dropbox SSD get backed up to Backblaze
And Dropbox gets cloned to my Synology NAS
Photos (almost exclusively from my phone) get backed up both to Dropbox (via the iPhone app, in full quality),
And simultaneously from the phone to Google Photos (in lower quality)
This is mostly crazy; I do love the “everything of value is in the cloud” lifestyle (especially since I save money on storage for my most used devices, namely phone + iPad + iMac) and I do recommend the redundant Dropbox + Backblaze backup. But this is clearly overkill, you don’t need to do this5.
Though work files that are relevant for real life, like offer letters, performance reviews, etc, do get copied over to the main Dropbox
And in theory accessing files off the Synology via the network would probably be actually notably slower than accessing them off a directly connected SSD
I mostly like it quite a bit more: I specifically got a Synology model that could do hardware transcoding and that is making it perform better than Plex on my iMac with software transcoding. There’s some roughness around the edges with Jellyfin being an open sourced project vs a commercial one like Plex, but I mostly haven’t run into anything egregious other than it’s more annoying to update.
I also have a series of Hazel scripts that gather up any screenshots on any of my computers > 1 week old and chuck them into an “Old Screenshots” folder in Dropbox. Have I ever, in almost a decade of this system, looked at anything in that folder ever? Of course not!
Though I am actually missing a piece that I arguably should have: in theory the ideal system is you should have 1) an offline on-site backup (ie a copy of your data in your same place, for use to quickly recover from an issue with a specific drive) 2) an online off-site backup (ie a cloud backup) and 3) an offline off-site backup (ie: a copy of your data you make every six months and drop off at your parents or friends house or office or a safety deposit box or somewhere else such that if your house burns down but your town doesn’t, there’s an accessible offline copy.) I have 1 (the Synology) and 2 (Backblaze) but no 3.